An extension of Sundress Publications, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit publication group founded in 2000, the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an artists’ retreat on a 45-acre farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, that offers residencies to writers, visual artists, filmmakers, composers, and other creators from across the country. With two residency rooms and a dry cabin on site, we offer a rotating space for nationally recognized and emerging artists in multiple disciplines. SAFTA also hosts weekend workshops, yearly retreats, and more.
Both
positions will run from December to June with a chance to be renewed. The
development research intern’s responsibilities include researching and
proposing grant opportunities, coordinating with the development writing intern
and other SAFTA departments, collating data, and proofreading documents. The
development writing intern’s responsibilities include writing grants, coordinating
with the development research intern and other SAFTA departments, collating
data, and proofreading documents.
Both
may also be responsible for writing copy, composing blogs, and assisting in the
establishment of new programs, projects, and partnerships.
Qualifications
include:
A keen eye for grammar, punctuation,
and syntax
Strong online research skills
Strong organizational, creative,
problem-solving, and written communication skills
A passion for contemporary literature
and community arts programs
Knowledge
of arts administration and/or grant writing a plus but not required. Applicants
are welcome to telecommunicate and therefore are not restricted to living in
the Knoxville area.
While
this is an unpaid internship, all interns gain real-world experience with a
nationally recognized press and arts organization while creating a portfolio of
work for future employment opportunities. Interns will also be able to attend
all workshops at the Sundress Academy for the Arts at cost.
To
apply, please send a resume and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in
the position to the Development Director, Tori Lane at
lane@sundresspublications.com. Applications are due by November 15, 2019.
Sundress Publications invites contributions to support the production of beestung, a new quarterly online micro-magazine for non-binary and two-spirit writers and readers, with an emphasis on intracommunity sensibilities.
Resisting the canon and all forms of bigotry, this entirely volunteer-run magazine under the imprint of Sundress Press, a 501(c)3 non-profit will publish poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrids, and art by creators who fall under the non-binary umbrella, with specific attention to historically underrepresented writers. beestung will never charge a submission fee.
100% of these tax-deductible donations will go to funding the quarterly.
This will ensure that each and every one of our writers and artists get paid.
This will help to sustain our hosting for two years as a paying outlet, with a modest budget for spreading the word about beestung.
This gift will help ensure we never have to charge a submission fee.
Help us fund a new home for writing that buzzes, stings, and drips with sweetness.
beestungmet their first donation goal and now have a stretch goal that will allow them to publish for three full years. This stretch goal asks for an additional $499. Editor Sarah Clark said, “For an additional $499, we can publish for a third year, fee-free, paying contributors $20 each. I think sustainability is a big project for literary publications…” Thanks to generous supporters who helped them off to a promising launch, securing sustainability can now be their goal. Further donations will be used toward that end.
Who’s behind beestung?
Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. Clark has edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is proud to present the next installment of their workshop series, “Finding an Appetite: Poetry Creative Nonfiction, and Food Writing.” This workshop will be led by Katie Culligan and will be held in Room 252 in the Hodges Library from 6 to 7 pm on October 28th. This event is free and open to the public.
Mark Twain said, “Part of the secret of success is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” When we begin to consider this active role that food plays in our lives and bodies, we must think about the senses, the land we live on, our families, both nuclear and national, and the labor-system-latticework we all must somehow live in the cracks of. In this workshop, we will investigate together how these considerations, and how food writing in general, can enrich your personal essays and poetry. If you’ve ever grown a mint plant in your kitchen, or waited a table, or eaten a hot dog that your mother cut up to look like an octopus, then you have enough to write about for the foreseeable future. Writers we read together will include those who specialize in both journalism and lyric nonfiction. We will not be reading Mark Twain.
Katie Culligan is a nonfiction writer living in Knoxville, TN, where she is the Fall 2019 Writer in Residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the recipient of the 2019 Eleanora Burke Award for Nonfiction and the Margaret Artley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. Recent work appears in Geometry, Noble/ Gas Qtrly, Columbia Journal, American Chordata, and others. She can be reached at katieculliganwriting.com
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an artists’ residency that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists. All are guided by experienced, professional instructors from a variety of creative disciplines who are dedicated to cultivating the arts in East Tennessee.
