Tag: press release

Sundress Publications 2023 AWP Off-Site Reading

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce that the readers for our 2023 AWP off-site reading include Barbara Fant, Kimberly Ann Priest, Stacey Balkun, Athena Nassar, jason b. crawford, Sunni Wilkinson, Nicole Arocho Hernández, Amanda Galvan Huynh, Cynthia Guardado, Dani Putney, and Donna Vorreyer. The reading will take place on March 10th, 2023, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM PST at Old Stove Brewing Co, 600 W. Nickerson St., Queen Anne, Seattle, WA 98119.

A brown woman with dark black-brown hair smiling against a blue and green backdrop. Her arms are crossed over her knees, and she is wearing a white blouse with two strings hanging down from the collar. The top of a reddish-brown pair of pants or skirt is visible.

Amanda Galvan Huynh (She/Her) is a Xicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of Where My Umbilical is Buried (Sundress Publications 2023) and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics (The Operating System 2019).

A brown woman with long black hair gives a small smile as she sits on the edge of a black chair. She is wearing a black top, a black jacket, and black pants against a grey vignette background.

Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet, essayist, and short story writer from Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the debut poetry collection Little Houses, published by Sundress Publications. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets, The Missouri Review, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, The Chattahoochee Review, Salt Hill, Lake Effect, New Orleans Review, Zone 3, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, and elsewhere. 

A Black woman sits on top of a wooden stool against a grey and white background. She has black hair and wears a yellow top, a pendant necklace, blue jeans, and a pair of brown heeled shoes.

Barbara Fant has been writing and performing for over 15 years. She has competed in nine National Poetry Slams and is a World Poetry Slam finalist. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Paint, Inside Out (2010) and Mouths of Garden (2022). Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets, McNeese Review, Button Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam, among others. She believes in the transformative power of art and considers poetry her ministry.

A black and white portrait-style photo of a woman. She has long hair that starts off black and the roots and grows lighter as it continues down her shoulders, a hexagon-shaped earring visible with her hair as well. She has a tattoo on her one visible hand and is wearing bands on her wrist.

Cynthia Guardado (she/her/hers) is a Los-Angeles born queer Salvadoran poet and professor. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Cenizas, (University of Arizona Press 2022) and ENDEAVOR, (World Stage Press 2017).

A portrait-style image of a person smiling against a background of a white column and greenery. They have short dark hair, a visible earring, a green shirt, and a red jacket with a light pattern on the front.

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Their debut collection, Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They’re also the author of the poetry chapbook Dela Torre (Sundress Publications, 2022).

A selfie-style photo of a white woman with short whitish-blonde hair in large teal glasses and a bright blue t-shirt. She is smiling and standing against a background of flags and a dirt-covered ground.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.

A selfie-style photo of a Black person wearing a pale pink beanie-style hat, glasses, dark blue lipstick, and a black sweatshirt with white letters on the front. One hand is up on their cheek, and they have a small amount of black facial hair.

jason b. crawford (They/Them) was born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut Full-Length Year of the Unicorn Kidz is out from Sundress Publications. They are currently an MFA Candidate at The New School in Poetry.

A white woman with reddish-brown, windswept hair looks into the camera against a blurred, wheat-coloured background. The photo is taken from a nearly fourty-five degree angle looking down at her face, and her black shirt is also visible.

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird, finalist in the American Best Book Awards, and chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place, Parrot Flower, and Still Life. She is an associate poetry editor for Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and assistant professor at Michigan State University.

A brown woman with dark brown hair and black wire glasses smiles. She is leaning against a tree, and she is wearing a purple and white striped top with a pendant necklace on black chord.

Nicole Arocho Hernández is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. Her poems have been published in The Acentos Review, Electric Literature, Honey Literary, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, I Have No Ocean, was published by Sundress Publications. She is the Translations Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review and an MFA candidate at Arizona State University.

A black and white portrait-style photo of a woman with dark wavy hair wearing dark framed glasses. The top straps of a dark top are also showing, and she stands against an outdoor background..

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest, her creative work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State & teaches online at The Poetry Barn and The Loft. 

A white woman with straight red hair. She appears seated on a white-grey background with a black bar fence. She is wearing a black and dark green garment only visible from the torso up, and the garment has a small greenish-white pattern on the dark green parts of the clothing.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize).  Her work has been awarded the New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, and the Sherwin Howard Award.

Sundress Announces the Release of Inès Pujos’ Something Dark to Shine In

Knoxville, TN— Sundress Publications announces the release of Inès Pujos’ Something Dark to Shine In, a debut poetry collection that considers the impact of pain while maintaining an unwillingness to surrender. 

