No One Knows Their Blood Type: An Online Book Launch

Join us for the international online launch of the novel No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated by Hazem Jamjoum.

Find us Sunday, October 13, at 12 noon ET (Cleveland time), register here: https://tinyurl.com/NoOneKnows2024

Qs? Write h.plum [at] csuohio [dot] edu. Hope to see you!

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“There’s a remarkable coiled power to this slim novel—it moves in unexpected directions, its characters’ lives tossed about by the collision of history and personality.” KAMILA SHAMSIE

“No One Knows Their Blood Type rejects the impulse to hyper-explain Palestinian life, instead taking the reader into the inner lives of characters shaped by the exile and instability that have come to define the Palestinian condition. There are no perfect victims here. Instead, we get intimate, honest portraits of actual human beings, in their kindness and cruelty, their failure and triumph. The masterful English translation is a triumph of language over trauma. Through and through, this is a story told by Palestinians, for Palestinians. Now, more than ever, we deserve to tell our stories.” EMAN ABDELHADI

“No One Knows Their Blood Type offers a gripping, textured vision of what it can feel like to be human amidst colonial dehumanization. In this novel, the deep disruptions of war and oppression sharpen universal family complexities and prod the young Palestinian women at the novel’s center to examine their own places in the world. I loved this tender, troubling book.” KATHARINE BEUTNER

2023/24 Lighthouse Poetry Series book selections

The CSU Poetry Center is delighted to announce that we’ve chosen Colleen O’Brien’s Reel and Vanesha Pravin’s Gold Country for publication.

Thank you to everyone who sent us manuscripts this year—it was a joy to spend time with your work and we’re grateful for your writing, readership, and support of small press publishing. Below you’ll find more information about our new authors as well as a list of other manuscripts from our open reading period we were particularly in awe of.  

COLLEEN O’BRIEN: REEL

FORTHCOMING 2025 

Colleen O’Brien is the author of the story collection All Roads (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press) and the poetry chapbook Spool in the Maze (New Michigan Press), which won the DIAGRAM chapbook contest. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, West Branch, and other journals, and her story “Charlie” won a Pushcart Prize. This fall, she will teach poetry and first-year writing as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Lehigh University.

VANESHA PRAVIN: GOLD COUNTRY

Forthcoming 2026

Vanesha Pravin is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Sarton Poetry Prize and the Golden Poppy Book Award. She is the author of Disorder (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Her poems have been anthologized in The Book of Poetry for Hard Times (Norton), and have appeared in Seneca Review, Slate, New Letters, Pleiades, Hanging Loose, Poetry Daily, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Phoebe, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of California.

OTHER MANUSCRIPTS WE LOVED:

Elaine Bleakney’s Take The Exit Then Exit; Ryan Bollenbach’s The Greening; Isabel Sobral Campos’s Sobriety Crystal / Sobriety Cave; Justin Cox’s Stock Pond; EG Cunningham’s Field Notes; Stephen Danos’s No Carnivorous Animal; Steffi Drewes’s Holding Patterns; Meia Geddes’s Little World Forms; Megan Kaminski’s Blazing Star; Annie Kim’s Only Art; John Latta’s Notes for General Circulation; Parker Menzimer’s Aion’s Ribbon; Austin Miles’s Soda Pop Aisle; Diana Keren Lee’s How to Cast a Beautiful Animal; Jessica Reed’s All Motion She Believes; Nicole Santalucia’s Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians; James Shea’s Last Day of My Face;  Katie Jean Shinkle’s Lavish Cruelty; Andy Sia’s Sleuth; Jordan Stempleman’s Spilt; Cole Swensen’s Veer; Mars Tekosky’s The Catherine Wheel; Randall Tyrone’s City of Dis; Sara Wainscott’s The Star Cabins; Maya Williams’s The Path to Heaven is by Lifeboat; Rose Zinnia’s anarchic womb.

Announcing the 2024-2026 Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing

Xan Forest Phillips, a poet hailing from rural Ohio, is the acclaimed author of HULL (Nightboat Books, 2019) and a recipient of the Whiting Award. He has been awarded fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award, the 2023 Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, and a 2022 Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grant. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Czech, and Slovenian. Xan’s poetry can be found in Berlin Quarterly Review, BOMB Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Our thanks to all who submitted applications this cycle, which was open only to writers who have been residents of Ohio for at least two consecutive years, for any period before the fellowship’s start in August 2024. The fellowship will re-open for applications in the winter of 2025.

The Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing & Publishing offers an emerging writer time to work toward a first or second book and professional experience teaching creative writing and engaging in publishing and community-oriented literary work in collaboration with the CSU Poetry Center and English Department.

2023/2024 Lighthouse Reading Series

We’re thrilled to announce our Lighthouse Reading Series for 2023/2024. Please join us at any or all of these fantastic events. On October 6 and November 17, we’ll be at Zygote Press (1410 E 30th St in Cleveland). Spring 2024 locations TBD. Just write us at poetrycenter [at] csuohio [dot] edu with questions. Hope to see you there.

2023 Essay Open Reading Results: Debut Essay Collection from Michael Loughran

Thank you to everyone who submitted to the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Reading Period for Essays and Essay-Like Things earlier this year. We’re elated to share that we’ve selected Michael Loughran’s essay collection Windower for publication.

Michael Loughran’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia. Windower is his first book.

Windower will publish in 2025 alongside selections from our next reading period for full-length manuscripts of poetry, opening this fall.

"Material Conditions: Adjuncting & Wellness": A Cleveland Humanities Festival Event

The CSU Poetry Center is hosting an online event as part of the Cleveland Humanities Festival, whose 2023 theme is “Wellness.” On Thursday April 27 at 4 pm Eastern Time, find us on Zoom, no registration required: https://tinyurl.com/AdjunctingNEO

According to the 2022 Contingent Faculty Survey conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, “75% of faculty [nationally] are not eligible for tenure and 47% hold part-time positions.” Fewer than 50 percent of the respondents reported having employer-provided health insurance, most make well under $4,000 per class, and only 20 percent report being able to comfortably cover basic monthly expenses. When we discuss “wellness” in academic and community contexts, who is included in that conversation? What is wellness if not healthcare, livable wages, predictable schedules, and on-the-job resources—none of which are available to most part-time faculty? This hour will be dedicated to a conversation about adjunct issues and futures. We will discuss the current conditions of adjuncting in northeast Ohio; national movements toward unionization, higher wages, and workers’ rights; and ways our specific academic communities might contribute to the wellbeing of this ever-growing faculty population via amplification, resource sharing, activism, and job creation.

Writers at Work 3/26/23: Nia Hampton

Join us via Zoom on 3/26/23 at 6pm ET for a conversation with Nia Hampton, hosted by Anisfield-Wolf Fellow Joseph Earl Thomas.

Here’s the link to join, no registration required: tinyurl.com/csupcwritersatwork.

Nia Hampton is a cultural worker from West Baltimore, MD. After starring in Al Jazeera America’s viral doc about the similarities in police brutality in Brazil and Baltimore she began a career in freelance journalism. Her written work has been featured in Vice, The Village Voice, Dazed Digital, and elsewhere. Her photo and videography work has been covered by BESE, AFROPUNK and screened in the Baltimore Museum of Art. She founded the Black Femme Supremacy Film Fest in 2018. Learn more about her at: https://about.me/nia3

Writers at Work 2/19/23: Publishing First Books with Joseph Earl Thomas & Laura Maylene Walter

Join us via Zoom on 2/19/23 at 5pm ET for a conversation about publishing first books of fiction and creative nonfiction with Joseph Earl Thomas and Laura Maylene Walter.

Here’s the link to join, no registration required: tinyurl.com/FirstBooksProse.

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame and studies English in the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. His memoir Sink won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities. He is the current Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing at the CSU Poetry Center.

Laura Maylene Walter is the author of the novel Body of Stars. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, Ninth Letter, The Masters Review, the Horse Girls anthology, and many other publications. She has received grants, awards, or fellowships from Tin House, Yaddo, the Ohio Arts Council, the Ohioana Library Association, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Chautauqua Institution, and Art Omi: Writers. Laura is the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow at Cleveland Public Library, where she hosts Page Count, a literary podcast.

Forthcoming in 2024: Book-length Essay by Sam Ace

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center is thrilled to announce our acquisition of Sam Ace's book-length essay, I Want to Start by Saying. The book will publish in 2024 alongside Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's No One Knows Their Blood Type (a novel translated by Hazem Jamjoum), as previously announced.

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton (Chax). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series.

Our 2024 catalog will also include a selection/s from the current Essay Series Open Reading Period, which runs until January 15, 2023. Selected manuscripts will be announced in late spring/early summer 2023.

