2020 Poetry Open Reading Period Selections Announced

Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce the results of the 2020 open reading period for full-length poetry manuscripts. The winning selections are: Mackenzie Berry’s Slack Tongue City, Jason B. Crawford’s How We Fed the Hunger, and Amanda Galvan Huynh’s Lotería. Each is slated for publication in 2022.

Mackenzie Berry is from Louisville, Kentucky. She has an English – Creative Writing BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison through the First Wave Program. Her poetry has been published in Vinyl, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart, and Broadsided Press, and she has read and performed her poems at various events and festivals, including the 2019 Open Book Festival in Cape Town, South Africa. She has an MA in Race, Media, and Social Justice from Goldsmiths, University of London through a Marcus L. Urann Graduate Fellowship. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing – Poetry at Cornell University. You can find some of her work at mackenzieberry.com. 

Jason B. Crawford (They/He) is a black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as SplitLip Magazine, Voicemail Poems, Glass Poetry, and Kissing Dynamite, they are the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Crawford has their Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit. Their second chapbook Twerkable Moments is due from Paper Nautilus Press in 2021.

Amanda Galvan Huynh (she/her) is a Mexican American writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of a chapbook, Songs of Brujería (Big Lucks 2019) and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics (The Operating System 2019). Her writing has been supported by fellowships and scholarships from MacDowell, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Monson Arts, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Congratulations also to this year’s finalists and semifinalists!

Finalists:

Brian Clifton, Beast-Headed
Matthew E. Henry, The Colored Page
Emily Hockaday, Naming the Ghost
Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, How to Be a Good Animal
Athena Nassar, Little Houses
Joshua Nguyen, Come Clean

Semi-finalists:

Babette Cieskowski, Blood In The Garden
Miranda Dennis, My Sister Who is Not My Sister
Jonathan Louis Duckworth, Night, Translated
Maggie Graber, Swan Hammer: an Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors
Paula Harris, Attack of the 50 Foot Wāhine
Sarah Lilius, Dirty Words
Anne Haven McDonnell, Breath on a Coal
Todd Osborne, The Overview Effect
Todd Smith, The Shape of Other Lives in You
Lindsay Wilson, The Day Gives Us so Many Ways to Eat