Each year, the Cleveland State University Press holds the Open Book Poetry Competition, the Essay Collection Competition, and the First Book Poetry Competition (all three open until March 31, 2017). The three 2016 winners are set to be published at the beginning of April 2017.

In One Form to Find Another by Jane Lewty was chosen as the 2016 Open Book Poetry Competition winner, selected by Emily Kendal Frey, Siwar Masannat, and Jon Woodward. Advance praise refers to the collection as “an heroically unsettling and compelling textual reenactment of feminine embodiments’ lament, contemplation, and recalibration of disturbed histories . . . ”

daughterrarium by Sheila McMullin, selected by Daniel Borzutzky, won the 2016 First Book Poetry Competition. Borzutzky says of his selection, “I admire daughterrarium for pushing too far, for making me cringe with its representations of what one human can do to another, of what a body can do to itself.”

James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well won the 2016 Essay Collection Competition, chosen by Chris Kraus. From Kraus: “In these essays, Hall lives alongside, and empathically lives through, his family’s meth addiction, and mental illnesses . . . and considers his own penchants for less than happy, equal sex with an agility, depth, and lightness that is blissfully inconclusive.”

Check out the individual links to learn more about each prize-winning collection, and pre-order copies of all three.

In mid-April, Gallic Books will be publishing Hell’s Gate by Laurent Gaudé. Gaudé’s The Scortas’ Sun is the winner of the Prix Gouncourt, the French literary award given to an author of the best imaginative work of prose each year. Hell’s Gate is a thrilling story following a father as he chases redemption for his murdered son. It explores “the effects of bereavement and grief on a family, and the relationship between the living and dead.”

Check out the Gallic Books website for more information about Hell’s Gate. Read advance praise, check out a downloadable PDF extract, and give yourself a chance to read work by one of France’s most highly respected playwrights and novelists. 

The winner of the 2016 Orison Poetry Prize, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom by Rebecca Aronson, will be published next month on April 4, 2017. Hadara Bar-Nadav, who selected the winner, calls the collection, “[e]xplosive, turbulent, haunting magnetic,” saying that “[m]ortality and death undergrid Aronson’s fantastical visions, where a child becomes a seagull, a woman turns tarantula, and a house threatens to fill with blood.”

Find sample poem “Wish” at the Orison Books website, where you can also find out more about Aronson and pre-order copies, which are currently on sale, a couple saved bucks you can set aside for even more poetry.

Parlor Press’s annual New Measure Poetry Prize (now open for 2017 submissions until the end of June) awards a poet a cash award of $1,000 and publication of an original manuscript.

The 2015 winner, This History That Just Happened, by Hannah Craig, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, was published at the beginning of the year. Komunyakaa says of his selection, “This History That Just Happened places the reader at the nexus where rural and city life converge, bridging a world personal and political, natural and artful, in a voice always uniquely hers.”

Craig has also won the 2016 Mississippi Review Prize and her manuscript was a finalist for the Akron Poetry Prize, the Fineline Competition, and the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Stop by the Parlor Press website to learn more about Craig and purchase her debut poetry collection digitally or in print.

Each June, Rescue Press accepts submissions for the Black Box Poetry Contest for full-length poetry collections open to poets at any stage in their writing careers. The latest Black Box Poetry winner will be released later this month (March 15): What Was It For by Adrienne Raphel. Judge Cathy Park Hong calls the debut full-length collection “feral and full of feverish delight.” She continues, “Raphel takes Victorian nonsense verse into the twenty-first century and transforms it to her own strange and genius song.”

Readers can learn more about What Was It For at the publisher’s website, where they can also find Raphel’s bio with more information about the writer and pre-order copies.

Things Impossible to Swallow poems by Pamela Garvey is the newest in the 2River Chapbooks Series. 2River chapbooks can be read online, or to make your own print copy, click “Chap the Book” to download a PDF, which you can then print double-sided, fold, and staple to have a personal copy of Garvey’s chapbook. There are currently 24 chapbooks available for free download for readers to enjoy.

Diode Editions recently held their very first full-length book contest and have announced two co-winners: Remica Bingham-Risher’s Starlight & Error, and Paula Cisewski’s quitter.

