Accepted & Forthcoming in 2026/7

Porkbelly Press is pleased to announce the following chapbook manuscripts have been accepted, and these books will join PP’s 2026/7 lineup of new releases!

POETRY

Seeds of Metals and Gems by Hilda Downer

The Power of the Plastic Fork: A Daughter’s Highly Unorthodox Kaddish by Debbie Feit

griefnotes by Audrey Gidman

Fragments of Myself by Fay L. Loomis

My Blood Must Have Something to Do with Me by Trinity Tibe

trans x brca metaphysics by Sasha Weiss

Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth by Ren Wilding

Still Waters by Juliette Zhu

Thank you to all of the poets & authors who took the time to submit and shared work this reading period. We had so many wonderful manuscripts to choose from. Narrowing down to just 8 was incredibly difficult, and we hope you’ll enjoy these books as much as we do.

If you’re interested in submitting work to Porkbelly Press, we’ll read for micro chapbooks in July 2025!

Accepted & Forthcoming in 2025/6

Porkbelly Press is pleased to announce the following chapbook & micro chapbook manuscripts have been accepted, and these books will join PP’s 2025/6 lineup of new releases!

POETRY

touching grass by Mukethe Kawinzi

where the bluegrass grows, june 1916 by Sarah Josephine Pennington

The Sword Swallowers by Emily F. Kerlin

Texas Flood by Robert Okaji

FICTION

The Uses of Hardness, the uses of softness by Sarah Beddow

Thank you to all of the poets & authors who took the time to submit and shared work this reading period. We’ll read again for chapbooks in January 2025—micro chapbooks subs open in July 2025.

Also forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2024/5 (as of this post):

POETRY

dream about an uncle by miles a.m. collins-sibley

The Woman, The River by Sayuri Ayers

A Few Mythic Paths by Mari Ness

Mascara, Boobs, & Headbands by Susan Milchman

Notes on how the wolf resuscitates by Paris Jessie

There Are No Filipinos in Mississippi by Noreen Ocampo

Arizona is in its 28th year of drought by Brekken Carns

FICTION

For Every Tower, a Princess by Kathryn Kulpa

HYBRID

Self-Talk by Esinam Bediako

Accepted/Forthcoming in 2024

Porkbelly Press is pleased to announce the following chapbook & micro chapbook manuscripts have been accepted, and these books will join PP’s 2024/5 lineup of new releases!

POETRY

Mascara, Boobs, & Headbands by Susan Milchman

Notes on how the wolf resuscitates by Paris Jessie

There Are No Filipinos in Mississippi by Noreen Ocampo

Arizona is in its 28th year of drought by Brekken Carns

FICTION

For Every Tower, a Princess by Kathryn Kulpa

Thank you to all of the poets & authors who took the time to submit and shared work this reading period. We’ll read again for chapbooks in January 2024—micro chapbooks subs open in July 2024.

Also forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2024 (as of this post):

POETRY

dream about an uncle by miles a.m. collins-sibley

Flown by B. Fulton Jennes

Ancestral-Wing by Sneha Subramanian Kanta

The Woman, The River by Sayuri Ayers

A Few Mythic Paths by Mari Ness

HYBRID

Self-Talk by Esinam Bediako

2023 Chapbook Acceptances!

Porkbelly Press is pleased to announce the following chapbook manuscripts have been accepted, and these books will join PP’s 2023/4 lineup of new releases!

POETRY

dream about an uncle by miles a.m. collins-sibley

Flown by B. Fulton Jennes

HYBRID
Self-Talk by Esinam Bediako

Thank you to all of the poets & authors who took the time to submit and shared work this reading period. We’ll read again for chapbooks in January 2024—micro chapbooks subs open in July 2023.

Also forthcoming from Porkbelly Press:

POETRY

in the aftermath by Jessica Ram

Ancestral-Wing by Sneha Subramanian Kanta

The Woman, The River by Sayuri Ayers

A Few Mythic Paths by Mari Ness

my lost womb still sings to me by Jane Ayres

Butt Stuff Flower Bush by Sam Herschel Wein

CREATIVE NONFICTION

The Maiden in the Moon by Sayuri Ayers

HYBRID

Eldest Daughter: a Break-up Story by Megan Cannella

Chapbooks Forthcoming from Porkbelly Press

Porkbelly Press is pleased to announce the following chapbook manuscripts have been accepted, and these books will join our 2022/3 lineup of new releases!

