Out now: BEST DEBUT SHORT STORIES 2021 and a li'l microchap

Being that it is solidly, pumpkin spicédly autumn now, it is long past time to announce some fruits of the summer literary harvest!

Cover art by Sirin Thada, art direction by Nicole Caputo

The Best Debut Short Stories series is now in its fifth year. This annual anthology celebrates the winners of the PEN America Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, which honors twelve short story writers on their first-ever fiction publication.

I’m honored to be an official co-editor for the series, having been involved in some capacity since its inception in 2017. We celebrated with a new cover design, with art direction by Nicole Caputo and gorgeous original art by Sirin Thada. This year’s judges were Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote, honoring twelve debut writers and their debut stories:

“Force, Mass, Acceleration” (The Southern Review), Heather Aruffo
“Good Girls” (Barrelhouse), Lindsay Ferguson
“The First Time I Said It” (The Georgia Review), Isaac Hughes Green
“Maria” (Waxwing Magazine), Amy Haejung
“The Math of Living” (Virginia Quarterly Review), Nishanth Injam
“Transit” (Virginia Quarterly Review), Khaddafina Mbabazi
“Re:Frankie” (Porter House Review), Mackenzie McGee
“The Strong-Strong Winds” (adda), Mathapelo Mofokeng
“Salt” (Michigan Quarterly Review), Alberto Reyes Morgan
“The List” (Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art), Stanley Patrick Stocker
“Taxi” (Midwest Review), Pardeep Toor
“Mandy’s Mary Sue” (Sine Theta Magazine), Qianze Zhang

Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize is available here, and wherever books are sold. Catapult magazine is doing an interview series with all of the winners, which you can read here. Debut writers, nominations for the 2022 prize are open through November 15th, so ask your editor to nominate you if you’re eligible!

Digital micro-chap

Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe,” a wee chap of 10 poems, is available now via Ghost City Press.

Ghost City Press selected my digital micro-chapbook for inclusion in their 2021 Summer Series. If you're interested in poems as meditations, poems as trances, Baba Yaga, hacking into the mainframe, and repurposed public domain images, come on down! Available here for the low price of FREE, or you can hit that donate button.

Preorders open for THEY SAID from Black Lawrence Press!

Image courtesy of BlackLawrence.com

Happy National Poetry Month! I am pleased as punch to show you this beautiful-weird new cover for They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing—and more pleased than punch to announce that preorders are now open!! 

Poet-friend Isobel O'Hare and I co-wrote a poem that appears in here. You can read about our process in the back of the book once it makes its way to your hot little hands. The full list of contributors, advanced praise (including from the editors of ZYZZYVA—I swooned), and order link are in today's BLP announcement.

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Image courtesy of younginklings.org

In other Poetry Month news, Society of Young Inklings interviewed me as their resident poet for their monthly newsletter, the Ink Splat. You can read about me writing poems for online communities as a teen, gushing about Matthew Zapruder, and being inspired by young writers here.

Second edition of Inevitable What released

I am pleased to announce that after a lovely limited-edition run with Sad Spell Press, my chapbook, Inevitable What, lives on in a new format! The second edition is available as a paperback and an ebook (for Kindle, Nook, and the whole slew), featuring several new watercolor illustrations by my fabulous collaborating artist, Sirin Thada.

Laura Madeline Wiseman recently asked me about Inevitable What and other things over at The Chapbook Interview. Give it a peep here.

Happy holidays!

Publication announcement: "Cosmologies" in Vine Leaves anthology

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Image courtesy of vineleavespress.com

Today is the official release date for this handsome coffee-table book, Vine Leaves Literary Journal: A Collection of Vignettes from Across the Globe. It includes "Cosmologies," a vignette I wrote some years ago in a creative writing class with Kate Evans.

The prompt was "you are an astronaut," and while many in my class wrote madcap sci-fi adventures, I thought about how children can believe they are anything. I wrote from the perspective of a mother recognizing that she can still create magic for her young son, but she won't always be able to.

The book of vignettes and photography is available to order at various sites here. If you, like me, are obsessive about adding books to the "to-read" list in Goodreads, you can find and add it here.

Annnnd stay tuned for another book-related announcement soon!