We are excited to announce that to expand the aesthetic range of our publications, we have launched an imprint, Salon des Refusés! Borrowing the name of the 1863 exhibit of artists rejected from the prestigious Paris Salon, which included such luminaries as Manet, Pissarro, Rousseau, and Whistler, Salon des Refusés champions projects that, for various reasons, have remained unseen—those deemed too strange, too unmarketable, those chronically rejected, those overlooked because of the competitive nature of publishing, and those simply abandoned. It is our conviction that literary artists working outside the margins of the expected expand our aesthetic consciousness by showing new possibilities of subject, genre, and form, and that these new possibilities often don’t reside in the complete, polished, or immediately comprehensible. We rescue brilliance from limbo and the dustbin, knowing the rejections of yesterday become the exemplars of today.
At the Edge... Longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Marina Tsvetaeva was one of the foremost Russian poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1892 to a family of wealth, she lived most of her life in poverty and exile, following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow Famine. Tsvetaeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, living in Berlin and what was then Czechoslovakia before moving to Paris in 1925. In 1939 she returned to the Soviet Union, where she died in 1941. Despite isolation, political disaster, and personal tragedy, Tsvetaeva wrote extensively throughout her lifetime, including short lyrics, long narrative poems, plays in verse, and literary criticism.
Margaree Little’s translations from the Russian of Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam have appeared in American Poetry Review, Asymptote, InTranslation (The Brooklyn Rail), and The Michigan Quarterly Review. Her first poetry collection, Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), won the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Award. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, the Camargo Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, among others.
Congratulations to Cole Swensen, Recipient of the Paul Engle Prize
Cole Swensen has been named the 14th recipient of the Paul Engle Prize, presented by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization.
The prize, established in 2011, honors an individual who, like Paul Engle, represents a pioneering spirit in the world of literature through writing, editing, publishing, or teaching, and whose active participation in the larger issues of the day has contributed to the betterment of the world through the literary arts.
Swensen is a poet, editor, and translator, who taught in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 2001 to 2012. She then taught at Brown University until her retirement in 2023.
She is the author of 20 collections of poetry, including And And And, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Art in Time, Gravesend, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry; Goest, a finalist for the National Book Award; Try, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award; and New Math, winner of the National Poetry Series.
Swensen has translated more than 30 books of French poetry, creative nonfiction, and art criticism, and won the 2024 National Translation Award from ALTA and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. She was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a writer-in-residence at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Pratt Institute, and Temple University. Swensen was the founder and editor of La Presse, an imprint of Fence Books that was dedicated to the translation of contemporary French poetry.
Swensen will receive the award at a ceremony at 2 p.m. on November 16, at the Coralville Public Library. Christopher Merrill will join Swensen in conversation. The event is free and open to the public. Book signing and reception to follow.
The Paul Engle Prize is made possible through the generous support of the City of Coralville, which is home to 11 permanent sculptures with artistic and literary ties to Iowa. The sculptures all have ties to work found in The Iowa Writers’ Library, housed in the Hyatt Regency Coralville Hotel, which features about 800 books written by former students, graduates and faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Paul Engle (October 12, 1908 – March 22, 1991), though best remembered as the long-time director of the Writers’ Workshop and co-founder with his wife, Hualing Nieh Engle, of the UI’s International Writing Program, also was a well-regarded poet, playwright, essayist, editor and critic. In 2000, then-Gov. Tom Vilsack declared Engle’s birthday, Oct. 12, as “Paul Engle Day” in Iowa.
Previous winners of the prize are: James Alan McPherson, Kwame Dawes, Luis Alberto Urrea, Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Dina Nayeri, Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Dr. Eve L. Ewing, Rebecca Solnit, Joan Naviyuk Kane, and Camille Dungy. Visit www.iowacityofliterature.org/paul-engle-day for more information about the prize and past winners.
Announcing the Essential Voices Editorial Fellow
We are happy to announce that Rebecca Dietrich has been awarded the Fellowship for the proposed anthology, The Earth Still Whispers Her Name: Poems for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The anthology will gather the voices of Indigenous poets across Turtle Island to speak to this crisis and its reverberations through grief, resistance, cultural memory, and survivance. While the central theme will be MMIW, the anthology will necessarily engage broader topics: colonialism, intergenerational trauma, gendered violence, land, language, and Indigenous sovereignty. The book will be both testament and intervention, insisting that Indigenous lives, especially those of women and girls, are essential and must be heard.
