Owen Lewis receives national recognition through the NEW YORK CITY BIG BOOK AWARD®!
The NYC BIG BOOK AWARD recognized Field Lightin the category of poetry as a DistinguishedFavorite.
The competition is judged by experts from different aspects of the book industry, including publishers, writers, editors, book cover designers and professional copywriters. Selected award winners and distinguished favorites are based on overall excellence.
Field Light (Dos Madres Press) is a book of and about the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Written as a unified work, with some sections is prose and dramatic formats, it encompasses the social, cultural, and political histories of an area known for its artists and social justice. The voices of W.E.B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Mumbet (first slave freed in Massachusetts in 1781), Daniel Chester French (sculptor of the Lincoln memorial), Norman Rockwell and his last political paintings, Hawthorne, Melville, and nearby writers such as Stanley Kunitz and Chris Gilbert form parts of this collage-like work that asks how we can know can know and enter history, how the self expands when personal and public history meet.
Sign-up for the open mic will be open ten minutes before the reading using the chat box function on Zoom; each participant will read ONE brief poem (no longer than a page). Limit 12 readers.
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other journals, his work appears in the American Journal of Poetry, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, and Tar River Poetry. Robert is poetry editor with Indolent Books based in Brooklyn, and recently retired from a career as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Links to purchase The Unbuttoned Eye can be found at robertcarr.org
Hannah Larrabee’s collection, Wonder Tissue, won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for a 2019 Massachusetts Book Award. She has a recent chapbook of epistolary poems exploring climate change and spirituality out from Nixes Mate Press, and new poems in Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic just released by Lily Poetry Review. Hannah has written poetry for the James Webb Space Telescope program at NASA, and she’ll be sailing around Svalbard in the Arctic Circle with artists and scientists in the fall of 2021. Here’s the link to buy Wonder Tissue directly from Airlie Press: http://www.airliepress.org/wonder-tissue
David P. Miller’s collection, Sprawled Asleep, was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. Poems have recently appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Seneca Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Constellations, Denver Quarterly, The Lily Poetry Review, Unlost, and Northampton (UK) Review, among others. His poem “Add One Father to Earth” was awarded an Honorable Mention by Robert Pinsky for the New England Poetry Club’s 2019 Samuel Washington Allen Prize competition. To purchase Sprawled Asleep, contact David Miller at dpmiller1955@outlook.com
Julie Danho’s first full-length collection, Those Who Keep Arriving, won the 2018 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press and was published on September 15, 2020. Poems from the book have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, and New Ohio Review as well as featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Her chapbook, Six Portraits, received the 2013 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the MacColl Johnson Fund. Julie has an M.F.A. from Ohio State University and works as an editor in Providence, Rhode Island.
“In Julie Danho’s Those Who Keep Arriving, the personal is political and the political is terrifying. Danho faces this terror and transcends it to make stunning poems about creating a home and family. She often employs the ekphrasis mode, seeing well-known visual pieces anew, using them as vehicles for exploration. She also writes her own character studies in American Landscape and other forms. In “Abstraction,” a sonogram is imagined as art on a wall called “Moon, Clouds, / Volcano Taken From Above.” The glittering surfaces of her elegant poems are as fascinating as their substance.”
—Denise Duhamel
“A first full-length collection in name only, this is mature, polished work that consistently moves past the anticipated ending and discovers, in that excavated place or moment, where the significant truth so often lies. From the small pleasures of donut pajamas and pink bathrooms to the anxieties of “It’s Terrible What’s Happening There” and “When the First Father Dies,” Julie Danho shows range and depth. It’s been a pleasure to be among the first to read these moving poems.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Samantha Kolber 802-477-3131 kolbersam@gmail.com
Announcing the Publication of Montpelier Poet’s Debut
“Birth of a Daughter” by Samantha Kolber is available now
MONTPELIER, Vt. — Samantha Kolber is an award-winning poet who edits the poetry series at Rootstock Publishing. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, where she also coordinates events and marketing for Bear Pond Books, and is the mother to an 18-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. “Birth of a Daughter,” a poetry chapbook [small book] published by independent publisher Kelsay Books in Utah, is Kolber’s debut.
“Birth of a Daughter is an honest and vivid portrait of new motherhood. It is a chapbook about intimacy and love, both for the child and for the self. ‘There is a world at my fingertips. / Or, I am the world — fingertipped’ Kolber writes in her poem ‘A(u)reola.’ These poems are a beautiful witness to that common, yet utterly profound occurrence of birth,” says Bianca Stone, author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief and A Little Called Pauline.
“In Birth of a Daughter, Samantha Kolber deftly reveals the private world of pregnancy and birth—the middle of the night and light of day worries about safety, connection, and intimacy, weighing what shifts, writing, ‘I am marked. I am one becoming two, becoming one / again…my body deceives me.’ Indeed, these poems are brave in their accounting of the pregnant, birthing body and the realities of mothering, the territory we enter—‘oh, these worlds we are now / you and I.’ Dailiness and milestones merge here, bringing us on a journey that is part emotional travelogue, part wonder, part weighing of generations and of our times, and part arrival at the precise awareness that, ‘I am witness. I am mother.’ Kolber’s voice is an important one, honoring what is often kept hidden,” says Kerrin McCadden, author of Keep This to Yourself.
Birth of a Daughter is available to purchase at Bear Pond Books and wherever books are sold (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop) and the publisher’s website, www.kelsaybooks.com.
A virtual book launch reading co-sponsored by Bear Pond Books and the Kellogg-Hubbard Library is scheduled for October 9th.
To request an interview, virtual reading with the author, or a review copy of the book, please contact the author through her website, www.samanthakolber.com.
Release Date: September 1, 2020 / 42 pages / 6×9 / ISBN: 9781952326363 / $16.00 / Poetry Distributed by Ingram and Kelsay Books
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About Samantha Kolber
Samantha Kolber has received a Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and a Vermont Poetry Society prize. She has published in many journals and anthologies, including Hunger Mountain, Poems2Go, Mom Egg Review, and PoemCity. She received her MFA from Goddard College and completed post-grad work at Pine Manor College’s Solstice MFA Program. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, where she coordinates events and marketing for Bear Pond Books and is the Poetry Series Editor for Rootstock Publishing. She volunteers with PoemCity, a program of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. “Birth of a Daughter” (Kelsay Books, 9/1/20) is Kolber’s first book. Read and listen to her poems at her website, samanthakolber.com.
Poems on Postcards Contest & A Preview This contest merges poetry with postcards. This new Peterborough Poetry Project contest has begun and ends September 25th. See the “Poems on Postcards … Read more
