Sundress Releases Marvels by MR Sheffield

**Sundress Releases Marvels by MR Sheffield**

Sundress Publications announces the pre-release of MR Sheffield’s new collection, Marvels. An “irreducible kind of book that pivots on every page, refuses to be pinned down” says Julie Marie Wade, author of Catechism: A Love Story and SIX, cautioning that “this book will wild you, Reader, gently.”

MR Sheffield’s Marvels is a séance; a chant of snake bites, wrens, and spiders, nesting and untangling; the instinct of a mother disoriented by her grief; a daughter finding her way in sex and obsession; a family broken and searching for something to pull it back together. Sheffield utilizes H.D. Northrop’s found poems, which describe various creatures, to reveal the wild, instinctive nature of human emotion by repurposing Northrop’s descriptions and applying them to a family. Sheffield couples the poems with manipulated original images from Northrop’s text to drive the skepticism of the poems. Multiplied spiders in the wrong color, transposed boa constrictors, and streaked antelope eyes are juxtaposed with poems about familial grief and resentment, alerting the reader to her instincts. This is the collection that steps back and reveals that instead of visiting an exhibit, admiring the lifelike animals from the soft fur to the magnetizing eyes, we are the exhibit, propped up and trapped behind the glass.

“When the narrator of MR Sheffield’s collection imagines “making a nest of you,” we are invited to make a nest back. Each word and image in this text builds a found and invented structure, layer by layer, for us to writhe around inside of. This multimodal work aims to enthrall us with a nontraditional, visual magic, both human and animal.”

— Nicole Oquendo, author of Telomeres and some prophets

“‘…there is no grief like this and no name for it,’ Sheffield’s speaker confesses in ‘the boa-constrictor,’ which, like all poems inside Marvels, uncoils to reveal monstrous truths about love and loss in a wilderness haunted by the familial. I have yet to find my way out of Sheffield’s collection, months after entering—I don’t believe I’ll ever want to. Between admiring the partnering images and found language from H.D. Northrop’s book of the same name, this collection asks readers—no, dares them—to put their face close to its glass and tap.”

— James A.H. White

MR Sheffield’s work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s FerryReview, The Florida Review, and other publications. This is her first book.

Pre-order at https://squareup.com/market/sundress-publications

Meet Our New Editorial Intern: Nikki A. Sambitsky

The times I am happiest are when I’m reading and/or writing. Most would say that I came to the writing game late in my life. In 2012 at the age of 35, and after having my first child the year before, I decided to return to college to get my BA in journalism. In my 20’s, I worked in and out of the newspaper industry. I even returned to school a few times after that to reinvent myself as a licensed massage therapist and esthetician.

But no matter what career field I worked in, the gravity of the writing life kept pulling me back to center. It was just a matter of time before I found myself back in the thick of things again.

Flash forward to 2018, and I am the proud owner of a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing with a couple of published essays under my belt. It’s hard to properly put it into words, but I truly feel alive, vital, and necessary when I am writing and learning. I’m slowly but surely making my way in this writing world while navigating the challenges and ups and downs of having two small children. But no matter what comes our way, my husband and I seem to make it work.

If there’s anything that I have learned about the writing life, it’s that it’s all about making meaningful connections and constantly evolving while engaging in the hustle. (And I mean hustle in the most positive way!)

When I’m not writing lyric essays or teaching about unconventional forms of creative nonfiction, I tutor, read, and now intern at Sundress Publications. It’s an understatement to say that I am beyond excited to work with Sundress. I have always wanted to learn the inside workings of the publishing industry and am thrilled to see things from the other side of the writing industry.