Starlight & Error retells through the lens of imagined memory the legacies of love between aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, children and their children’s children. The poems ask how we transcend the mistakes of those who made us, and who will save us.

quitter is a “thoughtful protest in form, line, and ideology.” The collection invites readers to ask ourselves what we’ve tried, and if we’ve tried hard enough, challenging us to continue looking for solutions.

Learn more about the prize-winning collections at the Diode Editions website where readers can read advance praise and order copies.

The University of Iowa Press brings readers a real treat: the lost novel of Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. While we’re familiar with Leaves of Grass, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle was serialized in a newspaper under a pseudonym, read with little fanfare, and then disappeared.

It wasn’t until 2016 that it was found by Zachary Turpan, a literary scholar. While following a deep paper trail into the Library of Congress, he stumbled upon the only surviving copy of Witman’s lost novel.

Now, after lying in wait for over 160 years, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle is available for modern readers both digitally and in print at the University of Iowa Press website.

Pleaides Press annually holds the Robert C. Jones Short Prose Book Contest in honor of Robert C. Jones, a former professor of English at the University of Missouri.

In February, the 2015 winner, Among Other Things by Robert Long Foreman, will be released. The essay collection reveals the “depth and significance of mundane objects—a puzzle, a skillet, an antique cannon, an avocado sandwich” and the essays “trace the author’s fraught path from adolescence to adulthood, and contemplate the complexities of family and belonging.”

While Robert Long Foreman has seen his work published in magazines since 2006, Among Other Things is his first collection. Find out more information and pre-order copies from the Pleaides Press website.

[Quotes from publisher’s website.]

During the tail end of 2016, Southeast Missouri State University Press released the winner of the 2015 Cowles Poetry Book Prize: Everyone at This Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin. Advance praise dubs the collection “Poignant, quirky, troubled” (Larissa Szporluk), “[a]n impressive debut from a poet who is as interesting as he is unpredictable” (J. Allyn Rosser). While this is Modlin’s first collection, his poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Florida Review, Indiana Review, and DIAGRAM, among others.

Read more about Everyone at This Party Has Two Names at the SEMO Press website, where you can also find more information about the Book Prize, which has an upcoming annual deadline of April 1st.

Next month, readers can look forward to the publication of two award-winning books: Small Crimes by Andrea Jurjević and When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other by Christopher Kang.

Andrea Jurjević won Anhinga Press’s 2015 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry with Small Crimes, which begins during the early 90s, the speaker living their adolescence during the Croatian War, and then moves on to post-war years and life in America. Judge C. G. Hanzlicek says the collection “is often dark but just as often beautiful” with language that “crackles with energy.” Learn more at the publisher’s website.

Christopher Kang’s When He Sprang From His Bed . . . is a daring book that challenges on every read. Made of 880 stories, the collection won the Green Mountains Review Book Prize, selected by Sarah Manguso. From the publisher: “Each story contains a world, tilted on its own axis, strange, remarkable and bursting with heart.” Read more about the book and Kang at SPD.

Southeast Missouri State University Press announces the winner of the third annual Cowles Poetry Book Prize, held in honor of Vern Cowles: James Crews of Shaftsbury, VT with his winning manuscript Telling My Father.

Readers may recognize James Crews’s work which has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among other journals. No stranger to writing award-winning books, his first poetry collection The Book of What Stays won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Books of the Year Award. Telling My Father will be published by Southeast Missouri State Press.

Ohio State University Press has announced Mad River Books, their new literary imprint. Mad River Books will publish diverse and creative literary writing that’s both artistic and daring as they push boundaries, explore uncharted areas, and generate new ideas.

One of the first books under this imprint is Don’t Come Back by Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, who won the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. The collection of lyrical and narrative essays, experimental translations, and reinterpreted myths explores home, identity, family history, and belonging while examining what it means to feel familiarity but never really feel at home.

Copies of Don’t Come Back are available for pre-order at the Ohio State University Press website, or readers can sign up to be alerted when the book is published without pre-ordering. While at the website, readers can also check out the other books forthcoming from the Mad River Books imprint.

Back in September, we let you know about Zeina Hashem Beck’s prize-winning chapbook 3arabi Song. Fans of Beck’s chapbook, chosen out of 1,720 entries to the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, may also enjoy the chapbooks of the three runners-up: Kill the Dogs by Heather Bell, exploring an overarching metaphor of women fighting dog; Ligatures by Denise Miller, revealing the honesty and depth that is lost when the media reports on murders of black people by police; and Turn Left Before Morning by April Salzano, about the daily struggles when parenting a child with autism.