In Something Dark to Shine In, trauma manifests in body horror. Skin strips away from flesh; blood stains floorboards; and teeth fall out to become toys. Death and religion hover constantly in the background of this haunting and haunted collection, even as the speaker reminds herself, “I am not dead yet.” Faced with the alienation and the horror of sexual violence, these poems resist the impulse to romanticize. Here, rot is marked by “a black wool of flies,” soil is laced with “chips of plates or lead paint,” and feral wolf-women refuse to be tamed. The classically beautiful becomes frightening such that a bee’s sweet honey is a reminder of the pain of their sting, and a golden crucifix is a symbol only of a calvary’s violence. Something Dark to Shine In refuses to look away from pain, from violence, yet to read these poems in a world where such atrocities become banal and commonplace, is to witness a profound refusal to die, a wish to find beauty, and even hope, in one’s own terror. 

Eileen Myles, author of I Must Be Living Twice and Inferno, (among many others) says, “Inès’ book is very pregnant and raggedy. I like it like I liked Lars Van Triers’ Nymphomaniac I & II. It’s medieval but darker like if a painter explained how he liked to cook—using skulls. So cavalier but with these tiny blots of light. Plus, she builds her poems with these good, great, organic lists that are never corny cause she’s seriously counting things in the world.” 

Order your copy of Something Dark to Shine In

Inès Pujos holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. Their poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, and Verse Daily, among others. Their manuscript was a finalist for the following prizes, among others: BOAAT Press’s 2018 open reading period and Alice James’ 2017 open reading period, and semi-finalist for: The 2017 Berkshire Prize by Tupelo Press and the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, among others. For more information, visit inespujoscreative.com. 

Doubleback Books Call for Submissions

Doubleback Books, a Sundress Publications imprint, is now open for submissions by authors of out-of-print books. At Doubleback Books, we believe that out of print should not mean out of mind. Although other publishers rescue works that have fallen into the public eye from obscurity, few reprint books from small, independent presses that have folded during the twenty-first century and (often through no fault of their own) left new, exciting books to go out of print before their time. 

If you are the author of a book that has recently gone out of print because of a press closure, we want to read it. We are hosting an open reading period from March to May 2020.  Authors of works that have gone out of print due to their original press folding may submit full-length or short books, including novels, novellas, chapbooks, short story collections, poetry collections, essay collections, and memoirs. Editors may also submit out-of-print manuscripts their presses published before closing. To be eligible, works must have been both published and out of print after the year 2000. 

Accepted manuscripts will be released as free downloadable e-books on the Sundress Publications website. Previous titles include Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s The Opposite of Work, Colleen S Harris’ These Terrible Sacraments, and Virginia Chase Sutton’s What Brings You to Del Amo. 

To submit, email the following to doubleback@sundresspublications.com:

  • Your manuscript(s) in .PDF or .DOC format 
  • A brief cover letter in the body of the email telling us a little bit about your work and yourself and noting the genre of the manuscript
  • The name of the manuscript’s original publisher
  • The name and contact information of the publisher’s former editor-in-chief, if available 

Please note: we do not republish translated work or previously self-published work. 

Doubleback Books is an imprint of Sundress Publications. More information can be found here.

Sundress Releases The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry

Sundress Publications announces the release of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry, an anthology edited by Ruth Awad and Rachel Mennies.

What does it mean for a poet to love a dog—especially knowing it will never outlive them? The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry catapults readers into the marrows of living and feeling alongside our mysterious canines: a species that often teaches us what it means to be human. These selections interrogate our lives as they’ve intertwined with humanity’s most beloved house companion. What catalyzes our hunger to share our vulnerabilities and lived realities with these curious, interdependent animals?

Writers, including Chen Chen, Noah Baldino, Hanif Abdurraqib, Carly Joy Miller, Maggie Smith, and Raena Shirali, among others, grapple with the simultaneous heaviness, happiness, love, and loss that comes with dog companionship, exposing deep truths about what it means to share space with our fellow non-humans. This collection examines both the routine and the unexpected lives this anthology’s poets have built with their dogs, exploring wildness and domestication, boundaries and freedom, rescue and grief through works centered on the complicated, expansive writer-to-canine connection.

Ruth Awad is the Lebanese-American 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. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio, with her four bratty and joyous Pomeranians.

Rachel Mennies is the author of The Naomi Letters, forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2021 and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has appeared at The Believer, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and her nonfiction has appeared at The Millions, The Poetry Foundation, and LitHub, among other outlets. Mennies serves as the reviews editor for AGNI. She lives in Chicago, where she works as a freelance editor and writer, with her spouse and her rescue greyhound mix, Otto.

The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry is available for order now!

