The Sundress Academy for the Arts at Firefly Farms, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is seeking an Editorial Intern for a six-month position. Each part-time position would consist of approximately 5-10 hours of work per week and run from January 5th, 2023 to July 1st, 2024. All applicants must be local to the greater Knoxville, TN area.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an entirely volunteer-run organization that hosts residencies, workshops, and retreats centered on creative writing in all genres. Located on a 45-acre farm twenty minutes from downtown Knoxville, SAFTA’s mission is to give writers of all levels a chance to work with nationally renowned professionals in their field as well as uninterrupted time to focus on their creative work.
The Editorial Intern’s responsibilities include the preparation of documents necessary to run an independent writer’s residency, such as writing press releases, composing blogs, proofreading, working with social media (Facebook, WordPress, etc.), collating editorial and residency data, research, and more. The intern will also be needed to help facilitate Zoom readings and events.
Preferred qualifications include:
• A keen eye for proof-reading
• Strong written communication skills
• Experience with WordPress, Zoom, Google Sheets, and/or other online mediums
• Knowledge of contemporary literature a plus
While the internship position is unpaid, our staff gain real-world experience in working with online event planning, nonprofit management, running a residency, communications, and more while creating a portfolio of work for future employment. SAFTA staff work alongside members of both the local and national literary community through workshops and readings, which staff are able to attend for free during their tenure with the organization.
To apply, please send a resume and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position to the Staff Director, Z Eihausen, at saftastaffdirector@gmail.com. Applications are due by Thursday, November 30th, 2023.
Stephanie Sauer’s Almonds are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press, 2019) is a masterful multimedia project that weaves together prose and craftsmanship, bringing light to buried historical narratives. While this is her second traditional prose book, Sauer also has multiple art books that demonstrate her experience with a wide variety of mediums, such as quilting, archiving other’s works, and stitching, specifically of clothing. Her writing is skillful, untangling her family’s history, but it merely accompanies the quilt she crafts throughout the book, the true star of the show. This quilt serves as a work of healing as she begins to reconcile the history all around her.
From the first paragraph, Sauer establishes the idea of quilting as suture, a word typically used for stitches used to hold a wound together. Her first chapter, “Patchwork” opens with pictures of the messy back stitching of something Sauer has sewed. Counterposing these images, Sauer moves readers to Rio, one of the many places the author has lived through her travels. She describes the city as hungry, its sharp mouths constantly searching for bones and blood. She writes, “I bump into one on the way to buy groceries and it slices my arm. I hold the cut with my opposing hand and an incision form from the inside of my skin, letting air in but no blood out” (Sauer 4). Sauer uses suture here to refer to her attempts to find healing via crafting.
She returns to the concept again on page 103, acknowledging that she can not be the first woman to make this connection. Sauer always makes sure to credit those who came before, saying, “Education, I find, has less to do with knowing things and more to do with the crafting and recrafting of oneself” (Sauer 104). She references Dr. Gladys-Marie Fy’s Preface to Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South, which documents how slave women would quilt their diaries due to being denied traditional educations.
As a whole, Almonds are Members of the Peach Family pulls historical vignettes through time. Sauer carefully intertwines the story of her grandparents with her own life. Their lives mostly exist in Nevada County, California, where readers are introduced to the version of her grandmother, or Billimae, that Sauer is most familiar with—the caretaker: “She ladles the brine into a bowl and serves it with oyster crackers. She spreads the heart with a butter knife on toast and tells the child to eat, to help herself to more” (Sauer 8). Sauer’s writing peels back these small, tender moments for readers to reveal their quiet intimacy.
The descriptions are transparently honest, transitioning from the above heart-wrenching moment of connection between a younger Sauer and her grandmother, to her grandmother’s description of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband. The transition is jarring, laying out her Grandpa’s veteran status and referencing a friend once saying, “‘Where is my purple heart? My father got one in Vietnam, but what about the rest of us who still have to fight the war he brought back home?’” (Sauer 9). The audience isn’t spared her grandparents’ suffering, and by the end of the section readers are primed to see Sauer coping by way of the sound of her sewing machine.