The Essential Voices Anthology Series has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. It intends to make less insular the various poetries of the world and to correct misrepresentations and misunderstandings in the broader culture. In other words, to go where the silence is and let the poets speak. We believe that a good anthology not only captures the zeitgeist, it can help shape it. When we look at the etymology of the word "essential," we see that the Latin essentia means "being." It is in this spirit of shared being that we publish these books. The Essential Voices Editorial Fellowship awards $2500 and gives an editor the resources and assistance to bring an anthology into the world.
Rebecca Dietrich is the author of the poetry collection Under the Stars of Turtle Island (Wayfarer Books, 2025) and the chapbook On Colonized Ground (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), a 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Award finalist. Her work appears in Welter, Steam Ticket, Red Coyote, and elsewhere. She graduated with a degree in Psychology and minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Stockton University and is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Announcing the 2025 Chapbook Open-reading Period Selection!
A fond thank you to all of the poets who sent manuscripts during our annual chapbook open-reading period. It is always one of our favorite times of year. We are honored to have been entrusted with such rich work to consider.
We are happy to announce that we have selected for publication Meg Kearney's Cardiac Thrill, which will be published in September. Meg Kearney’s most recent book is All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry and silver medalist in Foreword Review’s Indies Book Award for Poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, was published as a chapbook in 2020 by Green Linden Press; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology, guest edited by Natasha Tretheway. A native New Yorker, she lives in New Hampshire and is founding director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University in Massachusetts.
We would like to honorably mention the work of the following poets, whose manuscripts stood out to us from the approximately 400 submitted:
Dom Blanco’s Autoethnography [Poems]
Alex de Voogt’s translation of Constantine Cavafy’s Eighteen
Abigail Frankfurt’s And Then Some
Rebecca Hawkes’ Hide
D.A. Powell’s Tricks
Announcing the Recipient of the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation!
On behalf of Green Linden Press, I congratulate Cole Swensen, recipient of the Stephen Mitchell Prize for her translation of Pascalle Monnier’s Touché. Cole has been awarded $1000, and the book will be published in the fall of 2025.
Self-sardonic and often tongue-in-cheek, Touché, composed entirely of aspirations, captures something both subtle and insightful about quotidian struggle and the human spirit—to wit: its refusal to give in, even when wracked by regret, grief, and a tendency to brood. This is a portrait of a person saving herself through wry humor and complex literary allusion. In addition to its darkly uplifting attitude, Touché approaches the personal in a refreshingly impersonal way and models the art of not taking oneself too seriously.
I also congratulate Margaree Little, whose manuscript At the Edge: Selected Political Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva will also be published as an Editor’s Selection in the fall of 2025.
Marina Tsvetaeva’s political poems, a crucial part of her sensibility and life’s work, have largely been neglected in English-language translation. Emphasized instead are poems she wrote about her tumultuous personal and romantic relationships, an emphasis that suggests a gendered reading of the poet as an extreme personality, rather than a poet responding to the extremity of her time. In fact, Tsvetaeva was deeply attuned to the political circumstances in which she lived, and she wrote extensively and incisively about them. To erase this part of the poet and her work domesticates and exotifies her and ignores her reality. At the Edge seeks to correct this misreading of Tsvetaeva’s work by bringing together a selection of her political poems—many of them never before translated into English—at a moment when they are acutely relevant to our own culture.
Their work embodies Stephen Mitchell’s maxim that in translating “there’s a deeper faithfulness than simple accuracy. There’s a place where, as in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are the same things.”
Pascalle Monnier is the author of several books of ambiguous genre—poetic in their sound and imagery, they are, by turns, aphoristic, essayistic, and generally hybrid in form. A former fellow of the Villa Medicis in Rome, she frequently collaborates with visual artists and musicians. She is published by P.O.L, the leading publisher of experimental literature in France.
Cole Swensen has translated more than 25 books of poetry and literary prose from French and has won the PEN USA Award in Translation and, in 2024, the ALTA National Translation Award. Also a poet, her books have won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the S.F. State Poetry Center Book Award and have been finalists for the National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Award, and the Griffin Prize.