POETRY

in the aftermath by Jessica Ram

Ancestral-Wing by Sneha Subramanian Kanta

The Woman, The River by Sayuri Ayers

A Few Mythic Paths by Mari Ness

my lost womb still sings to me by Jane Ayres

Butt Stuff Flower Bush by Sam Herschel Wein

CREATIVE NONFICTION

The Maiden in the Moon by Sayuri Ayers

HYBRID

Eldest Daughter: a Break-up Story by Megan Cannella

When We Were Birds by Suzanne Honda

Thank you to all of the poets & authors who took the time to submit and shared their work. The best thing about January 2022 was spending time with a queue full of good work.

These nine chapbooks will be released throughout this year and early next year as we discuss and gather art, print, trim, and bind. If you’d like to pre-order any, links are forthcoming.

Newly Accepted Micro Chapbooks for 2022

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Porkbelly Press is pleased to announce the following micro chapbooks are joining our lineup of forthcoming titles for 2022:

HYBRID

The Enby Manifesto by Danny McLaren

POETRY

Grant Me the Tooth by Michelle Seaman **

Rites of Passing by Verna Zafra-Kasala

** may be extended to chapbook length!

OTHER NEWS
Our first chapbook forthcoming in 2022, available for pre-order until release:

FICTION

Girl Detectives by Emily Capettini

CHAPBOOK SUBMISSIONS OPEN
Our chapbook reading period is now open. Due to a slightly late start this year, we’re reading all through January to 2 February, 2022. Guidelines here.

PRE-ORDERS
Pre-orders for forthcoming titles can be found in our Offerings menu & are included in book bundles where you name your selected titles, which are mailed to you as they’re bound and finished.

Accepted/Forthcoming as of May 1, 2021

Our current listing of forthcoming titles, including delayed (pandemic), scheduled, and freshly accepted manuscripts, both chapbooks and micro chapbooks:

POETRY

Go Wolf Hunter by Khadijah Lacina

Brown Boy by Nishat Ahmed

FICTION

Girl Detectives by Emily Capettini

CREATIVE NONFICTION

The Closeted Diaries by grace (ge) gilbert

The above chapbooks and following micro chaps are forthcoming:

POETRY

Eppur Si Muove by Stacey Balkun

Tissue Memory by Michelle Ortega

like everything else we loved by Sarah A. Chavez

FICTION

Into the Woods We Must Go by Jordan McNeil

Pre-orders, when available, are linked in our forthcoming titles. Release dates for all books are in the works as we discuss cover art.

2019 Chapbooks!

We’re honored to partner with the following poets & authors to bring their chapbook manuscripts into the world as handbound books in future:

POETRY

A Man Ain’t Nuthin’ by Jason McCall

Go Wolf Hunter by Khadijah Lacina

Titania in Yellow by Dayna Patterson

Brown Boy by Nishat Ahmed

We’re Doing Witchcraft by E. Kristin Anderson

She May Be a Saint by Sarah Nichols

Monkey Was Here by Jasmine An

HYBRID

Ever After the End Matter by Sarah Ann Winn

FICTION

Girl Detectives by Emily Capettini

The above chapbooks will join the following micros in 2019:

FLASH CREATIVE NONFICTION, POETRY, & EPHEMERA

Lucid: a Micro-Memoir by Kia Alice Groom

POETRY

Venus in Bloom by Wanda Deglane

Eppur Si Muove by Stacey Balkun

Pre-orders, when available, are linked in our forthcoming titles. Release dates for all books are in the works as we discuss cover art.

Thank you to everyone who sent a manuscript this year — we enjoy your words and your craft.

Pushcart Prize Nominations 2018

We’re pleased to nominate the following poems, from our 2018 line of chapbooks, for the Pushcart Prize & anthology. Congratulations to all the nominees!

