Tag: anthology

Sundress Announces the Release of NOMBONO: Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Poets

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of NOMBONO: Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Poets, edited by Akua Lezli Hope. This is a collection that asks us earthers, terrans, the identified sentients of this planet to reconceive how we perceive ourselves in this world.

In the stunning and imaginative NOMBONO: Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Poets, we are presented with visions, invocations, foretellings, and bold harbingers. NOMBONO, drawing from the Zulu word for “visionary,” brings together mystical dreams and possibilities that are at times both striking and devastating. This anthology asks: are we on a bright threshold or at the edge of a dark precipice? Are we about to take flight and evolve or plumet into cataclysm? Around each corner in this book there may be a hyena man, salmon women, Mananggal, prayers, or curses. There is steady, unbroken eye contact, and there is fierce joy and fury. Here we have the limitless, boundless exploration of resplendent worlds.

Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and SFPA Grand Master, said of the collection: “The masterful Akua Lezli Hope is the quiet conductor of this transformative poetry collection, with work from around the world, each solo piece glows against the infinite dark/light background of galactic imaginations. Here, we are reminded that the blood of ancestors, whispering in our DNA, still sings of the stars to all souls, now and forever.”

Order your copy of NOMBONO on the Sundress website or download your free e-copy today!

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments, and peace. Her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, an Elgin and SFPA Award, and Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations. Her collections include EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, which won the Writer’s Digest Book Award, and THEM GONE. She is the editor of Eye To The Telescope #42 on The Sea. Her scifaiku micro chapbook, Stratospherics, is in the Quarantine Public Library. Her 2021 Elgin Award–winning chapbook, Otherwheres, is available now.

Nominations Are Now Open for 2021 Best of the Net Anthology

Nominations are now open for Best of the Net, an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing.

In addition to poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, for the first time, we will also be accepting art nominations!

Nominations must have originally been published online between July 1st, 2020, and June 30th, 2021. See guidelines for more details on eligibility. Submissions must be received between July 1st and September 30th, 2021.

See the full submission guidelines here.

To submit, please use the following forms:

Poetry submission form
Fiction submission form
Nonfiction submission form
Art submission form

This year’s judges are Mai Der Vang (poetry), Amber Sparks (fiction), Krys Malcolm Belc (nonfiction), and Rhonda Lott (art).

Asian woman with black glasses and long black hair and navy blouse, viewed from waist up, standing in grassy field with sunset in horizon.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, and The American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Mai Der also co-edited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology with the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. A Kundiman fellow, Mai Der has completed residencies at Civitella Ranieri and Hedgebrook. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

White woman with shoulder-length blonde hair standing in front of bookshelf with both hands on hips, wearing navy cardigan, cream blouse, and orange pants

Amber Sparks is the author of four collections of short fiction, including And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges and The Unfinished World, and her fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Paris Review, Tin House, Granta, The Cut, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

White man with shaved hair and beard and gray glasses smiling directly at camera in front of white background

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (Counterpoint) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet.) His work has been featured in Granta, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press), Wigleaf Top 50, and Best of the Net 2018. Krys lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children and works as an educator in a pediatric hospital.

White woman with dark hair and glasses smiling slightly at camera, wearing an off-the-shoulder navy blouse and large necklace with silver leaf

Rhonda Lott is an artist, code developer, and writer based in Knoxville, Tennessee. As a lifelong lover of the arts and sciences, she holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Springfield and a doctorate in creative writing from Texas Tech University. Her poetry has appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Whiskey Island Magazine, among others. She has contributed cover art to Best of the Net for twelve years.

Open Call for Pitches for Short Anthology Projects

Sundress Publications is open for submissions of pitches for short anthology projects. Anthologies would be published as part of Sundress’ e-chapbook series in 2021 and would be available for free download on the Sundress website. These anthologies will be limited to 50 pages of content.

All editors are welcome to submit pitches for qualifying projects. We are especially interested in projects helmed by or focused on amplifying the voices of BIPOC, trans and nonbinary writers, and writers with disabilities.

Pitches should be approximately 250 words and include:

  • Potential authors editors would like to solicit 
  • Example pieces of work to be included
  • Outline of a plan for the editorial process
  • Why editors believe the anthology is important to the contemporary literary landscape.

Editors of selected pitches would solicit and read work for the anthology project with Sundress-backed support in submission curation, contracts, proofing, promotion, and design. Sundress Publications will also provide a small budget to selected projects ($250) that may be used to pay editors for their work, or contributors, or both, as the editor deems appropriate.

To submit, email your pitch (DOC, DOCX, or PDF) to sundresspublications@gmail.com. Be sure to note both your name and the title of the project in your email header.

The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2020.

Call for Pitches: Short Anthology Projects

Sundress Publications is open for submissions of pitches for short anthology projects. Anthologies would be published as part of Sundress’s e-chapbook series in 2021 and would be available for free download on the Sundress website. These anthologies would be limited to 50 pages of content including front and back matter.

All editors are welcome to submit pitches for qualifying projects. We are especially interested in projects helmed by or focused on amplifying the voices of BIPOC, trans and nonbinary writers, and writers with disabilities.