Marina Tsvetaeva was one of the foremost Russian poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1892 to a family of wealth, she lived most of her life in poverty and exile, following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow Famine. Tsvetaeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, living in Berlin and what was then Czechoslovakia before moving to Paris in 1925. In 1939 she returned to the Soviet Union, where she died in 1941. Despite isolation, political disaster, and personal tragedy, Tsvetaeva wrote extensively throughout her lifetime, including short lyrics, long narrative poems, plays in verse, and literary criticism.
Margaree Little’s translations from the Russian of Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam have appeared in American Poetry Review, Asymptote, InTranslation (The Brooklyn Rail), and The Michigan Quarterly Review. Her first poetry collection, Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), won the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Award. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, the Camargo Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, among others.
I would like to acknowledge several translators whose work captivated our attention; first, this year’s finalist:
Monika Cassel for her brilliant translation of Wilderness by Daniela Danz
And I honorably mention…
Cyrus Cassells for his translation of The Man with the Oar on His Shoulder: Poems of Francesc Parcerisas
Wim Coleman for his translation of Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Cyrus and Paula Console-Soican for their translation of The Rope in Bloom by Radu Vancu
Yana Kane for her translation of my fish will stay alive by Dmitry Blizniuk
Jeannine Marie Pitas for her translation of La flor de lis by Marosa di Giorgio
Jonathan Simkins for his translation of Feral Cathedral: Selected Poetry of César Dávila Andrade
Wally Swist for his translation of Wild Rose Bush: The Life of Mary and Other Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
The Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation will be open August 1 through November 30, 2025.
All the best,
Christopher Nelson, editor and publisher
Announcing the Recipient of the 2025 Wishing Jewel Prize!
On behalf of Green Linden Press, I congratulate Jordan Stempleman for winning the fifth annual Wishing Jewel Prize! Green Linden Press will publish Spilt in the fall. Named for an essay in Anne Carson’s Plainwater, the Prize awards $1000 and publication for a manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be and demonstrates anew the rich potentials of lyric language.
Spilt captures the experience of living between the domestic and the absurd, the lyrical and the narrative, oscillating between these states as a reflection of day-to-day existence. The poems explore both pandemic and non-pandemic experiences of separation and quarantine, blending whimsy, deadpan humor, stark realism, and pure fantasy. Each poem stands isolated as its own distinct world (or word), slightly out of sync with our reality of excess and overwhelming information. The poems in Spilt leak and escape, striving to connect with one another and with us, gathering socially, often stretching lines and language to their limits before pulling them back again.
Jordan Stempleman is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cover Songs (The Blue Turn), Wallop, and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). He also serves as the editor for The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal. Since 2011, he has organized the Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to his editorial work, Stempleman is an associate professor in the Liberal Arts Department and the Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute. Author website: https://www.jordanstempleman.com/
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I would like to honorably mention numerous poets whose manuscripts we found exciting and evocative:
Ulrich Baer for Griefmouth :: Mirrorstains
Bruce Bond for The Crawling Eye
Kevin Carollo for Notebook of a Return to the Nonnative Land
Monika Cassel for Rehearsal for Future Hungers
James D’Agostino and Karen Carcia for O to Z
Emily Dorff for The Far Pasture
Dale Going for Sonnets of Succor and Sorrow
Chris Green for The Dead Zoo
Carolyn Guinzio for The Moving Walkway Is Ending
Julie Hensley for Bent Cedar Mountain
Jeffrey Herrick for Divining and By the Numbers and The Future o Literature
Alan Hill for Daughterland
H.L. Hix for Close
H.L. Hix and Jonathan Weinert for Ghost Smoke
Kirsten Kaschock for Docenture: A Tale of Hue Told by the Estate
Gregory Kimbrell for Triangular Phantasm
Esther Mathieu for insistent ghost
Ben Miller for it all melts down to this
A. Molotkov for Dictionaries
Dayna Patterson for Our Lady of Thread
Laurel Radzieski for Leaf Manifesto
Rebecca Seiferle for If Language Is that Forest
Claire Marie Stancek for Of Care as of this Encounter
Chuck Sweetman for Late Bloomers: a Documentary Film
Laura Van Oudenaren for Behind the Bar / At the Bar
Mary Jane White for Sirventes: 366 Lyrics from 20 Masks
The Wishing Jewel Prize contest will re-open August 1 through November 30, 2025.
