The Cider Press Review Book Award annually offers a $1,500 prize, publication, and more to the author of a book-length poetry collection. In 2014, Alison Prine won with her collection Steel, which was released this past January.

Advanced praise called Steel “a work of memory and reverie. Both precise and transcendent . . .” (Laura Kasischke).  Readers can order a copy of Steel and check out an excerpt on the Cider Press Review website.

For almost a quarter century, The University of Arkansas Press annually has awarded the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. The prize and series, edited by Billy Collins, are named for and honor the cofounder and director of the press, Miller Williams.

At the beginning of March, the 2016 winner, [explicit lyrics] by Andrew Gent, was released: “As the title indicates, these poems are lyrics—musings on the small decisions required by existence in the modern world. They contain the grand themes of art—life, love, and mortality—but not where you expect.”
 
To buy a copy or to listen to a selection from [explicit lyrics], head over to the University of Arkansas Press website.

[quote from publisher’s website]

Each year, Lake Forest College awards its Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize to writers under forty with no major book publication. Winners spend three weeks in residence at the campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs. While there, writers spend their time completing a manuscript to be published by &NOW Books, an imprint of Lake Forest College Press.

Matthew Nye was the 2014 winner and his novel Pike and Bloom was published in February. An American odyssey in miniature, Pike and Bloom maps the trajectories of three characters—Pike, Bloom, and Bloom’s wife Clytie—as they spiral through “the serious blues of Indianapolis,” attempting to construct meaning from the absurd.

 Readers can learn more about Pike and Bloom at Northwestern University Press’s website.

Brick Road Poetry Book Contest is awarded annually, winners receiving a contract with Brick Road Poetry Press, $1,000, and 25 copies of their published book.

In 2014, Shannon Tate Jonas took home the prize with his collection Battle Sleep, which was published January 21, 2016. This is Jonas’s first book-length collection of poetry with copies available from the Brick Road Poetry Press website.

In April 2016, Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria will start hitting bookshelves. Winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, The Black Maria “investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity.”

The Whiting Award Selection Committee says the collection is “always in service of a moral vision, a deep concern for who we are, who we have been.”

Copies of The Black Maria can be pre-ordered from BOA Editions LTD website.

[quotes from BOA Editions LTD website] 

Due out at the beginning of February is the winner of the Elixir Press Award in Fiction, The Loss of All Lost Things by Amina Gautier.

The collection explores moments of loss and yearning in its fifteen short stories that, according to contest judge Phong Nguyen, “have you by the throat [ . . . ].”

Readers can have a small peek inside The Loss of All Lost Things and order a copy at the SPD website.

The winner of Milkweed Editions’s 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Beautiful Zero by Jennifer Willoughby, is now available. Chosen by Dana Levin, this debut collection is filled with wit and humor and promises relief from the seriousness of real life. Levin likens the collection to “a buoy in the sea at bottom, a life preserver, a raft.”

Those needing a pick-me-up in the middle of these dark winter months can find copies of Beautiful Zero at the Milkweed Editions website.

In November 2015, the winners of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the 2014 Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction were published.

Last Words of the Holy Ghost by Matt Cashion placed first in the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction through the University of North Texas Press. Chosen by Lee K. Abbott, the collection of 12 Southern Gothic short stories was released November 15. This is Cashion’s first short story collection.

Nate Liederbach’s short story collection Beasts You’ll Never See, winner of the 2014 Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction, “seeks to unearth the inevitable paradoxes of comedy and tragedy lurking under the skin of every human relationship, and it does so while also challenging its reader to question the emotional mechanisms that underpin conventional narratives.”

[Quote from SPD website.]

The 2014 Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry winner is Objects of Attention by Aichlee Bushnell and was published in Fall 2015.

“In 1787, Sally Hemings joined her brother James as a paid servant to Thomas Jefferson in Paris, France. In 1789, she returned to Monticello pregnant, a slave again, at her own will. Objects of Attention explores the intimate boundaries between slave and slaveowner, celebrating the rich interior life and intellect of the enslaved woman while examining the contradictory laws and classic philosophies that supported her captivity.”

