Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that we will publish three manuscripts submitted to us throughout this year’s Summer Open Reading Period.
The editors are grateful to have read (and reread) more than 1,100 Summer Open manuscripts that came to us, not only in record numbers, but in record quality—arriving at our doorstep from throughout the United States, and from every continent save the Arctic.
We also wish to honor a list of manuscripts that we found so very deserving, and have referred to as Other Manuscripts of Extraordinary Merit.
Please read on for those names. Final selections were made by Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Cassandra Cleghorn, Poetry Editor, and Jeffrey Levine, Artistic Director. Each of the selected poets will receive a $1,000 advance, as well as publication, publicity and distribution by Tupelo Press.
We are proud and honored to select for publication the following three manuscripts:
- Forever Mistaken for Ourselves, submitted by Jenny Grassl of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- AutoPortrait (as flotsam), submittedby Kirsten Kaschock of Baltimore, Maryland.
- Blue Selvage, submittedby Preeti Parikh of Cincinnati, Ohio.
About Our Three Selected Authors:
Jenny Grassl is a poet and visual artist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Ocean State Review, The Boston Review annual poetry contest, runner-up prize selected by Mary Jo Bang, and Heavy Feather Review. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Bennington Review, Lana Turner Journal, and many others. Her book, Magicholia, was published in 2024, from 3: A Taos Press.
The editors of Tupelo Press write in response to Jenny Grassl’s Forever Mistaken for Ourselves:
Jenny Grassl’s Forever Mistaken for Ourselves offers a powerful meditation on femininity, violence, and alterity. Reminiscent of the work of such luminaries as Laurie Sheck, Julie Story, Sara Vap, and Joanna Ruocco, Grassl’s poems reveal our beliefs about gender as charged, historically sedimented, and inherently unstable. “I took the Chantilly lantern inside each girl,” Grassl tells us, “once their only guide.” Grassl’s poems, as darkly oracular as they are visionary, raise pressing questions about the relationship between femininity, history and transformation: In what ways are we shaped by a past we did not choose? Is it ever possible to escape the master narratives that haunt us? Or must we create new possibilities within the frameworks we have inherited? As readers encounter a “hem of fire,” “iron dresses,” “bits of tulle and lawn clippings” Grassl effortlessly weaves the feminine with the monstrous, the willfully destructive, and the grotesque in poems as original as they are luminous and lyrical. This is a book you won’t forget.
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Kirsten Kaschock, a Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of five poetry books: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and Explain This Corpse (Lynx House Press). Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. Work from AutoPortrait (as Flotsam) is forthcoming from American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, and A Public Space.
In response to Kirsten Kaschock’s AutoPortrait (as flotsam), the editors of Tupelo Press write:
Kirsten Kaschock’s extraordinary sixth collection of poetry, AutoPortrait (as Flotsam) builds on a body of work that places postmodern techniques—hybrid forms, found forms, literary collage and assemblage—in the service of cultivating greater freedom for women and nonbinary people. For Kaschock, this freedom is at once intellectual, artistic, and sociopolitical. “I’d rather layer light than decipher it,” she writes, “This is maybe how an ocean acquires depths.” As she delineates her own creative genealogy, encompassing such figures as Marc Chagall, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, and many other powerful—and powerfully transformed—influences, Kaschock takes on difficult subjects—from reproductive rights to the gender politics of language—with elegance and grace. Ultimately, Kaschock reminds us that a more just society begins with freedom in language. “The underworld is worlds,” she reminds us, “In one of them, art is neither echo nor cloying moon. Its shine immaculate—.” This book is a formidable achievement. Brava!
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Preeti Parikh is a poet and essayist with a past educational background in medicine and a recent MFA from The Rainier Writing Workshop. A Kundiman fellow and National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant award and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award.
Preeti’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Margins, Zócalo Public Square, and other literary journals. Her writing is anthologized in Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2021 and 2022 editions), and The Last Milkweed (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). Preeti has been a Millay Arts resident and an AWP Writer to Writer Program mentee and has received staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Born and raised in India, she lives with her family in Ohio. Blue Selvage will be Preeti Parikh’s first published collection of poems.
The editors of Tupelo Press write in response to Preeti Parikh’s Blue Selvage:
Preeti Parikh’s groundbreaking Blue Selvage reminds us that a revolutionary message often requires new forms of discourse. As Parikh considers necessary questions of immigration, identity, and belonging, she skillfully invokes form as metaphor, as performance, as dramatization, as content. “What’s felt becomes the body, what’s draped becomes form,” she reminds us. While Blue Selvage encompasses such diverse rhetorical modes as the lyric, erasure, prose poetry, and templates that are not germane to poetry, Parikh’s work is unified by a remarkable singularity of voice and vision. These poems share a commitment to not only articulating the relationship between language and alterity, but forever refining the question. “Perhaps, a cloth shrouding bone and soft tissue reveals how it is the skin that is / perceived as boundary—boundary of the self, of us, and of the other,” Parikh writes. This is an important debut by an exciting new voice in contemporary poetry.
