Announcing the Preliminary Readers for the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize

 

 

We’re pleased to announce the preliminary readers for our 2018 Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. These talented writers will help choose which manuscripts should be honored as finalists and forward on to our final judge.


Preliminary Readers for the 2018 Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize

 

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren; and several chapbooks. She is the winner of the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award through the Hawaii Council for the Humanities, Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prize on six occasions. Her poems have appeared in various journals including The Laurel Review, AGNI, Blackbird, Tampa Review, Action Yes, Drunken Boat, Barrow Street and The Kenyon Review. Collaborative poems with poet, Joshua Gottlieb Miller have recently appeared on Verse Daily. Her translations of the poetry of Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay, 1892-1979) and Mario Domínguez Parra are available through Poetry Salzburg Review. She teaches online with the Poetry Barn.

 

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Claudia Cortese is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her first full-length collection, WASP QUEEN (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), explores the privilege and pathology, the trauma and brattiness of suburban girlhood. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast Online, The Offing, and Sixth Finch, among others. She is also a book reviewer at Muzzle Magazine. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio and lives in New Jersey, where she teaches at Montclair State University.

 

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Noah Falck is an author, poet, and educator. He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, and attended the University of Dayton. He is author of the poetry collection Snowmen Losing Weight as well as several chapbooks including Celebrity Dream Poems, Life As A Crossword Puzzle, & Measuring Tape for the Midwest. He has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, The Ohio State University, and Antioch Writers’ Workshop. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poets.org, and has been anthologized in Poem-A-Day 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abrams Books, 2015). For ten years, he taught elementary school, and currently spends his summers mentoring young writers as a faculty member in the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. Now living in Buffalo, New York he works as Education Director at Just Buffalo Literary Center and curates the Silo City Reading Series, a multimedia poetry series in a 130-foot abandoned grain elevator.

 

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Toby Martinez de las Rivas was born in 1978. His first collection, Terror, appeared in 2014. His second, Black Sun, will be published by Faber & Faber in 2018.

 

 

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Michael Robins is the author of four collections of poetry, including In Memory of Brilliance & Value (Saturnalia Books, 2015) and People You May Know (Saturnalia Books, 2020). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Fence, Forklift, Ohio, Hubbub, Mississippi Review, Pinwheel, and Powder Keg Magazine. For more information, visit www.michaelrobins.org

 

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Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, Henk Rossouw has poems in The Paris Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Massachusetts Review, and Boston Review. His book-length poem Xamissa was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and the Colorado Prize for Poetry—excerpts are forthcoming in Blackbird and in the anthology Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press). He’s also published nonfiction in The Threepenny Review, criticism in Boston Review, and short fiction in Tin House. Henk earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2017, he graduated with a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston.

 

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Shelly Taylor is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Lions, Remonstrance (Coconut Books Braddock Book Prize, 2014) and Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2010). The anthology Hick Poetics, co-edited with Abraham Smith, is out from Lost Roads Press (2015). Recent work appears in Guernica’s “The Future of Language” special issue.

 

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Allison Titus lives in Richmond, VA. Her debut novel, The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing To Do With Fire, was recently published (Etruscan Press, 2014) and a new book of poems, The True Book of Animal Homes, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Press. Her first book of poems is Sum of every lost ship (CSU Poetry Center, 2010) and a chapbook, Instructions From the Narwhal, won the BOOM chapbook prize and was published by Bateau Press in 2007. Recent poems have appeared in A Public Space, Boston Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast and Tin House. She co-edits the poetry journal Handsome, and in 2011 was awarded a poetry fellowship from the NEA.

 

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