Tupelo Press Announces 

 July Open Reading Selections 2015

This year, Tupelo Press is grateful to the editors and publisher of 3:A Taos Press for joining us in a six-months process of reading and evaluating each of the submissions, which came to us in record numbers -- and record quality.

  

Tupelo Press will publish two of the submitted manuscripts, and 3:A Taos Press, which makes absolutely gorgeous books, will choose one more (that announcement coming soon). Tupelo Press will distribute all three books.

This year, Tupelo Press is proud and honored to select for publication:

Leprosarium by Lise Goett of Taos, New Mexico 

Leprosarium was the 2012 winner of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award in Poetry from the Poetry Society of America. Lise Goett's other awards include The Paris Review Discovery Award, The Pen Southwest Book Award in Poetry, the Capricorn Prize, the James D. Phelan Award, and The Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her first poetry collection, Waiting for the Paraclete (Beacon), as well as postgraduate fellowships from The Milton Center and the Creative Writing Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Image, Mandorla, and the Antioch Review.

and

A Certain Roughness in their Syntax by the contemporary Argentine poet Jorge Aulicino in translation by Judith Filc of Beacon, New York

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Judith Filc received a medical degree from Buenos Aires University, but decided instead to pursue a PhD in literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first of four volumes of poetry appeared while still a medical student. Judith's translations include poetry and fiction, public opinion research, women's health and rights, and scholarly work in a variety of fields. She has taught creative writing in both Argentina and the US, in English and Spanish. In 2002 she returned to the US as a visiting scholar at Columbia University and decided to settle in the Hudson Valley, New York where she lives with her husband and son.

Jorge Aulicino has played a key role in the Argentine and Latin American poetry scene for more than thirty years as a poet, translator, journalist, and editor. He has published twenty poetry books, among them, La caída de los Cuerpos (The Fall of the Bodies), Hombres en un Restaurante (Men at a Restaurant), La línea del Coyote (The Line of the Coyote), and Cierta dureza en la Sintaxis (A Certain Roughness in Their Syntax). He has translated the work of Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Passolini, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, John Keats, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore, among others. 

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 at least 100 submissions we'd publish 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 (and revision). 

Remember also that for this year's Dorset Prize (deadline, December 31 st) our judge, former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will read and choose from among the top 100 manuscripts received for the Dorset Prize (deadline, December 31st)! 

Although the July Open Reading Period at Tupelo Press is not a contest (and therefore we don't specify "finalists" or "semi-finalists") we do want to single out 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):

The Somatic Waver by Kristen George Bagdanov of Fort Collins, Colorado

Before by Jennifer Barber of Brookline, Massachusetts

Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics by Samiya Bashir of Portland, Oregon

Unburdened Blood, translations from the Spanish of poetry by Jeannette Clariond, by Curtis Bauer of Lubbock, Texas

Water Soluble Girls by Jessica Beyer of Baltimore, Maryland

Tramp by Joelle Biele of Ellicott City, Maryland

Technicolor by Michelle Brooks of Albuquerque, New Mexico

Acacia Road by Aaron Brown of Hutchinson, Kansas

Not Everything Is Lost by Deborah Brown of Warner, New Hampshire

A Strange Insomnia by Christina Cook of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Body of the World by Mary Easter of St. Paul, Minnesota

SCRAP: On Louise Nevelson by Julie Gad of Duluth, Minnesota

The Brighter House by Kim Garcia of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

Hum of Our Blood by Madelyn Garner of Denver, Colorado

Einstein's Imaginary Daughters by Jennifer Givhan of Albuquerque, New Mexico

heft and sing by Doyali Islam of Toronto, Canada

as burning leaves by gabriel jesiolowski of Seattle, Washington

Slow Scrape by Tanya Lukin-Linklater of  North Bay, Canada

The Stone in the Air, translations from the German of selected poems of Paul Celan, by Daniel Tobin of Boston, Massachusetts

The You That All Along Has Housed You: A Sequence by Leslie Ullman of Arroyo Seco, New Mexico

Republic of Mercy by Sharon Wang of Ridgewood, New York

Kinship by Matt Yurdana of Portland, Oregon

And so many others. Keep faith. Believe in your work. What you do as poets matters more in the world than even you know.

Jeffrey Levine

Tupelo Press