Award-Winning Scholar | Prof | PoetWinner, 2025 River Heron Editors’ Prizefor the poem “Independence Night”⇩ Recent Recognition Finalist for the 2025 Palette Poetry Nature Poetry Prize, for “Butterflies”Finalist for the 2025 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest, for “Courtshop among the Peoples of Eastern Cuba”Finalist for the 2025 Alta California Chapbook Prize, hosted by Gunpowder Press, for Refugee LotteriesFinalist for the inaugural (2024) Cardinal Poetry Prize, sponsored by Wesleyan University Press, for Lessons in Cuban Cosmology: Fifty-Two Poems & a Villanelle Books WINNER – 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, awarded by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion at the 2017 American Anthropological Association Annual MeetingHONORABLE MENTION – 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award, given by the Caribbean Studies AssociationFINALIST – 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, presented by Journal of Africana Religions WINNER – 2024 (inaugural) Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize on Vernacular Catholicism, awarded by the American Folklore Society