Bushnell’s first book, Objects of Attention is out now and available on the Noemi Press website with more information

[Quote from SPD website.]

Anna George Meek’s The Genome Rhapsodies was chosen by Angie Estes last year as the winner of The Ashland Poetry Series’ 2014 Snyder Memorial Prize. The award is given annually, with a prize of $1000, publication, and a featured reading at Ashland University (and submissions are currently open until April).

Angie Estes says of her selection: “These poems re-member us in language and reveal how the past becomes us, in every sense of the word; they are gorgeous, unforgettable works of art.”

To read these works of art, check out The Ashland Poetry Series’ website for three ways to pick up a copy.

Southeast Missouri State University Press’s annual Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel awards a $2,000 prize to winners, publication, and an invitation to read at the University.

James Tate Hill’s winning Academy Gothic was published this past October. The novel follows Tate Cowlishaw after finding the dead body of Scoot Simkins, dean of Parshall College.

From the publisher’s website:

Suspects aren’t hard to come by at the college annually ranked ‘Worst Value’ by U.S. News & World Report. While the faculty brace for a visit from the accreditation board, Cowlishaw’s investigation leads him to another colleague on eternal sabbatical. Before long, his efforts to save his job become efforts to stay alive. A farcical tale of incompetence and corruption, Academy Gothic scathingly redefines higher education as it chronicles the last days of a dying college.

Head over to the Southeast Missouri State University Press website to watch the Academy Gothic book trailer, read more about Hill’s first novel, and order a copy.

Kathy Flann’s second collection of stories Get a Grip was released last month from Texas Review Press. Winner of the 20145 George Garrett Fiction Prize, Get a Grip, according to the publisher’s website: “depict[s] a range of imagined lives . . . . All of the characters work out their struggles in the Baltimore region, channeling, in turns, the area’s charm, its despair, its humor, its self-doubt, its compassion. Get a Grip is a book about who we are when the cameras are off and the phone has died.”

Digital and print copies are available on the Texas Review Press website.

Drea Brown’s dear girl: a reckoning was released last month. The 2014 poetry winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition revisits the biography of poet Phillis Wheatley, reimagining her journey through the Middle Passage to Boston.

2014 Judge Douglas Kearney says of his selection, “Feverishly urgent, vivid, and unironic, dear girl: a reckoning refuses passivity, amnesia, and despair, bringing the bones to our present to begin the work of healing.”

Brown’s recent work can also be found in Southern Indiana Review and Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander.

dear girl: a reckoning, a perfect-bound chapbook, is available for sale on the Gold Line Press website, along with the 2014 fiction winner, The White Swallow by Anna Kovatcheva.

Gold Line Press’s annual chapbook contest ended in September, and they released their 2014 fiction winner this past October. Along with publication of her perfect-bound chapbook The White Swallow, winner Anna Kovatcheva has received a $500 prize and contributor copies.

Selected by Aimee Bender, she says of her selection:

The White Swallow has so many things going for it—starkly memorable imagery, strangeness that feels natural to the story, the feeling that the story itself grew up from the earth like a tree, and an ending that defies moralization. It seems instead to reflect the same unpredictable and mysterious quality of the world that also lets birds go into girls and healing to occur and, for inside all that, love to blossom.

Diana Arterian has designed the book, creating a beautiful little package for Kovatcheva’s work. For more information about The White Swallow, check out the Gold Line Press website.

The Colorado Prize for Poetry annually awards a $2000 honorarium and book publication to an author of a complete collection of poetry. This month, the 2015 winner will be published: The Business by Stephanie Lenox, chosen by Laura Kasischke.

From the publisher:

What does it meant to work in the age of the cubicle? The Business takes on the modern workplace with sharp-witted poems that sting like a paper cut. A former secretary, Stephanie Lenox positions herself as poetic note-taker of the mundane. . . . The collection transforms office politics and paper clips into a funny and critical emanation of the mortal rat race.