The collection expands as it continues, becoming less interdisciplinary and more plain prose as Sauer tells Billimae’s tale. Here, the writing is truly given a chance to breathe comfortably, showcasing every side of Billimae, even the uglier ones. “It is family shorthand to call Grandma crazy. The screaming, the secrets, the lies, the sneaking of sweet things into hidden places all over the house, into her mouth. The cussing at and blaming of Grandpa for everything,” Sauer explains (59). The family villainizes this woman in her old age, some waving away any mention of domestic abuse towards her as fabricated. Sauer writes, “Now, Grandma is crazy because calling her this is easier on us. Pinning it on the woman excuses our own complicity in the normalizing of her pain” (59). She criticizes this simplification of everything her grandmother is, recognizing the depth in her past that has shaped her into who she is now.
Sauer is constantly reckoning with her history and family lineage, crafting and writing in an attempt to find some kind of answer. Between stories, readers watch her turn “pulp into pages… stitch linen thread between their creases and bind them to one another” (Sauer 71). Her language around the act is gorgeous, finding imagery in the household chores she idolizes through her words, reclaiming work that patriarchal society deems less than. For example, “I haul up bones from the river and sit, listen to the screaming left in them. I hold up each bone to the light, wipe it clean of debris, realign it back into its skeletal form” (Sauer 146). While her word choice turns morbid at points, it only adds to the passion behind her work and her desire to make something of it all.
Things do not end for Sauer here. After uncovering the bones from the graveyard, one can never truly be the same. Seams weaken over time, and eventually they’ll need to be reinforced: “I wake up late (6:50am), read for a few hours. I make coffee, toast a slice of bread, scrub the sink with borax, shoo away ants, re-hang the quilt, write in my slip, alternate between pushing back and suturing a heartache” (Sauer 149). In the face of it all, though, what Sauer has to do, and what we all have to do, is keep on living.
Izzy Astuto (he/they) is a writer majoring in Creative Writing at Emerson College, with a specific interest in screenwriting. When not in Boston for college, they live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has previously been published by Hearth and Coffin, Sage Cigarettes, and Renesme Literary, amongst others. He currently works as an intern for Sundress Publications, and a reader for journals such as hand picked poetry, PRISM international, and Alien Magazine. You can find more of their work on their website, at https://izzyastuto.weebly.com/. Their Instagram is izzyastuto2.0 and Twitter is adivine_tragedy.
When my husband and I decided to move into a nineteen-foot travel trailer, we knew it would mean a major downsize. No problem, I thought, looking around at my clothes, shoes, kitchenware, and toiletries. I love the idea of living minimally and feel so much lighter when I own less. I was up for the challenge… until I got to my bookshelf. How was I supposed to narrow downmy books? And where would I keep them in this tiny space?
Luckily, our camper came complete with this perfect, bookshelf-shaped storage area below the bed. Storage space is extremely valuable (we typically only buy single rolls of toilet paper because there is nowhere to store extra). At first I tried to fill only half of the shelf with books and save the other half for camping gear. But that plan didn’t last long. It is now fully stocked and held in place with this nifty little tension rod-turned-book seatbelt so that nothing gets squished when we lift and lower the bed.
Most of the books I have with me are poetry since that is what I read and re-read most often. I have read most of these books at least three times. Whenever I am reminded of a poem I love, I pull up the bed and dig through my collections to find it. I also re-read my favorite collections when I need some inspiration to get writing in the morning. That is why it feels crucial to keep them all with me. I also keep a few can’t-live-without craft books (like Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio and Structure & Surprise by Michael Theune) for when I feel stuck writing or editing.
I am less sentimental about my fiction books and often only keep one or two at a time, donating them when I am done. I am currently reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert so it stays in this little basket by the bed. I also use my iPad for reading when I can’t find a book I am looking for at a local bookshop (although reading on a screen is very much not preferred, it is a huge space saver).