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A short message from the Editors:
We would also like to honor other manuscripts of extraordinary merit, but before we do, we wish to acknowledge we are all human, we writers, and so very tender when it comes to announcements like this. We tend (of course) to believe that not getting selected equals “rejection.” Not so. We fall in love with so many of the manuscripts we read (both full-length and chapbooks), many of which we would publish if we had the time and money, and we learn so much by reading all of the submissions. This is why it’s so important for you, as poets, to keep your work in front of us as well as other publishers you admire.
Please keep in mind that our Helena Whitehill Book Award (Ilya Kaminsky, final judge) is currently open to submissions until October 31st, 2024 at 11:59 PM ET. Our Dorset Prize (final judge TBD) is also currently open to submission through December 31st. We encourage you to let us see your work again.
Here now, a list of other Manuscripts of Extraordinary Merit:
Where Jasmine Grows by Dana Alsamsam of Somerville, Massachusetts.
West of Rooster Port by Christina Baptista of Newington, Connecticut.
Late Work Near Dark by Kate Bolton Bonnici of Los Angeles, California.
Diary: Poems by Maxine Chernoff of Mill Valley, California.
Scrolls for Blue Bottle Trees by Sarah Cheshire of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
In Plain Air by Jack Christian of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor—A Catalog by Catherine Cowles of Geneva, New York.
Crowd Noise by Stephen Danos of Portland, Oregon.
La Ruta by Jason Reblando and Joanne Diaz of Normal, Illinois.
What Used to Be Called Ruins by Fay Dillof of Berkeley, California.
A Potluck of Sorrows by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc of Portland, Maine.
Creation Myths by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher of Fort Collins, Colorado.
Rivermouth Shouting by Jean Gallagher of New York, New York.
Butcher by Kylie Gellatly of Providence, Rhode Island.
The Trades by Caroline Goodwin of Montara, California.
Bat Hour by Cynthia Hogue of Tucson, Arizona.
[Numeracy] by Catherine Imbriglio of Riverside, Rhode Island.
Mother labor art by Annie Kim of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Burning Index by Sarah Kruse of San Francisco, California.
On Weightlessness by Inkyoo Lee of Jersey City, New Jersey.
The Pleasure Divide by Jessica Lee of Portland, Oregon.
The Bougainvillea by Steve Kronen of Miami, Florida.
A White Horse Is Not a Horse by Angelo Mao of Charlottesville, Virginia.
No Earth But This by Brad Aaron Modlin of Kearney, Nebraska.
Deś দেশ ਦੇਸ਼ دیش देस by Sati Mookherjee of Bellingham, Washington.
#TheRebelSonnets by Bino Realuyo of New York, New York.
At Mercy Hospital by Mary O’Reilley of Vashon, Washington.
Name and Earth by Kylan Rice of Columbia, Missouri.
Slow Like Nowhere by Todd Robinson of Omaha, Nebraska.
Scroll Logic by Martin Rock of Solana Beach, California.
The Book of St. Niko by Matt Schroeder of Mechanicsville, Virginia.
Gigantic by Kent Shaw of Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
What Is Simple by Megan Shevenock of Los Angeles, California.
Cassandra Data by Sandra Simonds of Tallahassee, Florida.
Cryptoalchemy by Lian Sing of Johnson City, Texas.
Green Card by Jeddie Sophronius of Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Same World by Leah Souffrant of Brooklyn, New York.
Walking Back Into Night by Kim Sousa of Bayside, New York.
The Brothers, Perdendo and Perdendosi by Brian Trimboli of Nyack, New York.
Land of Light & Joy by Amish Trivedi of Elkton, Maryland.
Cloud Chamber by Matthew Tuckner of Salt Lake City, Utah.
Desire & Other Flightless Birds by Marc-Anthony Valle of St. Louis, Missouri.
Topside by Nance VanWinckel of Spokane, Washington.
Public House by Dylan Weir of Chicago, Illinois.
When the Thread Breaks, the Story’s Over by Emily Wolahan of San Francisco, California.
Hata Kamac by Abigail Ardelle Zammit of Lija, Malta.
Often You Light a Fuse to Prove You Won’t Explode by Corey Zeller of Syracuse, New York.
Congratulations to all of the poets whose exciting work gave us so many, many hours of pleasurable reading, not only those poets cited above, but all who submitted manuscript to our Summer Open Reading Period. We hope to see your work again!
Respectfully,
The Editors