This is Lenox’s third collection of poetry, and her second prize winner (The Heart That Lies Outside the Body won the Slapering Hol Chapbook Competition in 2007). Copies of The Business are available for purchase at the website for The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University.

BkMk Press annually holds their G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction (currently open with a deadline in January), and this year’s winning title was just released at the end of September. King of the Gypsies by Lenore Myka was chosen by Lorraine M. López who writes of her selection, “Myka’s characters release uncountable fibers, connecting them to one another in the linked narratives, binding them to the harshly beguiling Romania they inhabit and that inhabits them.”

This is Myka’s first collection, though her work can be found in Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, and New England Review, amongst others. To find out more information about King of the Gypsies, head over to the BkMk Press website.

Matthew Minicucci’s Translation was published in August 2015, winner of the 2014 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize from Kent State University Press. The Poetry Prize is awarded to a poet who has not previously published a full-length collection of poems.

Translation is the 21^st book to be released through the Wick Poetry First Book Series and was chosen by Jane Hirschfield who calls Minicucci’s poems “accurate and deftly navigable vessels of inner life.”

More information about Translation can be found on the Kent State University website.

The Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program at University of Notre Dame in conjunction with The University of Notre Dame Press. Awarded to authors who have published at least one volume of poetry, winners receive publication and a prize of $1000 dollars.

The 2015 winner was published last month: Underdays by Martin Ott.

From the publisher’s website: “Underdays is a dialogue of opposing forces: life/death, love/war, the personal/the political. Ott combines global concerns with personal ones, in conversation between poems or within them, to find meaning in his search for what drives us to love and hate each other.”

Ott’s work can be found in The Antioch Review, The Café Review, and Epoch, just to name a few.

To learn more about Underdays, check out the University of Notre Dame Press’s website.

Look forward to Christine Poreba’s Rough Knowledge, winner of the 2014 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, currently scheduled to be published by Anhinga Press at the beginning of 2016. Rough Knowledge is Poreba’s first book and was chosen from nearly 700 manuscripts by Peter Everwine.

Everwine says of his selection:

[Poreba] has an eye for exact particulars and doesn’t stray from them, but her poems are so transparent, so quiet and intimate with the daily ambiguities and revelations of experience, that if you listen carefully you can almost believe the movement within her poems is like breathing: inward-containment, outward-space. I want such poetry close at hand.

To learn more about Rough Knowledge, check out Fresno State University’s website.

Halfway through November, Orison Books will release J. Scott Brownlee’s debut full-length poetry collection Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize.

From the editors: The poems in this collection explore the rural landscape and residents of Brownlee’s native Llano, Texas. Brownlee might be considered a natural mystic, refusing to settle for the simplistic ideological framewo0rk offered by his religious heritage, but rather finding in the particulars of place the vehicles of transcendence.”

Brownlee has been awarded $1,500, along with publication. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, and more.

Find out more at Orison Books’s website.

Winner of the 2014 Able Muse Book Award, Cause for Concern by Carrie Shipers is now available. From the publisher’s website: “Full of incisive meditations on frailties and fortitude often delivered with visceral honesty, Cause for Concern is spellbinding from start to finish.”

Order a print or digital copy of Cause for Concern from Able Muse’s website.

Since 1983, the University of Georgia Press has annualy held their Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, which, according to their website, “was established to encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership.” Siamak Vossoughi’s winning collection Better Than War will be published in September 2015.

From the publisher’s description: “The stories in Better Than War encompass narratives from a diverse set of Iranian immigrants, many searching for a balance between memories of their homeland and their new American culture. [ . . . ] All Iranian immigrants, young or old, carry with them a vivid past in their contemporary life. Vossoughi’s Better Than War is about growing up, coming of age, and raising children in America while still remembering the importance of retaining Iranian pride.”

Preorder your copy of Better Than War at the University of Georgia Press website.

The Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize is awarded annually, with a first prize of $1,000 and publication. During this past May, the 2014 winner was published: No Map of the Earth Includes Stars by Christina Olivares.

Also the winner of YesYes Books’s 2014 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Competition with her chapbook Petition, Olivares has poems published or forthcoming in Five Quarterly, decomP, Vinyl Poetry, and PALABRA, among others.