Best wishes and happy reading!
Christopher Nelson, editor and publisher
A Reading and Conversation with Rebecca Seiferle
A Reading and Conversation with JoAnne McFarland
Congratulations to Cole Swensen for receiving the National Translation Award!
The National Translation Award is given annually in poetry and in prose to literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality. The NTA, which is administered by American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.
Pierre Alferi, who recently passed away, was a major figure in contemporary French experimental poetry. A scholar of medieval literature, Alferi’s work is deeply informed by Postmodern critical theory as well as the lyrical traditions of both English and French poetry. The short fractured lyrics of And the Street capture the velocity and intensity of contemporary life, which somehow slowing time and attention to the smaller and often ignored moments that make up quotidian lives. The son of a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, Alferi’s work in And the Street marries the deep inner life with the phenomena of the material world.
Cole Swensen is a poet and translator. Of her twenty collections of poetry, the most recent, And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), was long-listed for the Griffin Prize and a finalist for the Big Other Award. She has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the LA Times Book Award. Her translations include thirty volumes of poetry from French, one of which won the PEN USA Award in Translation, and numerous art-critical articles and exhibition catalogue essays. She divides her time between Paris and the SF Bay Area.
Get your copy here.
Now Available! Dominion + Selected Poems by Dennis Hinrichsen
It is a pleasure to announce the publication of Dominion + Selected Poems by Dennis Hinrichsen. Gathering his best work from forty years of publishing, these formally adroit and lyrically rich poems unerringly map both the zeitgeist and the subjective psyche.
"A treasure trove of his most poignant poems and a record of a poetic conscience at its most elevated and elevating." —Khaled Mattawa
"The four-decade trajectory of Dennis Hinrichsen’s poetry epitomizes a classic American version of aesthetic self-fashioning and refashioning. Every style Hinrichsen creates he then breaks and remakes. In this way, he has recapitulated, more than once, the great changes undertaken by major postwar poets like Merwin, Rich, and Wright. ... Few poets write with greater imaginative restlessness (even as the heart holds steady), and no poet more deserves a retrospective of this sort." —Steven Cramer
"What mysteries underlie our ordinary emotions, memories, inquiries of mind? Each poem answers that question with meticulous precision, mapping out the ways the extraordinary, numinous, sometimes ruined world is right here, if only we know where to look. And we must look, say the poems, because the mysteries of our lives turn out to be the meaning of our lives." —Chase Twichell
"Book after book, Hinrichsen has 'polished the shock' of language so that we might bear witness to its strange gleam. But his dynamic lexicon goes well beyond language play. It’s always tugging at the seams between the mundane and the holy." —Aaron Coleman
+ + Order a copy today! + +
Events
October 11 at Book Suey — Hamtramck, MI (with Cal Freeman, Timothy Geiger and Jassmine Parks)
October 26 at Everybody Reads — Lansing, MI (with Shlagha Borah)
November 2 at Kazoo Books — Kalamazoo, MI (with Kathleen McGookey)
November 26 at The Robin Theatre — Lansing, MI
2025
February 8 at Uncloistered Reading Series — Toledo, OH
March 16 at Hungry Brain Reading Series — Chicago, IL
April 12 at Rally of Writers — Lansing, MI (with Sarah Carson)
April (TBD) at 2 Dandelions — Brighton, MI (with Sarah Carson and others)
Dennis Hinrichsen's recent books include Flesh-plastique and schema geometrica, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation, and This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go, winner of the Grid Poetry Prize. His other awards include the Field Poetry Prize, the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, the Tampa Poetry Prize, the Akron Poetry Prize, and the Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. He lives in Michigan, where he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing area.
Forthcoming Chapbook!
We are excited to announce that David Trinidad's Hollywood Cemetery has been selected for publication in early 2025 from nearly 500 submissions to our chapbook open-reading period. David Trinidad’s numerous books include Sleeping with Bashō, Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces, Notes on a Past Life, Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, and The Late Show. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, and Divining Poets: Dickinson, an Emily Dickinson tarot deck. Trinidad currently lives in Chicago.