“Filthy Woman Writes a Letter”
by Noor Hindi
from Diary of a Filthy Woman

“Omen”
by Maggie Woodward
from FOUND FOOTAGE

“Disarticulated” & “Extinct”
by Sara Ryan
from Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned

“How Darkness Enters a Body”
by Sarah Nichols
from How Darkness Enters a Body

“I Tell What Kind of Girl”
by Sally Rosen Kindred
from Says the Forest to the Girl

Diary of a Filthy Woman

$9.00

by Noor Hindi

DIARY OF A FILTHY WOMAN is shot through with desire, standing firm in its ground as protest, as prayer, as command. Hindi masterfully weaves vulnerability and strength, pain with sharp determination—she is tempered steel, she is flame, she is fierce in her direction: “Make a bonfire out of want. // Jump into it.” (Porkbelly Press, 2018)

16 pages
inkjet cover
open edition

Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned

$13.00

by Sara Ryan

Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press, 2018) is an investigation of the history and practice of taxidermy via hybrid text of poetry and micro-essay endnotes. In blood, bone, feather, Ryan weaves a spell to enchant the taxidermy enthusiast, museum explorer, poet—the curious. These pieces are a combination of tender & strange, delightful in their approach to the combination of grotesque & beautiful & trophy-keeping that makes up taxidermy—this practice of preservation. Ryan’s hybrid form is a deepening of the subject, the stitching of memory & curiosity & invention.

40 pages
inkjet cover
open edition

Found Footage

$13.00

by Maggie Woodward

Found Footage is visceral little book of freckled skin, fox-bellies, and sparrow blood. There are erasures scribbled out in pen and secrets released into the night—girl stories, horror stories, love stories, a little bit of each one ominous.: “this is how the story goes: there was a girl & / there was a river.” They feel like confessions pulled from a diary stained around the edges in blood and darker things, each one “fanged  (but lovely).” (Porkbelly Press, 2018)

44 pages
letterpress covers
numbered editions of 50

How Darkness Enters a Body

$9.00

by Sarah Nichols

“In this darkness, desire is safe,” begins the title poem for Sarah Nichols’ How Darkness Enters a Body. In this darkness, desire is safe. There are secrets here, confessions. The poet brings us to the photos of Diane Arbus, inspecting contact sheets and images, mining poems from silver embedded in emulsion. Black and white photographs transformed into ekphrastic lines, light and shadow, poet leading reader to artist to begin a conversation. The speaker’s voice is sure, whispering to us in the way Arbus’ images do, pools of darkness unexpected and edged, like shadows thrown under an eclipse. Confront her or take her hand—these and more choices are yours:  “Here is your tongue, sister. / Let me share it.”  (Porkbelly Press, 2018)

16 pages
inkjet cover
open edition

Says the Forest to the Girl

$13.00

by Sally Rosen Kindred

Kindred offers an invitation to join the wolf & the girl in the forest, to walk in this fairy tale land of Rapunzel, Little Red, and Sleeping Beauty. Here, the forest speaks. “Drink the world / you won’t admit you want—” it says, “This / is the story; to wake // you must claim it, crow-close in the telling. Climb / in.” She empowers these women, crow-touched and sharp as a tempered blade, realizing a “story where / the hard-skinned woman / carries thunder and bread / through the wood.” This is a chapbook of poems full of dandelion, ash, and bone—she asks each woman or girl to make a choice, to realize a choice is possible: “What is it that waits / inside her, a nest / or a knife, a huntsman / or an open door?” (Porkbelly Press, 2018)

40 pages
inkjet cover
open edition

Micro Chapbooks FORTHCOMING in 2019

We are delighted to say yes to three manuscripts this year, and we look forward to sharing them with you in 2019.

FLASH Creative nonfiction, poetry, & ephemera

Lucid: a Micro-Memoir by Kia Alice Groom

poetry

Venus in Bloom by Wanda Deglane

POETRY

Eppur Si Muove by Stacey Balkun

We were pleasantly surprised by the volume of submissions this year—we had so many it took an extra month to read through them. Thank you so much for your patience in our replies, for all of the fine manuscripts sent for us to read, and to our readers this year for stepping in to help narrow down the possibilities.

Each year we make new connections, discover new-to-us poets and fiction writers and essayists, and are astounded by the bravery, vulnerability, experimentation, and openness offered in the queue.

In the next few months, we’ll be posting more information to listings for each of these micros, adding listing pages, and choosing samples to share with you.

Sally Rosen Kindred's SAYS THE FOREST TO THE GIRL

This week we released Sally Rosen Kindred's Says the Forest to the Girl, a chapbook of modern fairy tale poems. I've been in love with her poetry since I purchased a copy of her Hyacinth Girl Press title Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (2013). You might also enjoy our anthology Bramble & Thorn (Porkbelly Press, 2017), which includes another of Kindred's poems which was nominated for a Rhysling Award. 