The rest of my precious books live in boxes in a storage unit near my parent’s house. When things get a little bloated in my bookshelf, I will load my suitcase with books before a flight home and transfer them to storage. I often end up bringing a book or two back with me.
As much as I love living on the road, sometimes I daydream about settling into a home and having a huge library. My dream is to have one of those libraries with floor to ceiling bookshelves and a rolling ladder to reach the top. In this dream, I get to keep all the books I love and never have to put one in storage only to decide weeks later that it is exactly what I want to read. Until then, my little hidden bookshelf will do.
Jen Gayda Gupta is a poet, educator, and wanderer. She earned her BA in English at the University of Connecticut and her MA in Teaching English from New York University. She lives, writes, and travels across the U.S. in a tiny camper with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in Up the Staircase, Rattle, Jellyfish Review, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani, released by Perugia Press in 2023.
REAL ESTATE
In class, a student of mine quotes Heidegger:
Every man is born as many men
and dies as a single one.
He moves on, pontificates on poetry,
claiming the air around us—
an estate he’ll soon inherit.
My mind can’t register the new sounds
his mouth makes as I think of every woman
I know and whether Heidegger’s aphorism
applies. I am a professor and new mother
who hears the boy say, Heidegger said,
and he becomes Heidegger as well as himself,
while I am one woman in the middle
of all the men making word sounds.
Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. Her debut poetry collection The Book Eaterswon the 2023 Perugia Press Prize and was released in September 2023. Hotchandani holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities. Her honors include scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Community of Writers, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani, released by Perugia Press in 2023.
PORTRAIT OF APHASIA ON A BURNISHED MOON
Was it not then, as you thudded over memory’s potholes
embarrassed for swerving too late, I searched for ways
that your forgetting echoed mine. A word effaced itself
in a conversation, I told you, and then I caught a glimpse
of my idea’s underside, like a deer the darkness hid
till the moon appeared and all I saw was movement.
A flash of being. It was the word “eclipse,” of all words,
that escaped me like that furtive deer—its hind legs
springing over brush. I was left with the white tail
of a thought in a sentence: The moon moved
into the Earth’s shadow, which surrounded my idea
while obscuring it, the way the conifer forest
embraces the deer while sheltering it from human eyes.
Pine needles must have brushed my fragile thought as it left me
and I flushed, like that strange and rare and reddish moon.
Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. Her debut poetry collection The Book Eaterswon the 2023 Perugia Press Prize and was released in September 2023. Hotchandani holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities. Her honors include scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Community of Writers, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
Knoxville, TN– The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce our Spring 2024 fellowship and support grant winners: Danielle Emerson, recipient of the Black and/or Indigenous Identifying Writers Fellowship and support grant; Dania Bowie and Emdash, winners of the Spring 2024 LGBTQIA fellowships; and Grisel Y. Acosta, recipient of a support grant for Black and/or Indigenous writers.
These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment at our home at Firefly Farms in Knoxville, TN.
Danielle Shandiin Emerson is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. Danielle writes fiction, poetry, plays, and creative essays. Her work centers Diné culture, perspectives, and personal narratives.
Dania Bowie (she/they) is an artist, as well as a resource and community organizer who works to move resources and people power to address systems-level change through civic and political education in Maine. They are first-generation Filipinx American, queer, and a learning abolitionist. Their art—from fiction writing to painting—seeks to connect people, but also complicate the narrative of resilience in immigrant families. Their focus is on the Filipinx diaspora and the consequences of living global lives as previously colonized people.
Emdash AKA Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐）is a poet, performer, bookseller, open mic host, and the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her poetry proudly propagates from Spoken Word & Ethnic Studies—writing in order to heal, grow and decolonize. She has received funding from Jersey City Arts Council, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference. For full publication and performance history, see emdashsays.com. Her work primarily unpacks her bipolar diagnosis, Chinese Americanness, queerness, intergenerational healing/harm, the U.S medical system, and bilingualism. She holds a MFA in Poetry from Rutgers-Newark University and resides on Munsee Lenape Land (Jersey City, NJ). When not writing, she is most likely telling one too many jokes. Any/all pronouns.