She is in the tree by the river that sings in the tree, in the mouth of the tree waxing mournful on water. The hively shrilling of bees, darker than honey, more homely than resinous gold. It’s cold and damp in the song of water ringing of ripple, of rapid and fade, of day’s end and the coming of blade, of the axe’s edge opening the throat of bold call. Of what the moon won’t say in any emergency, any anxious fall, reds in the greens of summer, the lone hollow of tree by the river in which she sings, water in her teeth.
This selection comes from the poetry book, available from University Press of Colorado. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter, selected by John Yau as the winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry (The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2018) and My Dim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She has also written three chapbooks: Ophelia (dancing girl press, 2016), Petals as an Offering in Darkness (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and Spirits of the Humid Cloud (dancing girl press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, The Colorado Review, The Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, The Laurel Review, Linebreak, The Massachusetts Review, The New Orleans Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, in other journals and in two anthologies. In 2008, she was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund Poetry Prize. A graduate of Stony Brook University (BA, English) and of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, Gillian lives in Westchester County, New York, where for five years she taught poetry workshops to women at New York Presbyterian Hospital. She is currently at work on a novel and a third collection of poetry. She also draws botanical still lifes and occasional other subjects, and is currently seeking out professional training in the visual arts.
Nilsa Rivera writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe for Sundress Publications. Nilsa’s work appeared in the Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and Selkie Literary Magazine.She lives in Riverview, Florida with her husband, son, and other multi-species family members.
This selection comes from the anthology, Puerto Rico en mi corazón available from Anomalous Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Erica Mena is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and book artist. They hold an MFA in poetry from Brown University, and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Their book Featherbone (Ricochet Editions, 2015) won a 2016 Hoffer First Horizons Award. Their translation of the Argentine graphic novel The Eternaut by H.G. Oesterheld and F. Solano Lopez (Fantagraphics, 2015) won a 2016 Eisner Award. Their artist books are collected widely. Most recently they created the artist books Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of letterpress printed broadsides by Puerto Rican poets in response to Hurricane Maria, printed in Spanish and English; and Gringo Death Coloring Book by Raquel Salas Rivera with collaborator Mariana Ramos Ortiz.
Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize and the Laureate Fellowship, both from the Academy of American Poets. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, LO TERCIARIO/THE TERTIARY, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, WHILE THEY SLEEP (UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019. They received their PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Raquel loves and lives for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.
RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Collateral (Akashic Books/National Poetry Series) and the recipient of fellowships in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Queer Arts Mentorship. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, essayist, and Spanish language translator at large in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, the New Yorker online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, small axe salon, and elsewhere, always elsewhere. She won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize for her translations of the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma–an ongoing project. She is currently at work on her first book, a psychogeograpnhy of Puerto Rican culture, forthcoming from Riverhead and tentatively titled NO ES NADA: Notes from the Other Island. Wherever you are, there is always another island to see through to.
This selection comes from the anthology, Puerto Rico en mi corazón available from Anomalous Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Erica Mena is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and book artist. They hold an MFA in poetry from Brown University, and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Their book Featherbone (Ricochet Editions, 2015) won a 2016 Hoffer First Horizons Award. Their translation of the Argentine graphic novel The Eternaut by H.G. Oesterheld and F. Solano Lopez (Fantagraphics, 2015) won a 2016 Eisner Award. Their artist books are collected widely. Most recently they created the artist books Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of letterpress printed broadsides by Puerto Rican poets in response to Hurricane Maria, printed in Spanish and English; and Gringo Death Coloring Book by Raquel Salas Rivera with collaborator Mariana Ramos Ortiz.
Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize and the Laureate Fellowship, both from the Academy of American Poets. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, LO TERCIARIO/THE TERTIARY, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, WHILE THEY SLEEP (UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019. They received their PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Raquel loves and lives for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.
RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Collateral (Akashic Books/National Poetry Series) and the recipient of fellowships in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Queer Arts Mentorship. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, essayist, and Spanish language translator at large in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, the New Yorker online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, small axe salon, and elsewhere, always elsewhere. She won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize for her translations of the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma–an ongoing project. She is currently at work on her first book, a psychogeograpnhy of Puerto Rican culture, forthcoming from Riverhead and tentatively titled NO ES NADA: Notes from the Other Island. Wherever you are, there is always another island to see through to.
In an installment fit for October and Halloween, Jenny MacBain-Stephen shares Sarah Nichols’ work with us and talks about her own experience with found poetry. Thank you for reading and supporting the Lyric Essentials series!
Riley Steiner: Why did you choose these two poems to share with us?
Jenny MacBain-Stephens: I chose to read “Little Sister Remembers Helter Skelter” and “Little Sister’s Sister.”
I’ve always been a fan of Sarah Nichols’ poetry. Her poems are surreal, creepy, and multi-layered. Her chapbook Little Sister (from Grey Book Press, 2018) does not disappoint in these areas.
RS: Sarah Nichols’ chapbook Little Sister, where these poems come from, is a collection of found poetry. Sarah uses the novel Violin by Anne Rice as her chapbook’s source material. What is your own experience with found poetry?
JMS: I was new to experimenting with found poetry until I participated in several month-long poetry challenges over various Octobers (called “The Poeming”) the past couple of years with a group of other poets, facilitated by E. Kristin Anderson and Samantha Duncan and Sarah Nichols.
Nichols was one of the poets who participated in these as well. An author is picked (like Anne Rice or Stephen King), and then each poet is assigned a book by that author to create a poem a day and publish it in a private closed group on social media every day in October.
Because it is October, the authors are usually horror-related or maybe focused on science fiction. It is an awesome experience. We always review the rules about using another writer’s words to create something new, and each poem is attributed. I’ve created many poems using this method now, and I thoroughly enjoy it.
RS: What do you admire about Little Sister as a whole?
JMS: I love the musical references in the chapbook (the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” P.J. Harvey, Joy Division,) and even though the Little Sister is “Little,” she seems off and a little violent and the reader also doesn’t even know if she is real sometimes. The speaker is distrustful of her but also at times says things like “She is my own breath.” There are images that play with mental hospitals, and God, and evil, and sex, and I love the idea of playing with those boundaries.
RS: Did you discover anything new about these poems after reading them out loud, as opposed to reading them on the page?
JMS: I did. In “Little Sister Remembers Helter Skelter,” the first line is, “I don’t believe in confession. I was a little abomination, girl.” If you read this line faster and skip over the comma a bit, it sounds like the reader is talking about herself, rather than addressing the “girl.”
And this little change up for me is symbolic of these poems—is the Little Sister a separate entity or are the girls the same? Is one person severed into little dark pieces? I think so.
A poet from Connecticut, Sarah Nichols has published four chapbooks, including How Darkness Enters a Body (2018) and Dreamland for Keeps (2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Dream Pop, Memoir Mixtapes, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Rogue Agent.
Jennifer MacBain-Stephens lives in the Midwest and is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Your Best Asset is a White Lace Dress (Yellow Chair Press, 2016), The Messenger is Already Dead (Stalking Horse Press, 2017), We’re Going to Need a Higher Fence, tied for first place in the 2017 Lit Fest Book Competition, and The Vitamix and the Murder of Crows, which is recently out from Apocalypse Party. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of ten chapbooks. Recent work can be seen at or is forthcoming from The Pinch, Black Lawrence Press, Quiddity, Prelude, Cleaver, Yalobusha Review, Zone 3, and decomP.
Riley Steiner graduated from Miami University, where she studied Creative Writing and Media & Culture. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she enjoys baking, cheering for the Green Bay Packers, and spending way too much money at Half Price Books. Her creative work has recently appeared in the Oakland Arts Review and Collision.
