Tupelo Press
AN INDEPENDENT LITERARY PRESS
New & Forthcoming
Edited by Kristina Marie Darling
An ideal supplemental text for courses in creative writing, professional development, leadership studies, management studies, and publishing, with strategies for leadership- and community-building within academia and beyond its boundaries.
This book offers a practical guide to building community, fostering collaboration, and inspiring generosity through the creative arts. This collection of original essays features an accomplished roster of contributors with backgrounds in diverse fields, including literary translation, magazine editing, publishing, higher education, and curriculum design. By featuring successful writers who represent such a wide range of skillsets and career paths, this book helps students envision themselves as leaders in the university and well beyond its boundaries.
In a cultural moment where graduates often seek meaningful careers outside of academia, this essay collection also offers an introduction to alt-ac career paths and the unique opportunities for effecting social change in these roles. Focusing on techniques that have broad applications for high school teachers, nonprofit leaders, community outreach organizations, and college classrooms, each chapter includes an original essay from a contemporary writer, editor, or nonprofit leader in the arts, culminating in a set of exercises for individuals and groups, which focus on empathy, citizenship, and community stewardship.
by Ángel García
Through one state to another, from one country to the next Indifferent Cities traverses both distance and time to reconcile the most confounding reality of family: our people, sometimes, are the people we know least. Utilizing forms such as ekphrasis and epistolary, the collection sources photographs, postcards, and official documents as well as rumor, suspicion, and supposition to uncover the consequences, by choice or circumstance, of migration and immigration between Mexico and the United States across four generations.
Surveying the terrain of what one knows and does not know, what one inherits and disinherits, Indifferent Cities wrestles with every departure, each arrival, and the author’s inevitable return to determine where and to who he belongs.
by Carrie Olivia Adams
Three sequences of poems engaging with deserts, consumerism, Alaskan ice, religious icons, and more.
The poems collected in The Book of Marys and Glaciers traverse both the psychological and physical landscape to explore the too-muchness and overwhelm that categorizes our demand-driven age. The longest series, “Dust Cover,” is a meditation on deserts of all kinds—geographic, urban, celestial, domestic, and linguistic. The poems themselves enact their own ideas of space and emptiness, building to a work that grain after grain becomes heavy as a whole. In contrast, the title sequence “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” is an expansive work of feminist ecopoetics that asks questions about the role of women as mothers, religious figures, friends, and lovers in a society that rarely makes room for quietude anymore.
Altogether, the poems are controlled, precise investigations and interrogations of the ideas and images we take for granted.
by Jennifer Militello
A hybrid collection blending historical research and contemporary essays to consider the nature of oppressive marriage and gender inequity.
Composed as a lab notebook recording various surgeries, autopsies, and experiments, Identifying the Pathogen tells the story of a scientist on an obsessive quest to document an ailment that resists classification. The book considers the body in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, woven through with the story of Anna Morandi Manzolini—an eighteenth-century Italian anatomist and artist who struggled to support a husband suffering from depression—as well as several essays detailing accounts of a ruptured appendix, a splintered cello, and an ill-fated rock climbing excursion.
by Janée Baugher
While the poems in The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles can be enjoyed individually, as a whole this book reads like an autobiography of what Baugher imagined Andrew Wyeth’s creative life to be. She employs the footnote form to write a book-length narrative of art-influenced (ekphrastic) poems in which the Andrew Wyeth character chronicles his internal musings. The sixty-three Wyeth paintings that influenced these poems (dated 1938 through 2008) are the ones in which Baugher delighted in how the quotidian is made tender—a white sheet drying outside on the line or sunflowers’ shadows against a house. As for her writerly process, studying the work of this particular artist was a decades-long meditative practice of deep-looking, a method by which Baugher detaches from her ego. Wyeth’s paintings, drawings, and watercolors became portals through which Baugher could explore linguistic possibilities and invent worlds beyond her immediate awareness.
by John James
A collection that combines fixed poetic forms with long-form meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene.
Extinction Song begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive to the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.
by Diana Cao
Slipstream is a bracing, intimate, and formally adventurous debut that moves with equal grace through personal memory, inherited history, myth, and the ambient technologies of contemporary life. Diana Cao’s poems braid ancient Chinese legend, family migration, illness, love, and grief with moon landers, algorithms, privacy policies, and online ritual, creating a lyric field where the ancestral and the digital speak fluently to one another. The book is formally restless and assured. Sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, fables, and linked sequences feel conversational rather than ornate, their intelligence worn lightly, their music precise and unforced. Throughout, Cao writes with a clarity that never flattens complexity: humor and vulnerability coexist with philosophical rigor; tenderness is sharpened, not softened, by attention to politics, history, and care. What emerges is a voice attuned to relational life in all its registers—daughterhood, friendship, desire, citizenship, species— asking how to live, love, and remain lucid inside systems that both sustain and estrange us. Slipstream is a book of uncommon range and emotional intelligence, one that feels fully of this moment while remaining in deep, living conversation with the past.
Edited by Jennifer Jean
A bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by forty women poets from eleven Arab nations.
A project of the Her Story Is (HSI) collective, led by Iraqi and American women writers and artists, Other Paths for Shahrazad features poems curated by the Iraqi contingent of HSI. Each poem was cotranslated by HSI members and collaborators from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Canada, and the United States.
The anthology is arranged so that the poems are in dialogue with each other, rather than separated into stark sections according to theme, region, or author, so that the reader experiences it as they experience a standard collection of poetry: as a potent journey, as poems speaking to poems.
Marvels
A Literary Tarot Deck for Writing Inspiration
At your fingertips are all the creative energy from authors and their books from the library of twenty-three years of passionate publishing that is Tupelo Press! Sift through the visual and verbal gems excerpted from their covers and pages, let your eyes feast and your imagination spark! Whatever question or silence you bring to the deck, the deck will respond to, in verse and image. You have only to be open to the possibilities!
This exquisite, layered, 78-card tarot-size deck is a perfect instrument for poets and writers of all genres, creators, artists, and anyone who is looking for unusual and diverse visual and literary inspiration! Consider it an oracular opportunity to enliven your craft.
Please consider each card as a portal into the images and language of its corresponding book of poetry, including tantalizing poem excerpts and cover art from our beloved Tupelo collection.
We offer this guidebook to more deeply connect you with our authors and books. It lists card name, author, book title, publication year, poems the quotes come from, and to further animate the work, evocative words drawn from within each book.
Magic doesn’t follow rules, but we include suggestions for different card spreads so you can easily get started using this oracle deck. Shuffle the cards between your fingers and pull six cards from the deck, then use the associated six-card spread for your unique divination for crafting. Or, pull a card a day for writing or artistic prompts based on image, color, words and phrases. If you are so moved, each author would love for you to further explore their work!
Open for Submissions
The Berkshire Prize for Poetry
January 1st – April 30th
Submit a previously unpublished, full-length poetry manuscript with a table of contents.
Judge: Beth Bachmann
The Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry includes a cash award of $3,000 in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 20 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion.