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is the author of Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere (Get Fresh Books, 2021), which was a 2020 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. She is also editor of the anthology, Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), and currently the Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Select work by Dr. Acosta is in Limp Wrist; Platform Review; Best American Poetry; Acentos Review; Kweli Journal; Gathering of the Tribes Magazine; Speculative Fiction for Dreamers; and The Future of Black. Recent work includes oral history interviews of Latine/x folks from Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, a project that is funded by the Mellon Foundation/Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative at the City University of New York (CUNY). They are a full professor at the CUNY-BCC, a Macondo fellow, a VONA alum, and a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet. Her work focuses on her Afro-Latinx and indigenous ancestry, queer identity, mental health, the punk and house music subcultures, her birthplace of Chicago, and the destruction of post-colonial neoliberalism in educational environments.
Finalists for this year’s fellowships include Caprice Gray, Les James, Sacha Bissonnette, Shara Chaves, Bleah Patterson, Angela Abiodun, and Tsahai Makeda Wright.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from
Heirloom by Ashia Ajani, released by Write Bloody Publishing in 2023.
after my shoe spreads the guts of an unassuming earthworm across a crosswalk didn’t it just want to breathe didn’t it just want to dance in the rain too
A body can be a prison if you let it.
Fanon calls a puddle an ecosystem minutes before a boot
disperses its wet contents. Split tongues emerge from the
fragments, eager to taste what lingers on the sole.
Power is the difference. This is a food chain, after all,
begging us to spin sustenance from scarce dew droplets.
Dark, wet continents fall from our hips, waiting to be caged
once the dust settles.
Small pond, small body, it must be so heartbreaking to
see yourself reflected in every iris that passes you over;
a well of emotion, motionless til the heat of summer
evaporates you into the invisible everythingness that surrounds us.
Just as the dehydrated hips of hibiscus widened
when met with moisture, so too shall you unfold past
short-lived habitats. Change accumulates languidly like
condensation. In the ancient sludge of existence,
you
disperse
endlessly.
Ashia Ajani is a sunshower hailing from Denver, CO, (unceded Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapahoe land), now living in Oakland (unceded Ohlone land). A lecturer in the AfAm Department at UC Berkeley and a climate justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network, Ajani has received fellowships from Just Buffalo Literary Center, Tin House, The Watering Hole and others. Their words have appeared in Sierra, Atmos, World Literature Today, Frontier Poetry, & elsewhere. Ajani is co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine and a Fall 2023 Poet in Residence at SF MoAD. Their debut poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing), dropped April 2023.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from
Heirloom by Ashia Ajani, released by Write Bloody Publishing in 2023.
meditations on sweetness and other fruits
my mother asks the pronouns of my crush
as a courtesy, knowing which one she prefers.
this gives her hope, girlchildren to aspire to.
nevertheless a persistent stinging, ringing
smoke above the vibrations of the words we
speak to one another. i don’t kiss using the same
tongue i confess in, my teeth always chattering
away a girlhood dispossessed.
always remember: she the accommodating one.
i basketcase know-it-all split between all divinity, fully spatcocked
over glowing coals; i expose my beating muscle to the flame
and the flame, of course, doesn’t hold the salt of me,
doesn’t cook the meat into anything tender.
ain’t no thang cut muscle deeper than a Black mother’s refusal.
i an expensive lesson in expectation—gluttonous
in my shameful desire.
i confess, i prefer fruit.
in the eveningtime, when the heat becomes bearable,
my eyes set on the horizon, twisted with visions of
watermelon women tonguing their signatures across
my inner thighs, the flavor of kumquats descending from my
lover’s lips.
true, i am greedy.
summer arrives with its ephemeral jewels;
succulent peaches, bountiful berries short-lived
freedom ends at the corner of my lip, lest what i
love begs to remain at the border of burning.
with the scent of honeysuckle in my hair
a boi drenched in fallen flowers ripens me ready,
drunk with plum wine, the mere
promise of nectar enough to satisfy a whole
darkness of longing. the slow roast of time
descends on all of us, but for this moment i
live between a fresh kill & a blossoming tree.
no matter. it all matters.
light the joint &
exhale your juicy transgressions into my eager mouth.
