Claremont Graduate University recently announced veteran poet Jennifer Chang and newcomer Eduardo Martinez-Leyva are winners of the 34th annual Kingsley Tufts and Kate Tufts poetry awards, respectively.

Chang won for “An Authentic Life,” Martinez-Leyva for “Cowboy Park.” The poets will take part in a free and open to the public reading and reception at Pomona College’s Lyman Hall, 340 N. College Ave., Claremont, at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 15. Register at eventbrite.com, search “Tufts Awards.”

The Kingsley Tufts is awarded to books by mid-career poets and comes with a $100,000 prize. The Kate Tufts recognizes a debut book and includes a $10,000 prize.

Forty-one-year-old LA resident Martinez-Leyva is still processing the success of “Cowboy Park,” published in 2024 by ‎University of Wisconsin Press. Along with the Kate Tufts award, it also won the 2025 Lammy Award for LGBTQ Poetry, the 2024 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and Texas Institute of Letters Award for First Book of Poetry.

Named after a park he frequented as a child in El Paso, Texas, “Cowboy Park” is Martinez-Leyva’s invitation to readers to step into his shoes as a queer Mexican American and listen to the various neighborhood voices that shaped him. It’s also an exploration of his psyche in the wake of several tragedies, including the 2019 Walmart shooting in El Paso that his mother survived, the deportation of his older brother years prior, the long-held childhood stress of dealing with dismissive authority figures, and his own sexual orientation.

“The core of everything in ‘Cowboy Park’ is about survival and how a community that again is often pushed to the margins, misinterpreted, stereotyped and persecuted, still finds a way of surviving and being resilient and finding their way, despite or maybe because of all the pushback in the darkness,” Martinez-Leyva said. “It’s again, a speaker trying to navigate the circumstances in the cards that they were dealt with in the best way possible without necessarily shying away from the harshness of reality … Beauty can’t exist without its counterpart.”

“Cowboy Park” was an on-again off-again project. It started as his thesis manuscript during a master’s program at Columbia University, which he finished in 2015. He then became a high school English teacher and put poetry on the back burner.

It wasn’t until he secured a seven-month Fine Arts Work Center fellowship in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 2021 that he returned to writing. “The large part of ‘Cowboy Park’ started there,” he said.

His motivation for writing includes his English students at Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica and today’s chaotic world.

“I feel like the driving force for me is, using art, using words, using literacy, especially again now when things feel incredibly precarious and there’s this sense of erasing and getting rid of all these platforms and avenues and artistic talent now more than ever,” he said. “I feel that that’s where we need to sort of use our voice, use our creativity to showcase, to depict and to convey our stories.”

As for what’s next he said, “I have some ideas for a future project, but I’m letting the poems guide me.”

“Cowboy Park” is available at uwpress.wisc.edu and wherever books are sold.