Doubleback Announces Newest Release: “The Opposite of Work”

Doubleback Books, an imprint of Sundress Publications, is pleased to announce the upcoming release of The Opposite of Work by Hugh Behm-Steinberg. This poetry collection was selected in our 2019 open reading period for fall publication. The Opposite of Work was originally published by JackLeg Press and we’re excited to bring it back for new readers. 

The meditative poems in The Opposite of Work are paired with intriguing images on opposite-facing pages. The images, which operate as a flipbook, were created by Mary Behm-Steinberg. Doubleback will also release a companion video of the book.

On The Opposite of Work—

“Hugh Behm-Steinberg has built a dream-rattled space. It is a space of stretched ideas and ideals,” Tony Mancus, PANK.

“Delicately explores the effort to come to terms with one’s own soul and the Other,” Charles Kruger, The Rumpus.

“Extraordinary magic and possibility,” S. Marie Clay, Ghost Town.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is a poet and short fiction writer. His books of poetry include Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books, 2007), as well as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery (2007), Good Morning! (2011), and The Sound of Music (2015). A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, is forthcoming from Nomadic Press in January, 2020.

Behm-Steinberg is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA fellowship. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize for short fiction, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018. From 2007-2017 he served as Faculty Editor of Eleven Eleven, and he is currently the Chief Steward of the adjunct faculty union at California College of the Arts.

Look for The Opposite of Work, book download and video, coming soon at Doubleback Books.

Website: sundresspublications.com/doubleback             Facebook: DoublebackBooks
Email: doubleback@sundresspublications.com               Twitter: @DoublebackP

Sundress Announces the Release of Gender Flytrap

SD

FlytrapSundress Publications announces the release of Zoë Estelle Hitzel’s collection, Gender Flytrap. In this debut collection, Hitzel ambitiously portrays transgender experiences and confronts the systems and culture that initiate violence against the gendered body.

To see and be seen begets presumption and therefore is an act of violence, a violence that dictates how a person should look, act, and even perceive the world around them. Gender Flytrap delves into the multifaceted nature of prejudice from gendered stereotypes to a broken healthcare system to the realization that everything—including transness—is filtered through a cisnormative lens. Hitzel’s debut collection is an authentic portrayal of the constant hurt that a trans experience entails in a toxic, hegemonic culture where trauma is inherent to the trans existence.

After reading this collection, Nicole Walker, author of The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, and Sustainability: A Love Story states, “I’ve never understood better than I do now or with such elegance and grace, that our bodies, and our words, are not for the taking.”

ZoeZoë Estelle Hitzel earned her MA in Creative Writing/Poetry at Northern Arizona University and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Oregon State University. She is the 2019 Ofstad Writer in Residence at Truman State University. Her work has appeared in Blue Lyra Review, entropy, pacific REVIEW, and elsewhere.

Hitzel blogs about her transgender experience at znoted.wordpress.com. A citizen of the wind, she scores standardized tests remotely from Missouri, writes and edits freelance, and drums in the blues band, Deadwood.

Order your copy today!

Sundress to Publish Three New Titles in 2015-2016

sundresslogogaramond_vectorized2

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the publication of the following books in the years 2015 and 2016. Ha Ha Ha Thump by Amorak Huey (due for release in 2015), What Will Keep Me Alive by Kristen LaTour (due for release in 2015) and Washed with Hymns and Singing by Donna Vorreyer (due for release in 2016).

Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook, The Insomniac Circus, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press. His poems appear in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2012, The Poetry of Sex, and Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry, as well as journals such as Rattle, The Collagist, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Menacing Hedge, and others. Ha Ha Ha Thump is his first full-length collection.

Kristin LaTour has three chapbooks: Agoraphobia, from Dancing Girl Press (2013), Blood (Naked Mannequin Press 2009) and Town Limits (Pudding House Press 2007). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Massachusetts Review, Fifth Wednesday, Cider Press Review, Escape into Life, and Atticus Review. Her work appears in the anthology Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, she teaches at Joliet Jr. College and lives in Aurora, IL with her writer husband, a lovebird, and two dogitos. What Will Keep Me Alive is her first full-length collection.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of chapbooks: Womb/Seed/Fruit (Finishing Line Press), Come Out, Virginia (Naked Mannekin Press), and Ordering the Hours (Maverick Duck Press). She is a poetry editor for Mixed Fruit, and her work has appeared in many journals, recently in Sweet, Linebreak, Rhino, Cider Press Review, Stirring, and Wicked Alice. Donna lives in the Chicago area where she teaches middle school and therefore often acts like she is twelve years old. Her first full-length collection, A House of Many Windows was published by Sundress Publications in 2013. Washed with Hymns and Singing is her second collection.

 

Press Release: When I Wake It Will Be Forever by Virginia Smith Rice

wheniwake

Knoxville, TN— Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of Virginia Smith Rice’s first full-length book, When I Wake It Will Be Forever. Rice’s debut collection collapses the natural and material world into instances of loss, longing, memory and sensory expression.