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Nikki A. Sambitsky earned her MFA in creative writing, specifically focusing on the lyric/fragment essay (creative nonfiction) from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. Sambitsky holds a BA in journalism from Central Connecticut State University. She is currently working on her collection of lyric/fragment essays, which center on mental illness, her family, and her husband and two autistic children. Sambitsky enjoys writing essays that explore family, family issues, and autism. Her journalism work and creative nonfiction has appeared in many publications including The Helix, Gravel Magazine, and West Hartford Magazine. She was a scholarship recipient to the 2018 Slice Literary Writers’ Conference, and her essay, “Happy Birthday (Numb)” was selected as a finalist in the nonfiction category for the Slice Literary Writers’ Conference Emerging Writers Contest. Sambitsky was also a scholarship recipient to the 2018 Murphy Writing Workshop of Stockton University. Her most recent essay, “Penny Drop,” is slated for publication in Longridge Review, in November 2018. She lives with her husband, two children, and way too many animals in a peaceful, rural, area of Connecticut.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces Winners of Lambda Literary Fellowships

Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces Winners
of Lambda Literary Fellowships

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Wo Chan and Catherine Chen as the winners of their Spring Lambda Literary Fellowships. SAFTA has paired with Lambda Literary to offer two fellowships (one full fellowship and one 50% fellowship) for a week-long residency to LGBTQIA+ writers of any genre. Lambda believes Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer literature is fundamental to the preservation of our culture, and that LGBTQIA+ lives are affirmed when our stories are written, published and read. These fellowships are designed to give queer artists time and space to complete their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.

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Catherine Chen is the author of the chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks) forthcoming June 2019. Their work has appeared in Slate, Hobart, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Mask Magazine, among others. They’ve been awarded fellowships and residencies from Millay Colony, Lambda Literary, and Art Farm.

Screen Shot 2018-10-25 at 1.48.02 PM Wo Chan is a queer poet and drag performer living in Brooklyn. Wo has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. As a member of Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. Check them out @theillustriouspearl or wo.bingo.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is now open for applications for summer. For the summer residency period, SAFTA will be offering the following fellowships: one full and one 50% fellowship for writers and artists of color; one full fellowship for a marginalized writer sponsored by the literary magazine, Alternating Current; and one full fellowship for a survivor of sexual assault. We also have limited scholarships for all applicants with financial need.

SAFTA is an artists’ residency on a 45-acre farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers of all genres, visual artists, and more. All are guided by experienced, professional instructors from a variety of creative disciplines who are dedicated to cultivating the arts in East Tennessee.

PROJECT BOOKSHELF: NIK BUHLER

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As you can see, my bookshelf isn’t so much a bookshelf as it is multiple bookshelves and stacks of unplaced new buys. As a virgo sun, I am extremely anal about having everything in alphabetical order (by authors last name, of course) to achieve the feel of a real home library. However, as a gemini moon and sagittarius rising, I can never buy just one book! Because of this, I often end up purchasing books by the tens and twenties, resulting in the stacks of books haphazardly thrown on shelves while my anxiety screams about how disorganized it is as well as how long it will take to organize.

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I love collecting odd trinkets that catch my eye for whatever reason whether they be weird, interesting, or funny. Various shelves are adorned with these trinkets such as my hungry hippo, old lost photographs, glowing alien toys, and carved wooden stump. Similarly to my fascination with odd trinkets, I have a fascination with odd books. Many books found on my shelves are those found browsing places like yard sales, GoodWill, and McKay’s. Funky books like my ombré, vapor-wave copy of Hamlet, my copy of The Practical Guide to Tarot and the Runes, and a copy of Woodburning with Style add a fun flare to my collection and opportunities to read on fun things I might not have normally picked up.

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Additionally, I have many books of sentimental value that have been passed along through my grandmother, aunts, my mother, and finally I such as my collection of Steven King novels or original copy of A Night to Remember. These books have been well taken care of for many years and you can feel the love in the pages. They mean so much to me as the first novels I ever owned – though perhaps that is slightly macabre. Similarly, I have an unfortunate obsession with Franz Kafka and own every book he has published, including a completed work of texts just to be absolutely sure i’ve missed nothing! I even own a collection of aphorisms that I carry around like the world’s worst bible.

The rest of my books are miscellaneous selections left over from English and Philosophy classes taken previously at UT. As a double major in two reading and writing intensive studies, i’ve managed to amass quite the collection of novels and academic texts, all of which I still enjoy reading to this day despite the fact that they may of been attained for a simple freshman 101 course. If you asked me to pick a favorite book from my shelves, I don’t think I could do it; I simply have too many to decide!