Haaaaappy Anniversary: 60 years at the CSU Poetry Center

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. An independent small press survives through the care and good vibes of its readers, and we thank you for participating in six decades of literary exchange and adventure. Here are the exploratory, culture-making endeavors we’re up to this year, as well as ways you might join in or support our work:

Publishing

Preorder our fall catalogue—featuring new poetry by Michael Joseph Walsh and Raúl Gómez Jattin (tr. by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott).

Follow three new series at our digital space, Exclamation’s Gauntlet—named after a poem by the Cleveland poet, playwright, editor, and composer Russell Atkins—featuring commentary on editing, process, and creativity:

And Could They Hear Me I Would Tell Them: interviews with small press authors about their newest books, publishing experiences, and the social aspects of their writing and reading lives.

Arch(d)ives: artifacts and ephemera plucked from our press’s dust, placed in personal, contemporary, and historical contexts.

Index for Continuance: a podcast series featuring conversations with workers at independent, small-press, and DIY literary presses and projects, and offering grassroots knowledge about how to edit, collaborate, reach readers, and build community (coming in 2023).

Programming

Lighthouse Reading Series: hosts eight poets and nonfiction writers annually, including a 60th-year anniversary reading and celebration in April 2023. Events are in-person and open to the public.

NEOMFA Writers at Work Colloquium: provides students opportunities to hear from visiting writers about their experiences in editing, arts administration, journalism, translation, or community programming, offering an expansive definition of literary work and where it takes place.

Bookfairs: find us at Loganberry Books' Author Alley, Lit Cleveland’s Inkubator, AWP, SMOL Fair, and Mission Creek, among other literary gatherings.

Pedagogy and Community

Graduate assistantships: we offer multiyear graduate assistantships to NEOMFA students interested in gaining experience in literary publishing and editing while pursuing an MFA in creative writing. We also teach literary editing and publishing and offer internship and volunteer opportunities.

Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Publishing and Writing: a two-year postgrad fellowship offering an emerging writer time to work toward a first or second book and professional experience teaching creative writing and engaging in community-oriented literary work in collaboration with the CSUPC. Our next application period will open in winter 2023/2024.

Cleveland partnerships: we collaborate with local writers and organizers at Lake Erie Ink, Cleveland Review of Books, The Refugee Response, Cleveland Drafts, grieveland, Lit Cleveland, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, The Dodge, Mac’s Backs Books, and Loganberry Books.

Possibilities

The CSU Poetry Center is a nonprofit independent literary press and arts center whose funding comes from book sales, individual donations, and occasional grants. To support the work we do you can buy our books, attend our events, or MAKE A DONATION.

Announcing the 2022–2024 Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing

Every two years, as applications open for the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, we’re honored to hear from wonderfully impressive and engaged emerging writers—who are also teachers, editors, scholars, critics, organizers—from around the country and world. To encounter this breadth and depth of literary work is a source of hope.

We’re delighted to announce that in 2022–2024 we’ll be joined by the prose writer Joseph Earl Thomas, coming to us from Philadelphia, as the new Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing, hosted at Cleveland State. Thomas’s stunningly innovative, inimitable memoir of childhood, Sink, is forthcoming in 2023. He writes across genres, his work omnivorously informed—by the structures and insights of video games, Black Studies, fantasy and sci-fi, digital life, realities of race and economic inequality, the speculative building of new possible worlds—and committed to creating new forms. We’re thrilled to welcome his writing, teaching, editing, and community work to Cleveland.

—Hilary Plum, interim director, CSU Poetry Center

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame and studies English in the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. His memoir Sink won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.

photograph by Drake Masters

We're hiring! Applications Open for a Part-Time Managing Editor

We're delighted to share that applications are open for a part-time (20 hours/week) managing editor position at the CSU Poetry Center. This is a staff position within Cleveland State University's English department. Apply by May 15 with a cover letter and resume via the link below.

Information and application here: https://hrjobs.csuohio.edu/postings/16888

FORTHCOMING POETRY & FICTION IN TRANSLATION: Open Reading Period Results & More

We're thrilled to announce two forthcoming works of literature in translation. Look out for:

Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene, a collection of poetry translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott, forthcoming in fall 2022. This manuscript was selected from our winter 2020/2021 open reading period for poetry in translation. Warmest thanks to all those who submitted—we were honored to read so many fantastic translations.