We would like to honorably mention the work of the following poets, whose manuscripts we found remarkable:
—James D’Agostino and Karen Carcia’s At the Skirt of the Storm
—Denise Duhamel’s In Which
—Gail Griffin’s deGeneneration: A Vision Quest
—Alan Hill’s Daughterland
—Eric Pankey’s Foxfire
—Kylan Rice’s Little Sulfur
—Mark Tardi’s The Nettles of Implication
—Julie Marie Wade’s Capriccio
—Julie Marie Wade & Denise Duhamel’s The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020
The other titles in the Green Linden Chapbook Series can be found in our catalog. The next chapbook open-reading period will begin December 1. A fond thank you to everyone who shared poetry.
Meet Me There: a Reading from Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry
Please join us to celebrate the publication of our latest anthology!
Meet Me There: Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, hosted by Charis Books
With Samuel Ace, Jos Charles, Rajiv Mohabir, Christopher Nelson, and Magdalena Zurawski
May 9, 6:30 p.m. (Central) / 7:30 p.m. (Eastern)
Register here
Get the book here
"The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance."
—Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Two Forthcoming Readings
Please join us to celebrate the publication of two new titles from our catalog!
Vivian Faith Prescott’s Fat for Our Stories
April 4, 9:00 p.m. (Central) / 6:00 p.m. (Alaska)
Register here
Get the chapbook here
”Vivian Faith Prescott's poems powerfully interweave stories of family, place, and life with wild salmon. Rich with memory, Fat for Our Stories is an intimate and authentic portrait of the deep, meaningful relationship between wild salmon and people in Alaska—and of the ways the rhythms of that relationship are changing.”
—Mary Catherine Martin, SalmonState Communications Director
Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry at The Poets Corner
with Rick Barot, Ellen Bass, Richard Blanco, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and Charif Shanahan
April 14, 3:00 p.m. (Central) / 4:00 p.m. (Eastern)
Register here
Get the anthology here
“I come to this anthology having languished, having felt benumbed, having come to question, at my very core, poetry’s value, its potency, as we contend with our current brand of American tyranny, our Hour of Lead. As I read Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, I experience an incremental awakening, or re-awakening. Every poem, every phrase in every poem, clicks a small switch in me that had been shut down, repairs a blown fuse, brings a wound into the light, provokes it into being, or staunches it. The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance. From the first lines of the opening poem, Frank Bidart’s ‘Queer’—Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything—an entreaty against self-deception, we find ourselves in veracity’s realm, where language reigns free. … The lines of these poems accordion, inhale, exhale, serpentine, straighten, curl. A carnival of approaches to diction, positionality, structure, song. This anthology is not representative of a sector of American poetry. It is American poetry. The party contains multitudes and hints at multitudes to come. When I reach the last lines of the final poem, torrin a. greathouse’s ‘On Using the Wo|men’s Bathroom,’ I am no longer numb.”
—Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Announcing the Recipient of the 2024 Wishing Jewel Prize!
On behalf of Green Linden Press, I am excited to congratulate JoAnne McFarland for winning the fourth annual Wishing Jewel Prize! Green Linden Press will publish American Graphic in December. Named for an essay in Anne Carson’s Plainwater, the Prize awards $1000 and publication for a manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be and demonstrates anew the rich potentials of lyric language.
With candor and insight, American Graphic confronts personal and cultural pasts. Juxtaposing historical documents—recipes from the first cookbook published by a Black woman in the States, reward posters for people fleeing enslavement—with intimate moments from the present, the book's magic is to bend time so we see that the past’s rivers flow through us into the future. Spare yet lyrical in its language, American Graphic is a concentrate of feeling and vision.