Nik Buhler is a queer poet from middle Tennessee who attends the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where they are a senior who studies English Literature and Philosophy. When they are not at home chainsmoking, drinking beer, and playing with their adorable cats, Buhler can be found in coffee shops and libraries craving fries, furiously typing out papers due the next day, and screaming about the existentialist movements influence on modern literature.

Meet Our New Editorial Intern: Nik Buhler

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No matter how old I was, it’s always been unlikely that you’d ever find me without one, if not three or four, books with me. I would stay up well past my bed time, reveling in how sly I was, just to finish a few more chapters of the most recent story I just couldn’t put down. Even as I advanced to high school where I became more involved taking AP and dual enrollment classes, playing varsity volleyball for four years, and becoming an active member and even president of multiple organizations such as the Gay-Straight Alliance and HOSA, my love for reading never waned but instead morphed into a challenge of how many novels I could finish without neglecting my school work!

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to pursue academia in the long term. In high school, a select few of my teachers and professors further impassioned my love for reading and learning, even going as far as to help me find degree programs that would best suit me for college. Upon entering my freshman year at the University of Tennessee, I became mesmerized by all the options available to me; I wanted to learn everything there was to learn but I couldn’t help but gravitate towards text and writing based courses. Eventually, I found myself in a Philosophy course and became enamored with the subject immediately. I loved the analysis, the debate, and the thoughtful, structured writing that came along with it. However, it was still missing something for me – literature! I quickly picked up a second major in English literature where I could explore the expanses of both subjects that truly speak to me,

With the help of many wonderful professors and mentors during my time so far at UT, I have been lucky enough to encountermany positive, life-changing experiences. The people I have met here have pushed me to be the best version of myself that they are confident I can be while not letting me be limited by insecurities or anxieties. Because of this, I have been blessed with the confidence and support to reach towards dreams and goals of mine through submitting works, participating in a poet residency, seeking out well suited graduate programs, and, of course, this internship with SAFTA! I know my time here will further propel me forward towards my goals in collegiate work and studies through encouraging me to better myself and reach success beyond what I though possible.

Sundress Reading Series Presents Carlina Duan, Lisa Dordal, and Sophia Stid

The Sundress Reading Series is excited to welcome Carlina Duan, Lisa Dordal, and Sophia Stid for the September installment of our reading series! This event will take place from 2-4 p.m. on Sunday, September 16th at Hexagon Brewing Co., located at 1002 Dutch Valley Dr STE 101, Knoxville, TN 37918.

Screen Shot 2018-09-11 at 12.10.19 PM Carlina Duan hails from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and currently lives in Nashville, where she is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Vanderbilt University. Her debut poetry collection, I WORE MY BLACKEST HAIR, was published by Little A in 2017, and received a Finalist Award in the Little A Emerging Writers Contest. Her poems can be found in Black Warrior Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Nashville Review.

Screen Shot 2018-09-11 at 12.10.26 PM Lisa Dordal (M.Div., M.F.A.) is the author of Mosaic of the Dark (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) and teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University. A Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize and the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Cave Wall, CALYX, The Greensboro Review, Vinyl Poetry, New Poetry from the Midwest, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse.

Screen Shot 2018-09-11 at 12.10.32 PM Sophia Stid is a writer from California. Currently in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University, she has received fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the winner of the 2017 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Image, Beloit, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, Haydens Ferry Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.

The Sundress Reading Series is an award-winning literary reading series that is held monthly at 2 p.m. at Hexagon Brewing Co. just outside of downtown Knoxville. The Sundress Reading Series is free and open to the public.

Project Bookshelf: Jenna Geisinger

As you can see, my bookshelf isn’t much of a bookshelf at all. Right now, it is a box and three piles on the floor. I am in the process of moving to North Jersey for graduate school. This is not all of them. I have a terrible habit of leaving the books I’m currently reading out on coffee tables, counters, armchairs of couches, etc… It is this habit that made me want a bookshelf because my family will use my books as coasters (my biggest pet peeve) and leave coffee stains on covers, or just stain the entirety of Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. The pages are warped and stuck together. (My mom is trying to convince me to leave some books home, but I will lay in traffic before I leave my books with those careless people).