Pitches should be approximately 250 words and include:

  • Potential authors editors would like to solicit
  • Example pieces of work to be included
  • Outline of a plan for editorial process
  • Why editors believe the anthology is important to the contemporary literary landscape

Editors of selected pitches would solicit and read work for the anthology project with Sundress-backed support in submission curation, contracts, proofing, promotion, and design.

To submit, email your pitch (DOC, DOCX, or PDF) to sundresspublications@gmail.com. Be sure to note both your name and the title of the project in your email header. The deadline for pitches is August 31st, 2020.


2019 Best of the Net Anthology Released

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of the 2019 edition of Best of the Net. This year’s anthology includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published in thirty-two different journals and features work by Jane Wong, K Ming Cheng, Leila Chatti, Gabriela Garcia, Sarah Eliza Johnson, and many more.

This year’s judges were Eloisa Amezcua, Megan Giddings, and Hanif Abdurraqib

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. A MacDowell fellow, she is the author of three chapbooks and founder/editor-in-chief of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry. Her poems and translations are published in New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. Eloisa lives in Columbus, OH and is the founder of Costura Creative.

Megan Giddings is a fiction editor at The Offing and a features editor at The Rumpus. She’s been included in the 2014 and 2018 Best of the Net anthologies. Her short stories are forthcoming or have been recently published in Catapult, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Megan’s debut novel, Lakewood, will be published by Amistad in 2020. More about her can be found at megangiddings.com.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.

Read the latest edition of this annual anthology, today.

A 501(c)(3) non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.

Sundress Releases Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities

Sundress Releases Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities
edited by Nicole Oquendo

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Sundress Publications announces the release of Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities, an anthology edited by Nicole Oquendo. The anthology features the work of Jennifer E. Hudgens, Nic Campeotto, Nina Sudhakar, and Emily Corwin, along with over two-dozen writers and artists tasked with uniquely articulating what it means to occupy a hybrid identity.

In these poems, narratives, photographs, and striking hybrids of genre, Manticore compellingly reveals the ways in which the seemingly unified self is composed of infinite ways of being in the world. The anthology is not only populated with beautiful, multimodal works of art, but also includes statements by each contributor about how they conceptualize and are inspired by the notion of hybridity. Though not all of Manticore’s pieces are explicitly presented as autobiographical works of nonfiction, they each offer the honesty and vulnerability of the intensely personal. The result is an intimate, powerful, and visually striking collection that is as unique as its talented group of contributors.

“Hybridity, for me, has always equated to possibility, and the creative work I enjoy most inhabits multiple genres at once. Within the last few years, growing and changing along with the labels that make up my identity—nonbinary, disabled, queer, Latinx, brujx, and so much more—I have discovered there is a glorious intersection of identity and form when it comes to the creation of work outside the boundaries of what is traditionally accepted. In gathering the work for this anthology, I wanted to focus on hybrid identities and the hybrid work these identities inspire, and I believe this collection—in the form of various media, highlighting both the truth and what is imagined—is a fantastic representation of what we can do when we embrace possibility with ferocity.” -Nicole Oquendo, Editor

“Manticore is as surprising as it is lovely; exquisite, gut-wrenching hybridities that capture what it is to be outside. This collection of stories, poems, and images will captivate readers—its venom heady and delightful as it is deadly. A monstrous kind of magic is afoot here.” – M.R. Sheffield, author of Marvels

manticore

Nicole Oquendo is a writer and visual artist that combines these elements to craftmultimodal nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, as well as translations of these forms. Their work can be found in literary journals like BOAAT, CutBank, DIAGRAM, and Gulf Stream, among others. They are the author of the hybrid memoir Telomeres, as well as five chapbooks, including their most recent, Space Baby: Episodes I-III.

The anthology is available for free download HERE.

Call for Submissions: The Familiar Wild

Call for Submissions: The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry

Sundress Publications announces an open submission call for The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry, an anthology that centers the storied, yet perpetually mystifying connection that dogs and humans share with a new focus: the historical and contemporary relationships between poets and dogs.

Reaching beyond a generic celebration of the “dog-owner bond,” The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry will also interrogate and focus it: why (and how) do dogs appear in poets’ poems, and what does it mean to have a dog beside a poet at their writing desk? Why might poets in particular be drawn to dog companionship? This collection will examine both the routine and the unexpected lives we’ve built with our dogs, exploring wildness and domestication, boundaries and freedom, rescue, and grief through poetry centered on the complicated, expansive dog-poet connection. This call takes particular interest in voices and histories not usually centered in this conversation, particularly those that consider the role of the dog-poet bond in relation to disability, queerness, race, gender, age, and more.

Interested poets should submit a cover letter, 3-5 poems, and an optional short (max. 500 words) essay that considers their personal relationship to the anthology’s subject matter. We intend to include these essays alongside chosen poems for each author. Please feel free to interpret the themes of the anthology widely: however best fits you, your work, and your relationship to dogs. We want to be surprised! That said, poems must engage with dogs or dog companionship/ownership in some way (we’re not looking for poems not about dogs). The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2019.

