California Silence was selected by Emily Wallis Hughes for the 2026 Ottoline Prize.
An intricate tapestry of urban, natural, elemental, and linguistic worlds, California Silence by Stella Santamaría maps a future beyond the fraught border of language politics between English and Spanish. "The poet said nothing, nada," yet Santamaría invites us into a full and inclusive world, dissolving separation: the "Floricultura Pacific." In her transformative debut collection of poems, Santamaria renders "California" as both a futurist concept and graspable imaginary. Each line in Santamaría's distilled poetry reads like a song through her beams of "glistening sauvignon." This California is bicoastal and international, with the soundscape of Florida unfolding into "neon rind sunsets" through "Cuban banter."
Stella Santamaría was born in Los Angeles of Cuban and Guatemalan parents. Santamaría graduated from Under the Volcano as a Sandra Cisneros Fellow and from the XM Sci-Fi Instituteat Florida International University (FIU) as a Fellow. The Community of Writers awarded Santamaría the Ancinas Family Scholarship. Her work has been published in the Acentos Review, Juked, Brooklyn Review, Islandia, The Rumpus, Mayday, and New Overland Review, among others. Stella holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College of California.
"Stella Santamaría's intimate, layered, daring poems embrace silence and break silences. These are songs of family, of California, of our bruised and beautiful world. This collection is meant to be read, shared, and read again." — Chris Feliciano Arnold
"Stella Santamaría's California Silence is a brilliant debut. Her poems are intuitive and dreamlike, but also lucid. There is something organic about her language, as if California is talking through them in all its hope, its sorrow, its damage, its grief, its potential, its power. To listen to the mature and original and generous voice in these poems is an absolute pleasure, and I eagerly look forward to more from this exceptional poet in the time to come." — Matthew Zapruder
"California Silence from its opening incantation invites you into a mystical adventure. Each poem is a thread in the psychedelic tapestry of California. Stella Santamaría continues to be unapologetically herself and it shows in her work." — Alex Haq
"Stella Santamaría crafts borderlands of the page in California Silence, creating a third poetic language: a hybrid of English and Spanish. A hybrid that even creates new words and forms of syntax, a discourse all its own. These borderlands take us from industrial detritus to lush forestscapes to clean kitchens invaded by pests to famous cemeteries in search of teenage clout, all landscapes overrun with grief, love, and desire. Stella bravely and vulnerably defines and intermingles these invisible borders with ease, crafting las Fronteras de Santamaría." — Michael DuBon