Subscribers to Rattle received 3arabi Song with their copy of the literary magazine earlier in the year, and then received one of the three runners-up with the latest issue, good motivation for subscribing to magazines.

Submissions to the 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize are now open until January 15, so consider submitting while you’re picking up copies of last year’s four chosen chapbooks.

Dylan D. Debelis’s poetry and vignette collection The Garage? Just Torch It. was published earlier this week from Vine Leaves Press. A semi-finalist in the Vine Leaves Annual Vignette Collection Award (submissions currently open until February 28), this collection is, according to the Vine Leaves website, a “rally cry for the healing power of wonder and the disarming catharsis of grief.” Debelis “balances themes of belonging, love, politics, illness, family and forgiveness with stunning imagery and an intense playfulness.” Paperback and e-book copies are available at the publisher’s website.

Published by BkMk earlier in the month was Bonnie Bolling’s The Red Hijab. The poetry collection won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by H.L. Hix in 2015, and is written from the perspective of an American poet living in the Middle East. In his foreword to the collection, Hix says it “does not pretend divine perspective, and does not purport to have an answer to the conflicts reported in the news. It does, though, adopt an alternative form of attention and offer an alternative kind of account.” This results in a “more complex portrait than the news presents.” Stop by the publisher’s website to learn more about The Red Hijab.

With November practically over, let’s take a timeout to look back at award-winning small press and university press books published in the past few months.

In September, Rules for Lying by Anne Corbitt was published by the Southeast Missouri State University Press. Winner of the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel, Rules for Lying follows characters through a police investigation that makes them question their memories, allegiances, and actions, all while hiding secrets of their own. Check out the publisher’s website for more information.

Earlier in November, The Ashland Poetry Press released Life As It by Daneen Wardrop. The collection was selected by David St. John as the winner of the 2015 Snyder Memorial Prize Contest. The collection of prose poems (Wardrop’s third collection) features themes of music, family life, spirituality, and more. Check out the publisher’s website for multiple ways to order copies.

Also out this November is The Expense of a View by Polly Buckingham, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. The stories explore the psyches of characters, most displaced and disturbed, under extreme duress. Judge Chris Offutt called the collection “a carefully rendered examination of memory, loss, and sadness.” University of North Texas Press’s website has a preview of Buckingham’s collection and ways to order.

Check out these three award-winning books and show your support to small and university presses.

At the beginning of the month, Washington Writers’ Publishing House published the winner of the 2016 Fiction Prize: Strivers and Other Stories by Robert J. Williams.

From the publisher:

Set between the 1920s and the present day, Strivers and Other Stories explores a range of African-American and Southern voices reflecting characters striving towards their versions of the American dream. In 13 stories, we meet teachers and doctors, train porters and factory workers, soldiers and musicians; mothers, fathers, children and spouses; mentors and mentees. With a mix of humor and heart, satire and sentiment, this collection captures their everyday struggles for better lives and their hopes for promising futures.

Learn more at the publisher’s website. 

This past October, Noemi Press released the winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Poetry Award: Bone Confetti by Muriel Leung. Leung’s first poetry collection, Bone Confetti  reveals “there are two types of survivors at the end of the world.” Ash confetti “floats between funeral and parade, wedding and hell. When all that is left is the terrible residue of memory, lovers and ghosts try their best to make do [ . . . ] in an attempt to fashion a new sense of humanity.” Check out the Noemi Press website for more information and copies.

Looking ahead to December, the 2015 Winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Award will be released. Uncountry: a mythology by Yanara Friedland. The novel is “a collection of narratives that aim to expand creative pathways into historical space, particularly histories of migration and displacement.” Divided into four sections, each section explores “The gaps bweteen ‘remembered’ official history and the more unreliable spaces of private memory and unspoken unofficial history.” Copies of Uncountry are available for pre-order at the Noemi Press website.