JoAnne McFarland is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. She is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which exhibits works that focus on the intersection of language and visual representation. Her poetry collections include A Domestic Lookbook and Pullman, both recently published by Grid Books, Identifying the Body and the digital album Tracks of My Tears, both published by the Word Works, and Acid Rain, published by Willow Books. JoAnne has artwork in the permanent collections of the Cooper/Hewitt Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Department of State, among many others. She has had fellowships at the BARD Graduate Center Library, KALA Art Institute, the National Arts Club, Cave Canem, Van Alen Institute, and the Painting Center. JoAnne's artwork is represented by Accola Griefen Fine Art. www.joannemcfarland.com
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A fond thank you to everyone who sent a manuscript. It has been a pleasure to spend time with so much remarkable work. I would like to honorably mention numerous poets whose manuscripts we also found exciting and evocative:
・Samuel Ace & Maureen Seaton for My Ears or a Field of Ears
・Emily Carr for the autopsy lyrics: a murder mystery in verse
・Emily Carr for The Stork Rides Shotgun: & other statistically significant poems
・Cody-Rose Clevidence for This Household of Earthly Nature
・J.L. Conrad for it will have been so beautiful
・Aja Duncan for The Intimacy Trials
・Ethan Fortuna for surface phasms
・H.L. Hix for American Outrage
・Don Hogle for Meet Me at Waterloo Station
・Emily Hyland for Breasts/Mom
・Jen Karetnick for Sensor Hypothesis
・Ben Miller for Make
・Jane Morton for Drosophila: a Fairy Tale
・Heather Nagami for The Heart As
・Coco Owen for Scar let Woe man
・Dayna Patterson for Our Lady of Thread
・Jennifer Perrine for Beautiful Outlaw
・Rebecca Seiferle for If Language Is that Forest
・Megan Shevenock for What Is Simple
・Aaron Smith & Mareen Seaton for Beautiful People
・Sharon White for Landbrim
The Wishing Jewel Prize contest is open June 21 through November 30.
All the best,
Christopher Nelson, editor and publisher
Announcing the Recipient of the 2024 Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize!
It has been a pleasure spending time with the manuscripts submitted for the Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. A heartfelt thank you to all who entrusted us with their work and for their dedication to the art of translation.
We are excited to announce that Rebecca Seiferle is the recipient for The Dream of Apples: Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Rebecca has been awarded $1000, and the book will be published in the fall of 2024. Congratulations to Rebecca! We look forward to working with her to bring these wonderful poems into the world! Her translation work embodies Stephen Mitchell’s maxim that in translating “there’s a deeper faithfulness than simple accuracy. There’s a place where, as in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are the same things.”
Of Federico García Lorca, she writes, “There are few Spanish poets who have so captured the English speaker’s imagination, and yet we continue to read Lorca as we have read him, which is to say through the filters of our own assumptions. Similarly, previous translations have gone in pursuit of surrealism or ‘music’ or romanticism at the expense of the sharp clarity and elemental intelligence of the original. … Breathtaking in its versatility, Lorca’s poetry conveys the sense that there are many Lorcas, but elusive, a play of presence and absence. For Lorca, fluidity and evasion are essential to the truth of poetry. His deep anguish, his performative masques, his sense of difference and his identification with those also marginalized, his sense of the interpenetration of absence and presence, all begin to interconnect if viewed from a queered center. These translations seek only the original, its deep intelligence, where a phrase can convey what Lorca called duende, an elusive ‘something else’ that evades all definition, ‘a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ ... the spirit of the earth.”
There were many wonderful manuscripts submitted, which made for pleasurable reading and difficult decisions. I would like to honorably mention several translators, poets, and writers whose work captivated our attention:
— Kevin Carollo’s translation of The Law of the Trough by Patrice Nganang
— Bradley Harmon’s translation of ANIMA by Birgitta Trotzig
— Adriana X. Jacob’s translation of Yakantalisa and Other Poems by Hezy Leskly
— Margaree Little’s translation of The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam
— Carlo Massimo’s translation of Mario Scalesi: The Damned Poet of Tunis
— Robin Myers’ translation of The Beast of Being by Susana Villalba
Annually Green Linden Press awards $1000 and publication for a book-length manuscript in any genre translated from any language into English that honors Mitchell’s linguistic acumen. All finalists are considered for publication. The contest is open June 21 through November 30.
