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

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.

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.