Rice investigates the emptiness of language with a lyrical and alliterative force with a jarring, poignant, and distinct ability to deconstruct place through the linguistic fabric it emerges from, to create a more intimate presence with the physical landscape of existence. Rice builds her ethereal and imagistic poems with a deep engagement of the senses.

“Both shimmering and seething, haunted and haunting, the complex, dazzling contours of When I Wake It Will Be Forever beckon the reader with the imperative of ‘listen’; and we do, because Rice’s poems vibrate with a ‘voice thorned and singing / but not human.’ Like her poetic parentage—Desnos, Szymborska, Tranströmer and Csoóri—there is a wisdom contained in this work that transcends a singular being’s experience; ultimately elegiac, yet ‘lit by inner, hidden suns,’ this book is a stellate network of memory, loss, longing, silence, and voice. Often serving as witness (to an aunt’s suicide, a stranger’s suicide, ‘the suicide in my voice’) Rice pays tribute to the manifold ghosts that clamor inside us. This is one of the most solidly exquisite and lingering first books I’ve had the honor of reading.”
-Simone Muench, author of Orange Crush, recipient of the 2013 NEA Fellowship in Poetry

“Virginia Smith Rice has created a tremblingly precise, intricate, bright-edged evocation of a world both ecstatic and ominous, grieving and vital, broken and mending, but rarely mended. Her poems are richly colored and intensely focused on the shapes and forms of the world and of inner life and relationships. They are crowded with living plants and creatures and intense feeling, and Rice can even describe the color of solitude. Her language is sensuously complex, her angle of vision is oblique and finds the memorable touch of reality off-center, at the edges, just this side of perceptibility. She has created a delicate yet vivid response to what she calls the ‘percussed absence’ that haunts human life. This is a marvelous first book.”
-Reginald Gibbons, author of Fem-Texts and professor of Humanities at Northwestern Univeristy

Virginia Smith Rice earned her MFA in creative writing from Northwestern University, where she received the Distinguished Thesis Award for her poetry manuscript, “One Voice May Survive the Other.” Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Meridian, Rattle, and Third Coast, among other journals. She currently lives in Woodstock, IL, where she teaches art and serves as co-editor of the online poetry journal, Kettle Blue Review.

When I Wake It Will Be Forever is now available at www.sundresspublications.com.

Sundress Publications Releases David Cazden’s The Lost Animals

ImageKnoxville, TN- Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of David Cazden’s second full-length poetry collection, The Lost Animals, a lingering book that explores themes of mankind versus nature. The poems are hushed, evocative, and physically tangible to all the senses—a collection any lover of nature and human intimacy should own.

Cazden’s poems are unapologetically hungry for wilderness, raw tastes and physical, emotional relationships. The speakers have smudges on their wrists, hair like volcanic skies, and are ‘part of the earth’s alphabet/its language of bone.’ Even in sorrow, their lungs inflate and deflate like balloons. Cazden paints cooking dinner as titillating, almost erotic, and driving through traffic as a nostalgic journey. These poems impress with a total engagement of the senses and frank emotion coupled with a persevering urge toward the rational.

“David Cazden’s anticipated second collection, The Lost Animals, takes us from cemetery where animals nibble moss off headstones to a high-rise apartment to the sand fences of Fort Lauderdale. Through poems deliberate in their story and interlaced with images, we find exquisite and sensual language based in landscape and the natural world: ‘Here your body unwound / while winter’s clothing piled up, / its cold ground spreading for miles, / curtained in white, freckled by crows.’ Cazden’s poems take us into the details of living and relationships where we can settle into a world where ‘pears illuminate the neighborhood’ and ‘each surface melting / at the faintest touch.’ Each poem is layered with moments and a constant nod to time here on this robust earth and with the animals that live there.”

—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Hourglass Museum & Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room

“As the title of Dave Cazden’s wonderful book portends, loss is at the heart of this sure-handed and memorable new collection. These are felt and moving poems—from the death of a long-ago lover (‘Nicotiana, Jasmine alata’) to the break-up of a relationship to the death of a brother from a drug overdose (‘Voyage’). Through his use of lush metaphors and sharp-edged imagery, Cazden shows us how, in poem after poem, art can transform pain.”

-Jeff Worley, author of A Little Luck, winner of the 2012 X.J. Kennedy Prize from Texas Review Press

David Cazden is the author of the full-length collection Moving Picture. He began writing poetry in 1999 and has been published in numerous journals including Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, Stirring, and Apple Valley Review. A graduate of Reed College and the University of Kentucky, Cazden has also edited the poetry magazine Miller’s Pond for over six years.

The Lost Animals is now available at Sundress Publications.