The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Fall Literature Grant to Rosebud Ben-Oni for her upcoming book titled The Atomic Sonnets.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is a Jewish Latinx author, and the winner of 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which received a Starred Review in Booklist and was a Finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and the chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020) in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artists Corps, CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, among others. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC, and published by The Kenyon Review Online, and her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace" for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, which appears on Paramount Network, MTV Networks, The Smithsonian Channel, VH1 and many others.

In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi recalls what led him to the field chemistry: “…conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry…” In 2019, the world celebrated the 150th birthday of Dmitri Mendeleev’s creation of The Periodic Table which originally not only dealt with existing elements but predicted undiscovered, highly radioactive (and highly unstable) ones; today, its use stretches across the disciplines into nuclear physics, biology and engineering. Ben-Oni’s own love affair with chemistry began in her youth and was twofold:  in secular school with a set of periodic element flashcards that she handwrote— atomic number and symbol on the front, respective properties and facts written on the back— and in Hebrew school, where she had to choose a work by a Jewish author that dealt with the Shoah. It was her father who suggested The Periodic Table. Her teenage years were often turbulent, and she remembers finding solace in the science of the imagination when, after her parents had gone to sleep, she’d take out her periodic element cards and go through them, one by one, until she knew every name behind the atomic number and symbol, their properties, groups and chemical reactions. She’d recite them to herself, quietly, picturing their gaseous, liquid and solid forms, and just like Levi entrusted his own memories to each element in The Periodic Table, she eventually began creating her own “stories” with each element, giving them personalities, temperaments, loves, scandals, desires. Krypton— that is 36Kr, also known as “The Hidden One”— was her favorite, and the element was reimagined as masquerades, blue velvet and string quartets, with Argon as lover. She shared these stories with no one; she did not write them down because they seemed to form an atomic bond within her. Today, they remain fresh in her mind, so powerful was their spell over her.  The Periodic Table radiated joy— and poetry— in her youth when there was very little joy to be found.

Years later— in 2019, in fact— Ben-Oni began to write a series of poems from these stories she created so long ago, to celebrate 150 years of the Periodic Table, and in 2020, Black Warrior Review published her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which was (and remains) free and available to the public to read online during the first year of the pandemic. Some of the elements include Hydrogen, the origins of our universe; to Iron, destructor of stars; and elementary particles, too like the electron, reimagined as honey and killer bee, as interstellar love song

Ben-Oni is now working on a full-length collection of this project, The Atomic Sonnets, in which she will cover all existing elements and a few more discovered and hypothetical particles (like the graviton)— but in the spirit of sheer curiosity, Ben-Oni has also decided to create new ones, as The Periodic Table itself is not enough for her. This new collection includes two Crowns of Sonnets, one of which she honors existing poets by creating and naming new elements after them, to show how we as artists bond and become creative forces ourselves.

As for those flashcards, she still has them, keeps them close as a reminder that one can somehow create a way out when there is none to be found. That's her own “elemental yet shapeshifting electrons” of poetry, as Ben-Oni believes the future of human evolution will be the languages of poetry itself.

Please visit Rosebud’s website, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram for more information.