This selection comes from the anthology, Puerto Rico en mi corazón available from Anomalous Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Erica Mena is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and book artist. They hold an MFA in poetry from Brown University, and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Their book Featherbone (Ricochet Editions, 2015) won a 2016 Hoffer First Horizons Award. Their translation of the Argentine graphic novel The Eternaut by H.G. Oesterheld and F. Solano Lopez (Fantagraphics, 2015) won a 2016 Eisner Award. Their artist books are collected widely. Most recently they created the artist books Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of letterpress printed broadsides by Puerto Rican poets in response to Hurricane Maria, printed in Spanish and English; and Gringo Death Coloring Book by Raquel Salas Rivera with collaborator Mariana Ramos Ortiz.
Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize and the Laureate Fellowship, both from the Academy of American Poets. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, LO TERCIARIO/THE TERTIARY, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, WHILE THEY SLEEP (UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019. They received their PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Raquel loves and lives for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.
RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Collateral (Akashic Books/National Poetry Series) and the recipient of fellowships in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Queer Arts Mentorship. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, essayist, and Spanish language translator at large in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, the New Yorker online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, small axe salon, and elsewhere, always elsewhere. She won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize for her translations of the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma–an ongoing project. She is currently at work on her first book, a psychogeograpnhy of Puerto Rican culture, forthcoming from Riverhead and tentatively titled NO ES NADA: Notes from the Other Island. Wherever you are, there is always another island to see through to.
Sundress Publications announces the eighth episode of the podcast, Shitty First Drafts. A podcast made for and by writers this show playfully investigates the creative processes of different artists to determine how a finished draft gets its polish.
In Episode 8, Andrew Dillon visits Brynn and Stephanie to talk all things poetry and writing, and on top of everything: being nice to people. In between college and graduate school, Andrew taught for a year in Korea, as well as a substitute teacher in Nashville. He describes how his love of music led to a love of poetry and how a Terrence Hayes reading inspired him to apply for MFA programs. Andrew reads his poem “Apologia for Never Saying What I Mean” and teaches Brynn and Stephanie about his unique writing and editing process that he says allows him to “keep going with the drafting instead of sticking on one line…so I don’t lose the [momentum]” he says. After discussing Andrew’s published poem and how his editing process has changed over time, they question whether any poem can ever truly be perfect. Andrew currently works and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is a technical writer and sometimes-open-mic poet.
Andrew P. Dillon
graduated in the University of Tennessee’s inaugural MFA class. His work is
forthcoming or has appeared most recently in Analog, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Connotation Press, and Public Pool. He lives in Nashville and
is completing his first collection, currently titled Captain for Dark Mornings (after a track on his favorite Laura Nyro
album). He is tragically committed to the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo Sabres, and
Tennessee Vols. He strongly supports the use of semi-colons, em-dashes, and the
serial comma.
I’ve been a writer, in a sense, for as long as I can remember. Even before I knew how to spell my name I was conjuring up stories about spaceships and adventurers, making my own toys and building worlds around them.
Countless trees have fallen victim to my adolescent phases, such as drawing comic book spoofs of TV episodes. Dozens of mismatched comics I believed were worth millions, now sit in a folder in my closet, where they’ve been seen by 3 people, myself included.
When I was older, I started writing novels. Well, not exactly novels. More like the first two pages of the first chapter of the first part of a single novel. I would do this about a dozen times before I realized I was not good at writing.
Once I was in high school, I started taking creative writing classes. I received runner up for a stage play called “Olympus Family Therapy”. My mom helped me write it. She was an AP English teacher, so she got runner up for a stage play called “Olympus Family Therapy”. And I was still not good at writing.
Shockingly, my parents did not cry when I told them I’d be an English major, concentration; creative writing. And that’s where I was thrown in the deep end. My writing muscles went into maximum overdrive, and I wrote stage plays, screenplays, short stories, fiction, nonfiction, and even a web horror comic.
I have worked with UT’s literary arts magazine, The Phoenix, for over a year. I am the current prose editor. I’m also a creative intern for UnwarranTed, UT’s comedy sketch group. This year alone I have published 5 different pieces. I hope to publish and write more.
When people ask me what I want to be when I graduate, I tell them I am going to be a professional homeless person. I then explain it’s because I want to go into production, write screenplays or draw storyboards, and eventually pitch my own cartoon.
I’m still trying to be a better writer, and working with Sundress will not only help me learn, but it’ll be a crap ton of fun.