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Federico García Lorca is the preeminent Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century. From the beginning, his work was remarkably versatile, as he published in a variety of genres. His first poetry collection, Libro de poemas (1921), was preceded by Impresiones y Paisajes (1919) a work of prose, recounting his travels as a college student throughout Spain, and his first play El Maleficio de la mariposa, was produced the following year. In his lifetime, Lorca published five poetry collections, but a number of celebrated works, including Diván del Tamarit and Poeta en Nueva York were to be published posthumously and in other countries, as the works were viewed as too controversial in Francoist Spain. Published in 1928, his Gypsy Ballads made him famous in Spain and lead to international acclaim. In 1936, Lorca was killed by Fascist forces, and, following his death, his books were publicly burned in Granada and further publication banned. In the decades following, his works have been translated into many languages where they have continued to influence subsequent generations of artists in many fields. At the Prince Asturias Awards in 2011, Leonard Cohen spoke of his “deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico García Lorca” and how “he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.”
Rebecca Seiferle has published four poetry collections. Wild Tongue won the Grub Street National Poetry Prize, and Bitters won the Western States Book Award. She is a noted translator from the Spanish, having published translations of César Vallejo’s Trilce and The Black Heralds. Her translations of various poets are included in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. Her essay “Black Cactus Open in Reeds,” on Federico García Lorca appeared in Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Research and Development Grant, and was Tucson Poet Laureate for two terms from 2012–16.
Launch Readings: Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry
Join us in celebrating the publication of the second anthology in the Essential Voices series!
“The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational
voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance.” —Diane Seuss
Virtual Readings:
January 23, 7:30 p.m. (Central): Derrick Austin, Robin Becker, Rachel Mennies, Ruben Quesada, Mark Wunderlich —register here—
January 25, 8:30 p.m. (Central): Richard Blanco, James Allen Hall, Jennifer Perrine, Catherine Pond, Magdalena Zurawski —register here—
February 20, 8:30 p.m. (Central): Brian Blanchfield, Dorothy Chan, Eduardo C. Corral, Randall Mann, Brian Teare —register here—
February 22, 7:30 p.m. (Central): Meg Day, Jan-Henry Gray, Richie Hofmann, Rebecca Seiferle, Shelley Wong —register here—
April 14, 3:00 p.m. (Central), with The Poets Corner: Rick Barot, Ellen Bass, Richard Blanco, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Charif Shanahan —forthcoming—
May 9, 6:30 p.m. (Central), with Meet Me There Reading Series: Samuel Ace, Christopher Nelson, and others —forthcoming—
Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, Kansas City Convention Center, Room 2503AB:
February 9, 1:45 p.m. (Central): Lisa Dordal, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Donika Kelly, Paul Tran
Green Linden Press, 2024
Get your copy of the anthology in our store!
100 Poets for the Present and Future.
The Essential Voices series intends to correct misrepresentation and misunderstanding in the broader culture. At its heart is the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. This anthology features 100 poets who illuminate the queer experience in the U.S., including Kaveh Akbar, Rick Barot, Frank Bidart, Richard Blanco, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, CAConrad, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Nikky Finney, Nikki Giovanni, Marilyn Hacker, Robin Coste Lewis, Timothy Liu, Eileen Myles, Carl Phillips, Justin Phillip Reed, Kay Ryan, Sam Sax, Richard Siken, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and many others. Diverse in styles, subjects, and demographics, the book is a mirror to the lived experience of nearly one century of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender poets.
Chapbook Open-reading Period Selection
We have enjoyed reading the 400+ chapbook manuscripts submitted during our open-reading period. We are excited to announce that we have selected for publication Fat for Our Stories by Vivian Faith Prescott, forthcoming spring 2024!
Born and raised on the small island of Wrangell, Alaska, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan, Vivian Faith Prescott lives and writes at her family’s fishcamp. She’s a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of the first LGBTQIA group on the island. She’s the author of several poetry collections and works of non-fiction and fiction. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she co-hosts the award-winning Planet Alaska Facebook page and the Planet Alaska column appearing in the Juneau Empire.
We would like to honorably mention the following poets, whose manuscripts stood out:
— Jonathan Conley for Deadheading
— Richard Jordan for The Squannacook at Dawn
— James Scruton for Now Serving Customer Zero
— Don Thompson for Indelible
— André Le Mont Wilson for Landfill
Our next open-reading period for poetry chapbooks will be from December 21 to March 19.
Ryler Dustin's Something Bright
Congratulations to Ryler Dustin on Something Bright being a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in the chapbook category! Many poems in the chapbook are part of a longer manuscript, Trailer Park Psalms, which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