Check out the Marsh Hawk Press website for more information about No Map of the Earth Includes Stars or pick up a copy.

The John Simmons Short Fiction Award is open to any writer who hasn’t previously published a volume of prose fiction. Charles Haverty is the 2015 winner with his forthcoming collection Excommunicados.

From the University of Iowa Press’s website: “By turns haunting, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Charles Haverty’s debut collection charts the journeys of men, women, and children cast out of familiar territory into emotional terra incognita where people and things are rarely what they seem. . . . There are secrets at the center of each of these daring and original stories—secrets that separate these characters from one another but grow in the mind and the heart, connecting them with all of us.”

To be available in October 2015, copies of Excommunicados can be preordered from the University of Iowa Press website.

The 2015 Iowa Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press has been awarded to Edward Hamlin for his debut collection Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories.

Judge Karen Russell says of her selection, “The stories in Night in Erg Chebbi are sweeping and intimate and awesomely confident of their own effects. They document staggering, cataclysmic changes—forest fire, flash flood, revolution, murder—as well as the slow violence of grief and degenerative disease. [ . . . ] This is a collection with both depth and breadth, a book dedicated to revealing ‘the universal concealed in the weft of the particular.’ Hamlin spins the globe, jumping nimbly from a treetop lodge on a Brazilian riverbank to the lawn of a governor’s mansion on the eve of an execution to Merzouga, Morocco, ‘gateway to the dune sea of Erg Chebbi.’ [ . . . ] Each story here is a world in miniature, illuminated by the flashbulb bursts of Hamlin’s luminous, controlled prose.”

Available in August, readers can preorder a copy of Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories on the University of Iowa Press website.

The Gival Press Poetry Award is held annually. Open to national and international poets, winners receive $1,000 and publication. The 2013 winner, We Deserve the Gods We Ask For by Seth Brady Tucker was published this past fall.

Judge Lisa Graley, winner of the previous year’s poetry award, says of her selection, “This is sinewy writing at its most sturdy and tenacious. His—tangle of silk and muscle—is sure to stagger and transfix.”

More information about the Gival Press Poetry Award and We Deserve the Gods We Ask For can be found at the Gival Press website.

The Slapering Hol Press Sanger-Stewart Chapbook Competition is open to writers who haven’t yet published a chapbook collection. Richard Parisio is the 2014 winner with his collection The Owl Invites Your Silence, released this year.

From the editors: “Parisio’s wise and moving words emerge from his training as a naturalist, teacher, journalist, and conservationist. This is a book of poems written by a poet who pays keen attention to the natural world that is quickly being destroyed. It is an important book for our time.”

Parisio has worked as an interpretive naturalist for 40 years and is a nature columnist for the local paper in New Paltz, NY. His work can be found in three regional anthologies, as well as The Kerf, Spillway, and Common Ground Review, among other journals.

The Word Works’s Tenth Gate Prize, “named in honor of Jane Hirshfield, recognizes the wisdom and dedication of mid- and late-career poets.”

Lisa Sewell was recognized in 2014 with her winning collection Impossible Object, selected by Series Editor Leslie McGrath for “its eloquence, originality, cohesion, and craft.”

Released in April, readers can pick up copies of Impossible Object from the publisher’s website or from SPD.

Winner of the 2014 First Book Competition from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 50 Water Dreams by Siwar Masannat, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, is now available for purchase on the publisher’s website.

Of his selection, Kaminsky says, “How lucky we are to find a poetry debut that isn’t afraid of ideas, of mysteries, of politics, of passion. How brave she is to say ‘I saw nobody coming so I went instead.’ And to dare us: ‘I want to put you in my revolution.’ Like Zbigniew Herbert, this poet wants ‘to hide you in my eyelids & the nation,’ like Venus Khoury-Ghata, she makes a mythological pastoral, a book of voices that speak for more than one person.”

Masannat’s writing can also be found in New Orleans Review, Gargoyle, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other journals.