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's No One Knows Their Blood Type, a novel translated by Hazem Jamjoum, forthcoming in fall 2024.

Raúl Gómez Jattin (Cartagena, 1945–1997) was one of Colombia’s most outstanding poets—and one of the country’s most controversial literary figures. He spent most of his adult life between psychiatric hospitals, jails, and living as a homeless person. Through it all, he never stopped writing poetry or reciting it on street corners; his instantly famous public readings drew hundreds of listeners. As a queer man of Syrian descent writing in a way that broke with his country’s tradition, his rightful place at the forefront of Colombian poetry has long been denied. In 1997, he was tragically killed by a bus.

Almost Obscene is Gómez Jattin’s English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980 to 1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space—precisely the unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West’s narrow definitions of queer poetics.

Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Managing Editor for Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. More information at: www.katherinemhedeen.com

Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (Eulalia Books, 2020), which was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (Kenning Editions, 2018). She curates Poesía en acción on the Action Books blog and her writing on translation has appeared in Kenyon Review, Latin American Literature Today, Reading in Translation, and Words Without Borders. Her translation of Lauri García Dueñas’s “0” was recently named a winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets and Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Contest. She is a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow in Spanish at Kenyon College and a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Born in 1980 in Lebanon, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is an Arabic-language Palestinian novelist, poet, and children’s book author. She has published four novels: Grains of Sugar (House of Poetry, 2004), Threshold of Heavy Spirit (Ogarit, 2011), No One Knows Their Blood Type (Dar Al-Adab, 2013), and Glitter (Dar Al-Mutawassit, 2021). She has also published several children’s books, including A Blue Pond of Questions, which was translated into English and published by Penny Candy Books in 2017. She is the editor of The Book of Ramallah, a collection of short stories from and about Ramallah, published by Comma Press in 2021. She has published four collections of poetry: The Book of Fear (Dar KMN, 2021), Home Dresses and Wars (Dar Al-Ahlyah, 2016), This Smile, That Heart (Dar Raya, 2012), and What She Said about Him (House of Poetry & Qattan Foundation, 2007). A volume of her poetry has been translated into German and published as Ich verbrenne die Zeit (I Burn Time, published by Sujet Verlag in 2018), and an English translation of her poetry is forthcoming in fall 2022 from Milkweed Editions under the title You Can Be the Last Leaf (translated by Fady Joudah).

Hazem Jamjoum is a cultural historian completing his doctorate at New York University, and an audio curator and archivist at the British Library.

No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths—of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery about her blood type. Hers could not have been inherited from her father—the father she sometimes longed for, but always despised. This extraordinary novel centers its Palestinian narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day in their bodies, and the colonial context of their embodied lives. With humor and exhilarating inventiveness, it asks: why aren’t questions of love, friendship, parenthood, and desire at the core of our conversations about liberty and freedom? How would that transform our ideas of resistance?

WRITERS AT WORK, NOV 7th: JOURNALISM IN NORTHEAST OHIO

Co-hosted with the Cleveland Review of Books

Please join us for a lively discussion on journalism in Northeast Ohio with NEOMFA alums Sam Allard and Noor Hindi, on Sunday, November 7, 5 pm ET, via Zoom. No registration required: just use the link tinyurl.com/neojournalism at that date and time. The CSU Poetry Center and the Cleveland Review of Books will co-host a conversation with these exciting and accomplished writers, covering topics such as the state of local journalism here in Northeast Ohio, how to get involved, the relationship between creative writing and the news, and these two writers' experiences as working journalists. Contact poetrycenter [at] csuohio [dot] edu with questions about the event.

Sam Allard is the senior writer at Cleveland Scene magazine, where he reports on politics, power and justice in Northeast Ohio. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the NEOMFA (Cleveland State).

Noor Hindi (she/her) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Hobart, and jubilat. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Literary Hub, and Adroit Journal. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. is forthcoming from Haymarket Books (2023). She has worked as Equity and Inclusion Reporter for The Devil Strip magazine and as a Reveal fellow, reporting on evictions in Akron during the pandemic. Visit her website at noorhindi.com. Follow her on Twitter @MyNrhindi.

FALL 2021 CATALOG

2021 LIGHTHOUSE POETRY SERIES + FORTHCOMING BOOKS

The CSU Poetry Center is delighted to announce that our 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series judge, Shane McCrae, has chosen Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence for publication.
 