Some of my books are pieces of comfort—stories I love and reread over and over. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is one of my favorites. When I transferred to Stockton University from community college, I was so nervous. What if I couldn’t do it? I found solace in Rowell’s novel, whose protagonist suffers the same social anxiety as me. Cath’s life and circumstances were very similar to my own, and even though she subsisted off of protein bars because she was too afraid to ask where the cafeteria was (100% something I would do), she made it. It was the first time I found a book where the protagonist suffered from anxiety, but the anxiety was merely a trait of the character, rather than the focus of the novel. I felt like someone understood how I thought and felt.

Other books I love because of the stories of course, but also because of the memories associated with them—as if they could be pressed into the pages like a flower. I reread them and remember who I was when I first read them, where I was when I bought them. I bought Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalist and read most of it on a trip to Yale with my independent study, where Shilo and I explored New Haven, CT, getting lost trying to find a bookstore. We went to handle the earliest edition of Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, which we had been helping our professor edit in terms of where to put footnotes for “The Clever College Student.” The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, which I bought in the second-hand bookstore we eventually found. Tenth of December by George Saunders is in the mix there, which I started reading because a professor commented that a short story I wrote reminded him of George Saunders, and then it became a comfort after I was in the hospital room when my beloved grandmother took her last rattled breaths.

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Jenna Geisinger is a fiction and creative non-fiction writer from New Jersey. She attends the MFA Professional and Creative Writing Program at William Paterson University, while working as an associate managing editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal and a reader for Philadelphia Stories, where she has been published.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Now Accepting Applications for Residency Fellowship in Long-form Journalism/Nonfiction

Sundress Academy for the Arts Now Accepting Applications
for Residency Fellowship in Long-form Journalism/Nonfiction

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is excited to announce that they are accepting applications for a new fellowship in long-form journalism and/or nonfiction. The Fourth Estate Residency fellowship comes with a two-week residency during the spring or summer residency periods as well as a $500 stipend.

In the age of anti-journalism and “fake news,” we believe it is more important than ever to give journalists and writers time to research, write, and revise work that delves into the events and issues of our time. Our group of ten writers (Camille Dungy, Eliza Griswold, Patrick Hicks, Ilyse Kusnetz (in memoriam), Kathryn Miles, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Brian Turner, Sholeh Wolpe, Elliott Woods, and Sunil Yapa) have joined together to make this possible. Although several of us work in writing disciplines outside of journalism, we believe it is crucial to support the work of journalists—especially in a time when the entire profession is under threat.

This fellowship is intended to give writers space and time to continue to do this important and necessary work. Applicants may work in any journalistic medium—writing (traditional journalism or literary nonfiction), podcasting, vlogging, etc.

The SAFTA farmhouse is located on a working farm that rests on a 45-acre wooded plot in a Tennessee “holler” perfect for hiking, camping, and nature walks. Located less than a half-hour from downtown Knoxville, an exciting and creative city of 200,000 in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, SAFTA is an ideal location for those looking for a rural get-away with access to urban amenities.

The residency bedrooms are 130 sq. ft. with queen-size platform bed, closet, dresser, and desk. There is also a communal kitchen supplied with stove, refrigerator, and microwave plus plenty of cook- and dining-ware. The office and library have two working computers—one Mac, one PC—with access to the Adobe Creative Cloud. The library contains over 800 books with a particularly large contemporary poetry section and, thanks to the Wardrobe, many recent titles by women and nonbinary writers. The facility also includes a full-size working 19th century full-size letterpress with type, woodworking tools, and a 1930’s drafting table.

SAFTA is currently accepting applications for our spring/summer residency period, which runs from December 31^st to August 11^th, 2019. The deadline for The Fourth Estate Residency fellowship applications is September 1^st, 2018.

To apply for the Sundress Academy for the Arts residency, you will need the following:

Application form (including artist’s statement and contact information for two references)
CV or artist’s resume (optional)
Artist sample (see website for more details on genre specifications)
Application fee of $15 or $10 for current students (with student email) payable online*

Please also let us know if you would like to be considered for a residency even if you are not awarded this particular fellowship. For the spring, we also have fellowships for LGBTQIA writers; for the summer, we offer fellowships for writers and artists of color.