[Quotes from SPD website]

Pint-Size Publications, publisher of literary magazine Sport Literate, introduces their very first nonfiction, single-author book: A Proficiency in Billiards: Reflections from a Well-Traveled Life by Lance Mason. Mason first came to the editors’ attention with his essay “In the Lair of the Red Dragon,” published in an issue of Sport Literate earlier in the year.

A Proficiency in Billiards, Mason’s first essay collection, takes readers from his home base in South California where he stood “eyewitness to pool hustlers and drag racers in the 1960s” to travels throughout the world, including New Zealand, Ireland, Greece, and Yugoslavia, just to name a few. Readers are invited along Mason’s travels, all from the comfort of their homes.

Keep an eye on Pint-Size Publications to see what they’ll have on tap next, and head to their website to order copies of A Proficiency in Billiards.

Author Cass R. Sunstein introduces his 2016 book, The World According to Star Wars (HarperCollins) humbly enough:

I’m going to be covering some diverse topics here, including the nature of human attachment, whether timing is everything, how to rank the seven Star Wars movies, why Martin Luther King Jr. was a conservative, how boys need their mothers, the workings of the creative imagination, the fall of Communism, the Arab Spring, changing understandings of human rights, whether The Force Awakens was a triumph or a disappointment, the limits of human attention, and whether Star Wars really is better than Star Trek.

With the exception of that last point, which I still find open to debate, one of the joys of this book is that Mr. Sunstein accomplishes the tasks he sets out in a quick reading, well-documented short book that combines playful romps of unabashed Star Wars fandom with high level reviews of politics, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, and film critique.  The book is engaging for nerfherders and Jedi Knights, alike.

[Guest post by Chris Curtis. Chris teaches psychology at Delta College: www.delta.edu/clcurtis.]

“I wanted to remember the absences that online life had replaced with constant content, constant connection.  I’ve remembered what it is to be free in the world, free from the obliterating demands of five hundred ‘contacts.’” 

Author Michael Harris shares this journal entry near the end of an “Analog August” (a self-enforced month without a smartphone and other internet devices) in his 2014 book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection (The Penguin Group).  Mr. Harris examines the loss of absence from the perspective of the digital immigrant generation—those of an age to recall life both before and after the ubiquitous online world.  Do you remember what it was like to cast an empty gaze out the window of the car on a long family trip?  To vaguely wonder what the couple down the street was discussing as you waited for your bus?  Do you remember being alone with your thoughts and just . . . being?  Mr. Harris takes a digital immigrant journey of exploration through our technology-infused society and technology-induced angst, culminating in his own attempt to recapture absence.

Since 2013, Noemi Press and Letras Latinas (the literary imitative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame) have been co-publishing under the Akrilica Series to showcase innovative Latino writing.

You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior by Carolina Ebeid joins the ranks of the Akrilica Series, published in September 2016. Ebeid’s first book, You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior has been called “a book of listening and responding and listening again” (Shane McCrae) that uses “[t]he voice of a mother, of lover, of friend” (Julie Carr).

More information about the book and the series can be found at the Noemi Press website.

With October here, it’s time to announce a couple of the award-winning books slated for publication this month.

Winner of the 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, Of This New World by Allegra Hyde, hit the shelves earlier this month. The collection starts at the Garden of Eden and ends on a Mars colony, each story wrestling with “conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink,” and asking the fundamental human question: “Is paradise really so impossible?” Of This New World is Hyde’s first collection, and it’s now available at the University of Iowa Press website (now currently on sale for the frugal reader!).

Love Give Us One Death: Bonnie and Clyde in the Last Days by Jeff P. Jones is the winner of the 2015 George Garrett Fiction Prize. Final Judge Tracy Daugherty says the book of the two famous outlaws shows “larger dimensions: the spiritual shadows and compulsive needs from which our nation springs and through which it has found its many forms of speech.” This is Jones’s first book, and copies are available from the Texas A&M University Press website.

September seems to be the month for award-winning book releases. This month, find the winners of Moon City Press’s 2015 Moon City Poetry Award, the 2015 The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, and The University of Tampa Press’s 2015 Anita Claire Scharf Award.

Jeannine Hall Gailey brought home the Moon City Poetry Award with her fifth collection Field Guide to the End of the World, with a cover designed by the talented Charli Barnes (shown on the right). The poetry collection “delivers a whimsical look at our culture’s obsession with apocalypse.” Readers can pre-order copies from The University of Arkansas Press.

