Sweet Beast by Gabriella R. Tallmadge is the winner of the 2020 Lousie Bogan Award selected by Sandy Longhorn.
Gabriella R. Tallmadge is a
Latinx writer and educator from San Diego, California. She holds degrees
in English, Creative Writing, and Counseling. She is also certified in Mental
Health Recovery and Trauma-Informed Care by San Diego State University.
Gabriella’s poetry has received awards from the Hedgebrook Writer in Residence
Program, the Community of Writers Workshop, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center
for the Arts, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has
previously appeared in journals such as
The Adroit Journal, The Georgia Review, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Mid-American
Review, and Passages
North. To learn more, visit www.grtallmadge.com.
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Songbox by Kirk Wilson is the winner of the 2020 Trio Award selected by Malena Mörling.
Kirk Wilson’s work
in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction is widely published in journals including New England Review, Southern Indiana Review,
Idaho Review, Crazyhorse, Eclipse, and others, and in anthologies such as The 64 Best Poets (Black Mountain
Press), This Side of the Divide
(Baobab Press), New Millennium Writings
(New Millennium), and others. His awards include an NEA Fellowship and prizes
in all three genres. His past publications include The Early Word, a poetry chapbook from Burning Deck press, and Unsolved, a true crime book published in
six editions in the US and UK. Kirk’s website is www.KirkWilsonBooks.com.
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Third Winter in Our Second Country by Andres Rojas, forthcoming fall 2021
Andres Rojas is the author of the chapbook Looking for What Isn’t There (Paper Nautilus Press Debut Series Winner, 2019) and the
audio-only chapbook The
Season of the Dead (EAT Poems, 2016). His poetry has been
featured in the Best New Poets series and has appeared in, among others, AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review,
Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and Poetry Northwest.
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The Traditional Feel of the Ballroom by Hannah Gamble, forthcoming fall 2021
Hannah Gamble is a poet, essayist, screenwriter, and director. Her
first book of poems, Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, won the
National Poetry Series in 2011. In 2014, she received the Ruth Lilly/ Dorothy
Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is the writer,
director, and executive producer of the Chicago-based webseries Choose
Me: An Abortion Story, which was selected for several national and
international film festivals, winning the Award of Excellence for a TV Show
from the Montreal Independent Film Festival in 2020.
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“In You Do Not Have to Be Good Madeleine Barnes has crafted a beautiful and luminous book of lyrics out of the grit and gristle of lived experience. This ‘scarred’ yet ‘flowering’ collection is lit from within by the poet's fierce resilience and faith in the redemptive potential of love. Barnes is a poet who attends to the breaking and broken body while never losing sight of the ‘body’s impossible blessings.’ ‘Change is your flint/use it to renew,’ she writes, ‘Say it:/you want to live.’ I am grateful for Barnes’s powerful voice singing clear light into the darkness we inhabit. Hers is a searing, necessary debut.”
—Deborah Landau
“Madeleine Barnes generously reaches toward painful places that many poets are afraid to touch. Organizing her book around a sequence of absolving principles, she enacts a forgiveness journey, without false consolation; instead, she speaks in praise of tenacious embroidery, steadfast retrieval, destinationless self-assemblage, and a pleasing neutrality, as if she were looking at disaster, or at daily life, through a scrim that gave some of the sad information but kept the viewer safely unseen. The book, an artfully composed act of ambiguous witness, addresses a ‘you’—a compassionate reader who will feel, as I do, grateful to Barnes for her high level of craft, wisdom, and emotional resourcefulness.”
—Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Camp Marmalade
“A wonderfully idiosyncratic logic animates Madeleine Barnes's debut collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good: half spirit, half inner speech. The poems take shape in the space between the dystopia of a real world and the utopia of a world the speaker longs for and valiantly wills into being: ‘I wish the sirens were remnants of churchbells, cymbals, second-hand static,’ she says. Caritas and death confront each other in ‘the sting of how easily we are forgotten.’ Through the poem ‘Vulnerary,’ I learned that a ‘vulnerary’ is something used to heal a wound, a definition that also applies to this powerful new voice.”
—Catherine Barnett
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