For more information, visit our website: http://www.sundressacademyforthearts.com/

*Application fee will be waived for those applying who demonstrate financial need. Please state this in your application under the financial need section.

Meet Our New Editorial Intern: Jenna Geisinger

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Reading has always been an escape for me. I felt like books were places of comfort, that tucked you in and welcomed you back just where you left off. Most summers I begged my mom to drive me to our library, and I’d take out the five book maximum, then return the next week for five more books. I spent hours reading without realizing how much time had passed. I was the kid that came to school zombie-fied by a book I couldn’t put down. To me, the lives of the characters in the books were more interesting, or fulfilling, than my life.

In elementary school I started writing. Sort of. It started with my own version of A Series of Unfortunate Events. I spent three long sentences describing every aspect of Mr. Poe—the olive green of his jacket, the bristle of his mustache, the scuffed shoes, his nervous hands—I wanted to make Mr. Poe standing at the door so real. I wanted to make it as real as the book was to me. Thankfully, I learned to pare down my sentences, but the first drafts are still gunked with too many adjectives.

However, writing will never provide the same escape for me that reading has. Writing is gruesome. It’s tiring—it’s writing five drafts simultaneously of the same story because you can’t make up your mind about the narrator. It’s rereading and rearranging the same paragraph, reading it aloud to yourself and hearing where the flow hiccups, but having no clue how to smoothen it out. I love writing, but it is work, and it is too vulnerable to my doubt and criticism, as well as that of others. Reading is intimate, accepting you in whatever mental or emotional state you’re in, and lets you step into someone else’s life for a little while. It wows you with shiny sentences, and tricks you with plot structure, but it’s free of the worry and overthinking that writing welcomes. I want to give that to someone else. I want to welcome them into a story and tell them everything will be fine, everything else can wait.

In the last year or so, the pressure has been mounting about what to do after college. Senior year ticked on, the deadline inching closer, waiting for my decision. I spoke extensively with my mentor about whether I should apply to graduate school. Was it worth it? In her small office, closed in with wall-to-wall bookshelves, she asked me what I pictured myself doing. I told her that I would love to write novels, but that is impractical. That is a side project. Then I looked at her—this polished writer with an award-winning chapbook under her belt—and said that I thought I could be happy being a part of the process to create published work. My favorite part of workshop classes was editing. I loved polishing my peers’ stories, showing them what they couldn’t see. I am really excited to intern at Sundress Publications and be so close to stories.

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Sundress Academy for the Arts & Lambda Literary Now Accepting Applications for Spring Artist Residencies

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Sundress Academy for the Arts & Lambda Literary
Now Accepting Applications for Spring Artist Residencies

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is excited to announce that they are now accepting applications for short-term artists’ residencies in creative writing, visual art, film/theater, music, and more. Each residency includes a room of one’s own, access to a communal kitchen, bathroom, office, and living space, plus wireless internet.

The length of a residency can run from one to three weeks. SAFTA is currently accepting applications for our spring residency period, which runs from December 31st to May 5th, 2019. The deadline for spring residency applications is September 1st, 2018.

For the spring residency period, SAFTA will be pairing with Lambda Literary to offer two fellowships (one full fellowship and one 50% fellowship) for a week-long residency to LGBTQIA+ writers of any genre. Lambda believes Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer literature is fundamental to the preservation of our culture, and that LGBTQIA+ lives are affirmed when our stories are written, published and read. All applicants to the two fellowships must identify as LGBTQIA+. Partial scholarships also available to any applicant with financial need. This year’s judges will be Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Meagan Cass, and librecht baker.

To apply for the Sundress Academy for the Arts residency, you will need the following:

Application form (including artist’s statement and contact information for two references)
CV or artist’s resume (optional)
Artist sample (see website for more details on genre specifications)
Application fee of $15 or $10 for current students (with student email) payable online*

For more information, visit our website: http://www.sundressacademyforthearts.com/

or find us on Facebook, under Sundress Academy for the Arts

or on Twitter, @SundressPub

*Application fee will be waived for those applying for the Lambda Literary scholarship who demonstrate financial need. Please state this in your application under the financial need section.

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Sundress Releases Marvels by MR Sheffield