To submit, attach your manuscript as a single DOCX or PDF file to thefamiliarwild@gmail.com. If the poems have been previously published elsewhere and/or simultaneously submitted, please indicate this in your cover letter. We will happily consider previously published poems so long as the poet retains the rights to reprint them.

The poets Ruth Awad and Rachel Mennies will serve as co-editors for this anthology.

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet and author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Rachel Mennies is the author of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards (Texas Tech University Press), the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, and the chapbook No Silence in the Fields (Blue Hour Press). Her writing has recently appeared, or will soon, at The Believer, Kenyon Review, The Poetry Foundation, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and is a member of AGNI’s editorial staff.

2015 Best of the Net Anthology Released

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Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of the 10th anniversary edition of the Best of the Net Anthology! This year’s anthology includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published in 27 different journals and features work by Claudia Emerson, Chen Chen, Jennifer Givhan, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Sandra Meek, Eric Tran, Harmony Neal, Jesse Goolsby, Kimi Traube, and many more!

This year’s judges included Bruce Bond, Brian Oliu, and Kate Schmitt.

Bruce Bond is the author of fourteen books including five forthcoming: Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and The Other Sky (Etruscan Press). Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He is the author of three full-length collections, So You Know It’s Me (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011), a series of Craigslist Missed Connections, Leave Luck to Heaven (Uncanny Valley Press, 2014), an ode to 8-bit video games, & Enter Your Initials For Record Keeping (Cobalt Press, 2015). essays on NBA Jam. i/o (Civil Coping Mechanisms), a memoir in the form of a computer virus, is forthcoming in 2015. His works in progress deal with professional wrestling and long distance running (not at once).

Kate Schmitt‘s Singing Bones won the 2013 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. A writer and visual artist, Kate Schmitt has an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies, including Earth Shattering Poems (Holt, 1998), Light Gathering Poems (Holt, 2000), I Just Hope It’s Lethal (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), and The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), as well as the literary journals Paradigm, Birmingham Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Louisiana Literature. She was a nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast and served on the journal’s Board of Directors in 2008-2009. She has also edited and written for the companion website to a pilot television series created by Shelley Duvall, a wind energy company, and most recently for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her courses include nonfiction and poetry workshops, 20th-century literature, young adult literature, and Chinese literature in translation.

You can read the newest edition of the anthology online.

“Quaker Meeting: Cambridge/Rangeley, Maine” from Gathered

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Quaker Meeting: Cambridge/Rangeley, Maine

There you are, purchasing
the Sunday paper. Ibuprofen.
Ajax. Pampers. Peanut butter.
Margarine. Clorox. There
you are, baby squalling, holy
voices in the IGA,
in Sarah’s kitchen tasting oatmeal-
raisin bread, yearning
for pies and chocolate frosting. You
will not forget the Wednesday corn
line. You must choose: How
many? and are the kernels
small and sweet?

“Almost died,” he
said, “fever of 106, down to
the hospital.” “Going to rain, trees
need the water, I guess.” “Thanks be
to God, my son got out, the night my store
burned down.” “Geologist dug up this
here rock, said it was from the time
of the Grand Canyon. Used to be this land
was all under water, back then.”
“Learned me the Internet at
the library—looked up my condition
on the Medline, they call it. Ain’t
no reason, just old age, they say, doctors
don’t know, but I’d have gone blind, it said,
if they hadn’t of given me the Cortisone
in time.” “I’ll think on it awhile, let
you know if I can fix it for you.” “The locksmith
out Rt. 4, he was a Baptist preacher,
died last June, you know. The schoolbus driver
he’s out 16 across from where the diner was,
the widow sold him all the molds. Lock
stock and barrel, you could say.” “Those wasps
you got, just spray ‘em with Raid and run
like hell.”

-Marian Kaplan Shapiro

You can purchase a copy of Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets, edited by Nick McRae, from the Sundress store for only $16!

“Blue Ridge Androgyny” from Not Somewhere Else But Here

Blue Ridge Androgyny

If you can the preserves, I’ll break the logs for
winter. Until then, your warm knuckles will need
to button the vest of my three piece suit—
nevermind that we buried my father in the jacket
and the trousers. Nevermind my breasts flattened
under your suspenders.
Nevermind we could flatfoot to the thrum of my heart.
I don’t have to remind my body: now,
my hand leads your waist instead.
Could you, would you, stitch your name into my collar?
That is to say, all this room in the crotch of
your pants I’m wearing even though my heart spills over.
That is to say, my milk for the baby even though you’re
the one who sings him.
Can you see the raccoon watching us from the
pine branch? She must have seen us digging
through each others’ bodies as she through
the pig trough, every night.
I’d like to tell her, our digging isn’t really search.
We know what we find here, what we don’t.
You, the sun in my mouth, and I, the eclipse
in your throat.

-Kristi Carter

“Blue Ridge Androgyny” is from the Sundress multi-genre anthology Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place. Order your copy here!