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 1st.
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.
Out now from BOA Editions, LTD. is Remarkable by Dinah Cox, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize. From the publisher’s website: Set within the resilient Great Plains, these award-winning stories are marked by the region’s people and landscape, and the distinctive way it is both regressive in its politics yet also stumbling toward something better. While not all stories are explicitly set in Oklahoma, the state is almost a character that is neither protagonist nor antagonist, but instead the weird next-door-neighbor you’re perhaps too ashamed of to take anywhere. Who is the embarrassing one—you or Oklahoma?In Fall, Kathryn Nuernberger’s poetry collection The End of Pink will be released. The winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award, The End of Pink (Nuernberger’s second collection) is “populated by strange characters” and is “equal parts fact and folklore.” Copies are available for preorder at the BOA Editions, LTD. website.
Interested groups may sign up for updates about the application period here. Learn more about the book group project and eligibility requirements here.
The Teens’ Top Ten is a “teen choice” list, where teens nominate and choose their favorite books of the previous year. Nominators are members of teen book groups in fifteen school and public libraries around the country. Nominations are posted the Thursday of National Library Week.
