Alix Anne Shaw
Russell Jaffe (and Celestine Jaffe)
Kay Gabriel
David Pritchard
We received an astonishing group of submissions this summer through our open reading period–really, the best manuscripts we’ve ever had. And we made a lot of really heart-breaking decisions winnowing down the field. We decided, in the end, on three truly excellent chapbooks: Alix Anne Shaw’s “Contingent,” Russell Jaffe’s “La Croix Water,” and Kay Gabriel and David Pritchard’s “Impropria Persona.” And don’t forget about Cean Gamalinda’s amazing scroll poem, which we’re publishing really soon! Find more info about our new authors — and the finalists from the reading period — below:
Alix Anne Shaw is the author of two poetry collections: Dido in Winter (Persea 2014) and Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize (Persea 2007). Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Harvard Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, and New American Writing. She is also a visual artist. Her work can be viewed online at anneshaw.org. We’ll publish her chapbook, “Contingent” in the early summer of 2016.
Russell Jaffe is a poet, artist, internet junk seller, and teacher living in Chicago, IL. He is the author of the poetry collections INTROVERT // EXTROVERT (Punk Hostage, ’15), and This Super Doom I Aver (Poets Democracy, ’13), as well as the online chapbook (accompanied by pushpins and balloons) (The Red Ceilings, ’12). He is the former editor of Strange Cage, a poetry press, and emcee of its reading series. He has been drinking seltzer since he was 6 and his daughter Celestine, nearly 2, drinks it now. You can him on Instagram (russelljaffe) or play him in Chess Time (ILikeToEatScones). We’ll publish his chapbook at the end of the summer
Kay Gabriel is a student in the Classics PhD program at Princeton University where she studies ancient Greek drama and its reception. She completed her B.A. at Columbia University and won a Euretta J. Kellett fellowship for postgraduate study at Cambridge, where she wrote a master’s thesis on the fragments of Sappho and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.Her poetry has appeared, or will, in Industrial Lunch and TINGE, and her academic criticism in Transgender Studies Quarterly. She is a co-editor of Vetch: A Journal of Trans Poetry and Poetics.
David W. Pritchard is one of the members of the editorial central committee of INDUSTRIAL LUNCH, a magazine of poetry and visual art. He studies modern poetry and political economy at UMass Amherst, the same place where he received his MFA in poetry writing. David is the author, with Greg Purcell, of the chapbook More Fresh Air (Industrial Lunch, 2015). His poetry and prose has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Incessant Pipe, Tammy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. He doesn’t think Utopia is a bad word. We’ll publish David and Kay’s chapbook early in 2017, most likely.
In addition, we selected five finalists:
Alexander Dickow — “Not to Mention”
Reynorman Escobar — “Dyslexia”
Emma Heldman — “Collateral From the Unknown”
Mark McCloughan — “M | M”
Carleen Tibbetts — “Datacylsm”
Congratulations to all the finalists and thank you again to everyone who submitted!