Likenesses by Heather Tone was chosen by Nick Flynn as the winner of The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Flynn says Likenesses, is an origin myth in its “attempts to create a world by naming it.” Copies of Tone’s first full collection of poetry will be distributed by Copper Canyon Press.

Patricia Hooper, the author of three previous books of poetry, received the Anita Claire Scharf Award, winners selected by the editors of the Tampa Review from among the manuscripts submitted to the annual Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Hooper’s collection, Separate Flights, “quite literally lifts off,” says Tampa Review Editor Richard Mathews, and is “musical and powerful in its impact.”

Check out these three award-winning poetry books, all hitting shelves sometime this month.

Who doesn’t appreciate a good play on words? The University of New Mexico Press has announced an anthology forthcoming in September, edited by Ilan Stavans, with a title that tickled my pun fancy.

The anthology of Jewish stories from Latin America is titled Oy, Caramba!, and put a smile on my face the moment it arrived. Even the bright, eye-catching cover mixes the Jewish and Latin American cultures: a sugar skull decorated with a hamsa, Chai symbols, and the Star of David.

First published in 1994 as Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers, the anthology returns next month, expanded and updated.

Check out the UNM Press website for more information.

Winner of the 2014 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, Bruce Bond’s Black Anthem, was published this month. The sonnets in the collection are “wide-ranging in their investigations of the body, the psyche, metaphysical hunger, and its place in human conflict.” Black Anthem is available from the University of Tampa Press website in hardcover and paperback.

In June, A Different Wakeful Animal by Susan Cohen was published by Red Dragonfly Press. Winner of the 2015 David Martinson – Meadowhawk Prize, A Different Wakeful Animal “takes on the profound questions in language that catches the ear and the imagination. [ . . . ] A Different Wakeful Animal investigates what perishes and what might remain.”

Readers can grab a copy of Cohen’s poetry collection, and writers can still submit to the 2016 David Martinson – Meadowhawk Prize until August 31.

Looking back to May, Jennifer Barber’s Works on Paper was published by The Word Works. Winner of the 2015 Word Works Tenth Gate Prize. Her third poetry collection, Works on Paper “shows us the power of lyric restraint in the hands of a poet who draws from the well of the small moments of motherhood as well as the sweep of Jewish history.” This year’s Tenth Gate Prize just closed earlier in the month, with results announced on October 1^st. 

The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation is accepting submissions from publishers for the twenty-seventh annual Ezra Jack Keats New Writer and New Illustrator Book Awards (known collectively as the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award).

The awards are designed to recognize and encourage authors and illustrators starting out in the field of children’s books who share Ezra Jack Keats’ commitment to children and diversity. The award is given annually to an outstanding new writer and new illustrator of picture books for children (9 years old and under). Publishers are encouraged to submit works by new writers and illustrators who are committed to celebrating diversity through their writing and art.

To be eligible, writers and illustrators must have had no more than three books published. A selection committee of early childhood education specialists, librarians, illustrators, and experts in children’s literature will review the entries, seeking books that portray the universal qualities of childhood, a strong and supportive family, and the multicultural nature of our world. The award includes an honorarium of $1,000 for each winner.

Deadline: December 15, 2016

Belt Publishing, publisher of city-based anthologies written by and for Rust Belt communities, are releasing a new anthology in the first week of July: Happy Anyway: The Flint Anthology. Edited by Flint writer and Belt Magazine contributor Scott Atkinson, Happy Anyway reveals Flint “at its funniest, its weirdest, and its saddest.”

There’s more to Flint than the water crisis that’s gathered the country’s attention in the past months. Preorder a copy of Happy Anyway to see all sides of this Michigan city, or check out the other anthologies which look at Detroit, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, with Akron and Buffalo anthologies in the making.

Forthcoming in July is the 2016 installment of the Western Press Books (University Press of Colorado) series, Manifest West. Published annually, the series produces one anthology focused on Western writing, and is edited and produced by students in the Certificate in Publishing program at Western State Colorado University.

The fifth volume of this annual anthology features the theme “Serenity and Severity.” The twenty-nine included writers explore the theme, the duality impacting identities, lifestyles, outlooks, worldviews, and values. Contributors include Rebecca Aronson, Heidi E. Blankenship, William Cass, David Lavar Coy, Gail Denham, John Haggerty, Ellaraine Lockie, Juan J. Morales, Scott T. Starbuck, and more.