Kindred offers an invitation to join the wolf & the girl in the forest, to walk in this fairy tale land of Rapunzel, Little Red, and Sleeping Beauty. Here, the forest speaks. “Drink the world / you won’t admit you want—” it says, “This / is the story; to wake // you must claim it, crow-close in the telling. Climb / in.” She empowers these women, crow-touched and sharp as a tempered blade, realizing a “story where / the hard-skinned woman / carries thunder and bread / through the wood.” This is a chapbook of poems full of dandelion, ash, and bone—she asks each woman or girl to make a choice, to realize a choice is possible: “What is it that waits / inside her, a nest / or a knife, a huntsman / or an open door?” (Porkbelly Press, 2018)

Says the Forest's mixed media cover painting is "Subtle Bodywork" by Alexandra Eldridge. Each copy of the chapbook is trimmed down by hand and bound with linen thread, lightly waxed (beeswax).

RECOMMENDATIONS

You might also enjoy our anthology Bramble & Thorn (Porkbelly Press, 2017), which includes another of Kindred's poems which was nominated for a Rhysling Award. 

Other chapbooks to pair with this one: Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018) by Lindsay Lusby & Feeding the Dead (Porkbelly Press, 2017) by M. Brett Gaffney & Love Me Anyway (Porkbelly Press, 2018) by Minadora Macheret.

We offer book bundle specials, where you can order any 3 titles or any 5 titles at a pretty sweet discount.

ELSEWHERE

Also this week, one of Sally's poems is up at Kenyon Review Online: "When You Call My Body An Odd Thing." 

Elgin Award Nominations

The Elgin Award, hosted by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA), is for chapbooks & books of speculative poetry. This year, the following Porkbelly Press chapbooks received nomination:

Feeding the Dead

by M. Brett Gaffney

These poems are the knife edge, the hot blood, the wolf’s howl, and the fang of the girl who hunts him down. This book holds the haunted-house-horror and everything real underneath, the costume, the bruise after, the smoke curling in the heart of a hellhound. “After supper she pulls on boots, prepares her heart” and goes out to collect his “sharpest fang.” These poems are demons and strawberries and bones, and teeth, and agency, self, girl-power, woman-power—assertive figures preoccupied with agency, not beauty—not prettiness for the observer. This chapbook of poems is the bone-yard, the skeleton, the strength. “I am here to stay / … / I am just as real as anything else.” (Porkbelly Press, 2017)

28 pages
inkjet cover
open edition

Haunting the Last House On Holland Island, Fallen Into the Bay

by Sarah Ann Winn

This is a dream landscape and it is underwater, all the house-things, human-things curled in between blades of red seaweed and pearl-filled oyster. It is a shimmer of sunlight filtering through from the surface, the glimmer of something faceted buried in silt. This micro chapbook is exploration and memory, the way we risk ourselves to look deep in search of some half-forgotten treasure, something we’ll always go back for, no matter how far down. (Porkbelly Press, 2016)

20 pages
inkjet cover
open edition

Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem

by Kristi Carter

Carter’s work investigates the intersection of intergenerational trauma, survival, feminism, and power. Body-heavy and image-rich, these poems evoke a landscape of the scars and blood we carry with us, all the things that make up our lineage of memory and modes of recovery/survival/learning. It’s an intensely intimate series of poems about the claiming and finding of voice, body, and agency. “And ever since I anchored myself to the ground / and split off from myself, from the cracked husk / of girlhood finished, I return replenished. /  I return, to burn. / I return, with the wound / like a medal—in its gleam, how it sings.” (Porkbelly Press, 2017)

40 pages
screenprinted cover
numbered editions of 50

hiku [pull]

by James A. H. White

James A. H. White’s work feels at once breathless and intense, reaching to capture vivid blooms of a life-history in poems grown so intricately together that they’re tangled, almost inseparable. It is the story of mother and father, of identity and travel and seeking and ghosts both behind and before. This is a tessellation of light, color, memory and story, a gay son fitting the pieces of self together and offering it up in poems. Each poem feels like a secret, each leaves you wanting more. (Porkbelly Press, 2016)

24 pages
inkjet cover
open edition

Congratulations to the nominees & good luck! 

Nominations are made by members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy poetry association. If you're passionate about speculative poetry and have read something fantastic that you'd like to nominate in future (or vote in SFPA awards for nominated works), you can join at sfpoetry.com. Perks of membership include copies of Star*Line, the Rhysling anthology, & Dwarf Stars.