The Open Mouth of the Vase by Amy Ash, the winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award, was published in January.

“Pain, love, regret, joy, longing, loss, humor, and an earthy sexuality all find memorable expression in these poems. Ash has a gift for reversing reader expectations in illuminating ways, as well as for coining metaphors that startle with their aptness and their ability to refresh the world,” says judge Charles Harper Webb of his selection.

The Open Mouth of the Vase is Amy Ash’s first full-length collection. Pick up a copy or learn more at the Cider Press Review website.

Study for Necessity by JoEllen Kwiatek was released in April 2015. Winner of the 2014 Iowa Poetry Prize from University of Iowa Press, “Kwiatek’s poems emit the uncanny luminosities of the artists’ worlds they refer to: those of Caspar David Friedrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Odilon Redon. Each is a ‘token of strangeness’ built with delicacy and restraint, embodying, vivifying what the poet calls the mind’s ‘lonesome flourish.’ Like entries in a recondite log, or the etchings, or tracks, of a complex consciousness, this work cannot help but identify its own material and spiritual corollaries: a bridle worn to threadbare, a voyage that ‘grows more & more captivating. More terse.’ It is, as one poem puts it, as if seeing / were a form of radiant / isolation. And yet the presence established over the course of the book is profoundly connective, rich with acute physical apprehension and charge. It moves under pressure toward its singular end, its very ‘necessity,’” says judge Emily Wilson.

Read an excerpt of Study for Necessity or pick up at copy at the University of Iowa Press website.

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Poetry Competition’s 2014 winner has been released at the beginning of the month. Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles was selected by Erin Belieu. Of her selection, Belieu says, “This is without a doubt my new favorite book. Upton has long been a well-respected poet, prose writer, and literary critic, but she deserves much more popular attention, including yours.”

You can start by checking out Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles on the CSU website.

The Miller Williams Poetry Prize is annually held by the University of Arkansas Press. Each year, three finalists are announced with one winner of $5000 and publication.

George David Clark, with his first collection of poems Reveille, is the 2015 winner. Editor-in-Chief of 32 Poems Magazine, Clark has also earned the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry and a Lily Postdoctoral Fellowship, among other honors.

Published this past February, Reveille, the publisher’s website says, “is rooted in awe and driven by the impulse to praise. At heart, these are love poems, though their loves are varied and complicated by terrible threats: that we will cry out and not be answered, fall asleep and never wake. Against such jeopardy Reveille fixes our attention on a lightening horizon.”

Readers can pick up a copy of this prize winner from the University of Arkansas Press website.

The Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry began in 1983 and is open to poets for a manuscript of original poetry in English. Held annually, winners receive $2000 and a reading tour of Florida colleges and universities.

Robin Beth Schaer is the 2014 prize winner with her first book of poetry Shipbreaking. Her work has also appeared in Tin House, Bomb Magazine, Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square, and Guernica, among others.

From Schaer’s website: “Shipbreaking charts a beautiful and dangerous journey. It is an intimate and interstellar odyssey where seas rise, mastodons roam, aeronauts float overhead, bodies electrify, and a child is born as a ship wrecks in a hurricane. The speaker here is curious and fierce, consulting scientists, philosophers, ancient maps, fossil bones, and lovers in order to survive and understand the strange majesty of living. With empathy and exaltation, the poems collapse the distance between natural disasters and human struggles, interweaving relationships between the upheavals and renewals that both the heart and Earth undergo.”

Shipbreaking will be published this August.

The Magic Laundry, by Jacob M. Appel won last year’s Serena McDonald Kennedy Prize from Snake~Nation~Press.

From the editors: “Jacob Appel’s fiction book, The Magic Laundry, is superbly written with that quirky quality that lets the reader know that somehow Mr. Appel has experienced something close to what he’s written about. Love of children and spouses and acquaintances in all their beauty and irrationality is depicted with an eye to what makes them lovable and yet hard to understand.”

To get your own copy of The Magic Laundry, check out the press’s website.

Trouble Sleeping by Abdul Ali, winner of the 2014 New Issues Prize, was published this past March.

