Tupelo Press is proud and honored to select the following three manuscripts for publication from among an astonishment of deserving work submitted during our July 2014 Open Reading Period:
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram of Buffalo, New York for Personal Science
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is a 2014 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship. Her first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise, was selected by Claudia Rankine as the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award winner and published by Red Hen Press in 2012 and was a 2013 poetry nominee for the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for outstanding works of literature published by people of African descent. Her second book, a slice from the cake made of air, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Winner of the 2012 Phantom Limb Press chapbook contest, her chapbook cutthroat glamours was published in 2013. She is one-sixth of the poetry collective, Line Assembly. She has been in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Montana Artists’ Refuge, has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Bread Loaf Writers’ and is the recipient of a United States Embassy grant for a writing residency at the Ventspils Writers’ & Translators’ House in Ventspils, Latvia, in 2014. The 2009-2011 Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College, her poetry, prose, photography, and digital stories have received numerous awards and have appeared widely in journals such as Black Warrior Review, Callaloo, Cream City Review, Court Green, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, jubilat, Mid-American Review, Narrative Magazine, OH NO, Subtropics, Sou’wester, Tupelo Quarterly, Twelfth House, and more. She holds degrees in creative writing from the University of Utah where she is the current managing editor of Quarterly West, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently a Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellow at Ithaca College, where she teaches creative writing.
Juliet Rodeman of Columbia, Missouri, The Voice of That Singing
Juliet Rodeman writes us: “I live in Columbia, Missouri and taught at the University of Missouri for 22 years, studied with Larry Levis and was an intern when we launched The Missouri Review in the spring of 1978. I grew up on a farm in Missouri, one of 12 children. I credit my mother’s legacy: she worked in factories, on the farm, milked cows by hand, helped women in childbirth, sewed our clothes on her Singer foot-treadle sewing machine. She loved music, reading, writing; she kept books for a local insurance company. She completed the 8th grade. I treasure her poetry handbook with her handwritten poems of Keats, Shelly, and Wordsworth, a phenomenal woman.” Juliet Rodeman’s poems have appeared in The Poets: Anthology (Cera), Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, Ellipsis, Many Mountains Moving, Peregrine, Southern Poetry Review (Guy Owen Prize), the Mid-America Poetry Review, the American Poetry Review, the Anthology of New England Writers, the Antioch Review, and elsewhere.
Grant Souders of Denver, Colorado, for Service
Grant Souders is a writer and artist from the Rocky Mountain West. He is the author of the chapbook, Relative Yard (Patient Sounds, 2013), and a collaborative book with Nathaniel Whitcomb, A Singular Continent (Palaver Press, 2014). His work has appeared in the Boston Review, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, and other venues.
Please know that we received so many memorable and vibrant manuscripts that stake a serious claim of entitlement to publication, and so many, many manuscripts that had brilliant parts and pieces, yet hadn’t yet “jelled” as a book. We hope to see all of this work again. The Dorset Prize is on now. It’s read anonymously, and this year’s judge is Edward Hirsch. On now, too, is the Snowbound Chapbook Award, this year judged by Lia Purpura.
So many poets believe that Not Getting Selected is the same as Rejection. Not so, though of course it may feel that way. We read and fall in love with so very many books, and there must be a good 50 submissions I’d take today if we had the time and money. Therefore, it’s so important for poets to keep the manuscripts coming back, to keep them in front of us. It’s a vital part of the process of discovery and rediscovery.
The July Open Reading Period at Tupelo Press is not a contest and therefore we don’t specify “finalists” or “semi-finalists.” However, we do very much want to single out several manuscripts that we felt deserving of special mention this time around. Think of these as “Honorable Mentions” all on the table right up to the final minute (and so many others, nearby, calling to us).
Jose Alvergue of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, for précis
Brandon Amico of Manchester, New Hampshire, for Green
Talvikki Ansel of Westerly, Rhode Island, for Somewhere in Space
Geoffrey Babbitt of Geneva, New York, for Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light
Justin Boening of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for Not On the Last Day, But on the Very Last
Alice B. Fogel of Acworth, New Hampshire, for A Doubtful House
Rebecca Foust of Kentfield, California, for Paradise Drive
Austin La Grone of Sweden, for Pinch-Bug in the Go-Go Boot
Michael Homolka of New York, New York, for Family
Rafiq Kathwari of New York, New York, for In Another Country
Joy Manesiotis of Redlands, California, for Revoke
Diane Martin of Graton, California, for Hue & Cry
Sawnie Morris of Rancho de Taos, New Mexico, for Her, Infinite
Paul Portugues of Los Osos, California, for But For Fortune
Stephanie Schlaifer of St. Louis, Missouri, for Clarkson Street Polaroids
Peter Shippy of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, for My Rugged Company
John Surowiecki of Amston, Connecticut, for Janice, Who Was Tall
Molly Tenenbaum of Seattle, Washington, for Exercises to Free the Tongue
Leslie Ullman of Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, for The You That All Along Has Housed You: A Crown Meditation
Ronald Wallace of Madison, Wisconsin, for For Dear Life
Sharon Wang of Chicago, Illinois, for Republic of Mercy