Open Letter has announced they will be publishing Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno this upcoming August. Translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger, the novel won the 2013 Dashiell Hammett Award (annually given to a book published in the field of crime-writing), and chronicles the passion, violence, crime, and corruption that take place during a winter in Villa Gesell. Recording the various voices in the town is Dante, the local newspaperman, resulting in a thrilling and captivating read.

Preorder a copy of Gesell Dome now at the Open Letter website, where you can also find an excerpt of the novel.

In July, readers can find copies of Michael Homolka’s debut poetry collection Antiquity on shelves. Homolka’s collection (with a cool, minimalist, textured cover) won the Sarabande Books Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry in 2015 and was chosen by Mary Ruefle. Ruefle writes in her introduction, “The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice . . . ”

Readers can preorder copies of Antiquity from the Sarabande Books website, where advance praise can also be found.

Forthcoming from Able Muse Press in August 2016 is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a new Modern English translation by John Ridland. Advance praise calls this edition one of the most readable and complete translations of the classic tale. Illustrations by Stephen Luke are found inside the pages, and provide the front and back cover art, the cover design similar to that of an old fairytale storybook.

A great addition to classic collections, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is now available for preorder from Able Muse Press.

If you haven’t joined the adult coloring book bandwagon yet, now is a great time to hop on. Black Squirrel Books, an imprint of The Kent State University Press, released a new coloring book last month. The Inklings Coloring Book—with illustrations by fantasy illustrator James A. Owen—features 15 line drawings inspired by the works of Oxford’s famous Inklings.

Inside, J. R. R. Tolkien has tea, Christopher Tolkien stands outside the Tolkien Home, Charles Williams is at Oxford, and these illustrations are all mixed in with dragons, dwarves, elves, and more, with the Bandersnatch hidden in many of the images.

Fans of fantasy literature can take a break from their latest adventure and relax with some fantastical coloring with The Inklings Coloring Book, available now.

Spring has sprung at Cleveland State University Poetry Center with freshly published titles added to their spring catalog, including the Editor’s Choice for the 2015 First Poetry Competition, Residuum by Martin Rock; the winner of the 2016 First Book Poetry Competition selected by Eileen Myles, My Fault by Leora Fridman; the winner of the 2015 Open Book Poetry Competition selected by Lesle Lewis, Shane McCrae, and Wendy Xu, The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo Kwa Mei-En; and the winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition selected by Wayne Koestenbaum, A Bestiary by Lily Hoang.

Readers can learn more about the individual titles (all four of them decked out in beautiful cover art) at the CSU Poetry Center website where links to interviews, past works, and author websites can also be found.

Every year, the University of Arkansas Press awards the Miller Williams Poetry Prize to four authors: one winner and three finalists, all of which are published with the winner receiving $5,000 in cash.

March 2016 saw the publication of the three 2016 finalists: When We Were Birds by Joe Wilkins, See You Soon by Laura McKee, and Cenotaph by Brock Jones.

Series Editor Billy Collins writes in each book’s preface:

See You Soon, the casual title of Laura McKee’s book, contains poems of powerful feeling that seem composed in the kind of tranquility of recollection. [ . . . ] [R]eaders will find in Brock Jones’s Cenotaph a new way of thinking and feeling about the reailties of combat. [ . . . ] Joe Wilkins’s [ . . . ] When We Were Birds, as the title indicates, is full of imaginative novelty as well as reminders that miraculous secrets are hidden in the fabric of everyday life.

All three titles—as well as the winning [explicit, lyrics] by Andrew Gent—are now available at the University of Arkansas Press website.

Last month, Coffee House Press announced their partnership with Brooklyn-based feminist publishing project, Emily Books (part bookstore/publisher/book club). Together, they’ve created a new imprint for “original books that speak to the aesthetic excellence, experimental boldness, and social concerns of both organizations.”

July 2016’s forthcoming Problems by Jade Sharma marks the first book coming from the imprint, with two new Emily Books titles to be published by Coffee House Press annually.

More information about the partnership and the individual presses can be found at the Coffee House Press website blog.