Ashia Ajani is a sunshower hailing from Denver, CO, (unceded Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapahoe land), now living in Oakland (unceded Ohlone land). A lecturer in the AfAm Department at UC Berkeley and a climate justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network, Ajani has received fellowships from Just Buffalo Literary Center, Tin House, The Watering Hole and others. Their words have appeared in Sierra, Atmos, World Literature Today, Frontier Poetry, & elsewhere. Ajani is co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine and a Fall 2023 Poet in Residence at SF MoAD. Their debut poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing), dropped April 2023.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from
Heirloom by Ashia Ajani, released by Write Bloody Publishing in 2023.
the plug won’t
after Mykki Blanco
i grease myself with lipgloss & lotion
perhaps a lil blush will conjure color courage
to go sit in this nigga’s honda for the third time
in two weeks.
the weedman is the only man to ever see me
with my scarf on. i dip & toe a green line. the
intimacy of purchase lingers want on my lips.
yes, this too is heady. in the eveningtime, i
upcycle heartbreak, try on a new facade of
sexycool meant to bring back bliss. eyes low
i coax memory to rewrite itself through a wrapped
fatty & weighty conversations like
did you know so n’ so died?
ash fell from the sky when—
he
didn’t
deserve—
the doctor says— rent is up another 175 so let
me get
a 1⁄2 ounce of anythingthat will pull my mind
back from the brink of no return. eager to oblige,
weedman hands me a bag of indigo to evince
a night sky from beyond my wildest emptiness.
both of us Black & hustling, rife with dreams
of soulmates evergreen. this be an elegiac alliance.
heartache notwithstanding, he beholds my blessings
everlasting. lovers come & go but this—this is
something sacred. i don’t know where my paycheck ends
& his begins, but i love (the idea of) being tethered to
something. i am a shapeshifter eroded by grief;
render my tenement hollow, let the fullness of me
idle below an unseeded frontier to conquer.
i call myself a Before. simply ungrounded.
how i began? not like this.
Ashia Ajani is a sunshower hailing from Denver, CO, (unceded Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapahoe land), now living in Oakland (unceded Ohlone land). A lecturer in the AfAm Department at UC Berkeley and a climate justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network, Ajani has received fellowships from Just Buffalo Literary Center, Tin House, The Watering Hole and others. Their words have appeared in Sierra, Atmos, World Literature Today, Frontier Poetry, & elsewhere. Ajani is co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine and a Fall 2023 Poet in Residence at SF MoAD. Their debut poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing), dropped April 2023.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce the results of the 2023 Prose Open Reading Period. The winning selection is Laura Dzubay’s Pure Fear, American Legend. The horror collection is scheduled for release in 2024.
The stories in Pure Fear, American Legend are startling, haunting, and memorable. Dzubay’s writing is honest, sharp, and unflinching without being cruel or unkind. Like any good horror story, the most commendable part of this collection is not in the momentary terror but in what happens after: how to live when you realize you’ve survived.
Laura Dzubay is a writer and teacher from Indiana. Her stories and essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, Electric Literature, TIMBER, Gulf Coast, Blue Earth Review, Cimarron Review, and Southern Humanities Review. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University, where she won the AWP Intro Prize.
We are also excited to note our finalists and semifinalists from this year’s Prose Open Reading Period.
Finalists
Perils of Girlhood by Melissa Fraterrigo Matter Out of Place by AnnElise Hatjakes Where the Water is by Anjoli Roy
Semifinalists
A Blur in the Field by Lori Brack Holly by Grace Gilbert The Aves by Ryane Nicole Granados Fighthouse by Liesel Hamilton Just Before Midnight by Abby Manzela People with Antlers by Elena Minor AMNH by Anthony Morena When the Crows Call by Shilo Niziolek More Than I Could Chew by Esteban Rodríguez Wormery by Gretchen VanWormer Vanishing Acts by Lori White