From the foreword, written by Thomas Sayers Ellis: “Like a projection of testimony, like the shadows that run-off from the plan-projector-tation immediately after you’ve lived and left the theater, like the dark figures moving through the haunted noirs of Aaron Douglas, the widescreen stare of Trouble Sleeping is a mighty mise-en-concern.”

Ali’s poems have previously appeared in Gargoyle, A Gathering of Tribes, and New Contrast, among others. To learn more about Trouble Sleeping, check out the New Issues website.

Winner of The 2014 Green Rose Prize from New Issues, My Multiverse by Kathleen Halme was published last month. The Green Rose Prize is awarded to poets who already have published one or more full-length collections of poetry.

Of the new collection, poet John Brehm says, “In poems that are both intricate and expansive, Kathleen Halme’s My Multiverse takes readers from the City of Roses, with its Shanghai traps and tunnels, to a hummingbird ‘tracing the missing shape of a feed,’ to the neural pathways of the mind itself. These poems do what all great poems do: they make the world seem strange again, shimmering with questions, ‘the mirror ball of meaning strung without a thread.’”

In his debut collection, Matthew Siegel explores his body’s fight with Crohn’s Disease and the struggle to remain one’s self in the face of illness. Winner of the University of Wisconsin Press’s 2015 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Blood Work was selected by Lucia Perillo. About her selection, Perillo states, “These poems resist the dualities of lyric versus narrative, confessional versus impersonal, real against surreal, formal/improvisational, comic/sad. Matthew Siegel manages to tick off all the boxes at once, while remaining compulsively readable. The trick that he’s pulled off is to make a book that simultaneously tickles you and shakes you by the scruff of your neck.”

Siegel’s writing has appeared in Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Tusculum Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Blood Work was released March 12, 2015.

Press 53 has awarded Rebecca Foust the winner of the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry with her collection Paradise Drive, chosen by Tom Lombardo. Of his selection, he says, “Rebecca Foust has created a Pilgrim who leads us from the hardscrabble existence and despair of Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she was raised, to the ultra-wealth and despair of Marin County, California, where she lived in the first decade of this century. The poems of Paradise Drive are powerful and figurative, with a very strong voice. Though the judging was close for this contest, Foust clearly stood out among the excellent finalists.”

Foust was also the recipient of the 2008 Many Mountain Press Poetry Book Prize for All that Gorgeous Pitiless Song, the winner of the 2010 Foreword Book of the Year Award with God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World, and the winner of Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook prizes in 2007 and 2008 with her two chapbooks Mom’s Canoe and Dark Card.

Paradise Drive will be released at the end of the month. For more information or to order a copy, check out the Press 53 website.

The Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize is awarded to one poetry author a year, with a $2,000 prize and publication. 2014’s prize winner is Jay Nebel whose work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, and Tin House, among other journals.

Neighbors, his winning collection, is a book of lyric narratives about the men and women who live and work next to us the people standing in line at the DMV or buying milk and bread at the grocery store. Jay Nebel gives voice to an America lost in the graffiti of park benches and 24-hour diner parking lots, where men attempt CPR on gorillas and beat each other in back alleys with baseball bats, as well as revere their mothers. These are poems that look through the windows at the secret lives of our neighbors, their affairs and addictions, their curses and loves.

Published by Saturnalia Books this month, Neighbors can be purchased through the University Press of New England website.

Robin McLean’s first short story collection, Reptile House, will be published May, 2015 by BOA Editions, Ltd. A finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize in 2011 and 2012, Reptile House is the winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize.

The fascinating characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, derail their lives with desires and delusions, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Probing the dark underbelly of human nature and want, Robin McClean’s stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty around us.

Living in Alaskan woods for 15 years as a potter and lawyer, McLean, in an interview with BOA, reveals how Alaska has affected her writing, “Alaska is wild, dangerous, beauitiful, and makes you feel tiny. Living there made me want to write with wild dangerous beauty, to be small, and also big . . . . Alaska made me think about scale, grandeur, and audacity.”

More information on Reptile House can be found on the publisher’s website.