Below you will find a list of finalists and our next two years’ catalogs. Thanks to everyone who sent us poetry to read this year—it was an honor spending time with your work and we’re grateful for your writing, readership, and support of small press publishing.

FALL 2022

Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence
Winner of the 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series competition, selected by Shane McCrae

Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet and translator. He is co-editor of APARTMENT Poetry, and his work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, Guernica, FOLDER, Fence, Sink Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver.

+ CSUPC’s translation series selection
(Title to be announced soon)

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LIGHTHOUSE POETRY SERIES FINALISTS: Sara Deniz Akant’s Kingdom Perihan; Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s Shopping or The End of Time; Ellen Boyette’s Bedieval; Bill Carty’s We Sailed on the Lake; Myronn Hardy’s Aurora Americana; Destiny Hemphill’s The MOTHERWORLD Devotions; Carrie Lorig’s Collection/Agency; ML Martin’s Wulf & Eadwacer; Colleen O’Brien’s Reel; Allyson Paty’s Jalousie; Raena Shirlali’s summonings; Jessica Stark’s Buffalo Girl; Bp Sutton’s Other Auspices; Jay Thompson’s Like Honey; Jennifer Tseng’s Not so dear Jenny; Paloma Yannakakis’s Your every image (un)tethered

SEMIFINALISTS: Kyle Booten’s Angels vs. Numbers; Kate Colby’s Reverse Engineer; Elizabeth Countryman’s Green Island; Naazeen Diwan’s Make a Season of Me; Binswanger Friedman’s The Four Color Problem; Shanta Lee Gander’s Black Metamorphosis; Eva Heisler’s Lexicon, Studio; Stephanie Heit’s Every Horizon Turns Liquid; Claire Hero’s The Encroaching Fur; Genevieve Kaplan’s blueroombrowngreenroom; Nora Claire Miller’s The Phone Book; Daniel Moysaenko’s Speak and the Sleepers; Kate Partridge’s Thine; Elizabeth Robinson’s Vulnerability Index; Michael Samra’s the beachgoer; Stella Santamaria’s California Silence; Emma Train’s A Spreading Out, Like; Emma Winsor Wood’s Preferred Internal Landscape

FALL 2023

Rennie Ament’s Mechanical Bull
Editors’ choice selection

Rennie Ament’s debut collection of poetry was a finalist for the Burnside Review Press Book Contest and a semifinalist for Fonograf Edition’s Open Genre Book Prize before being selected for publication by CSU Poetry Center. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, Colorado Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She has been the runner-up for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace, winner of the Yellowwood Prize in Poetry from Yalobusha Review, and finalist for the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize from Newfound.

A nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, Ament has received support from Millay Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Center for Book Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Ament studied poetry at Hunter College, where she taught creative writing. She lives in Maine.

Xavier Cavazos’s The Devil’s Workshop
Editors’ choice selection

Xavier Cavazos is a Chicanx poet from the Central Washington. He is the author of Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube press, 2015), which was the winner of the Prairie Seed Poetry Prize, as well as a chapbook of poems, Barbarian at the Gate (Poetry Society of America, New American Poets Chapbook Series, 2014).

A performance artist, Cavazos is a Grand Slam Champion of the NuyoRican Poets Café in NYC, and has poetry published in ground-breaking anthologies such as Aloud: Voices from the NuYoRican Poets Café (Henry Holt, 1994), Under the Pomegranate Tree: Best Latino Erotica (Washington Square Books, 1994), Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the POEMFONE Poets (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), and poetry forthcoming in Cascadia: A Literary Field Guide! (Tupelo Press, 2022).

Cavazos is an editorial assistant at Poetry Northwest and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and the Environment from Iowa State University. He currently teaches in the Africana and Black Studies, El Centro Latinx, and the Professional and Creative Writing Programs at Central Washington University, and serves on the Executive Board for Humanities Washington.

Melissa Dickey’s Ordinary Entanglement
Editors’ choice selection

Melissa Dickey is the author of two previous books of poems, Dragons and The Lily Will, both from Rescue Press. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Bennington Review, The Spectacle, the Laurel Review, jubilat, Puerto del Sol, and Kenyon Review Online, among other publications. She has received fellowships from the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Iowa Board of Regents, and the James A. Michener Center for Writers.

Born and raised in New Orleans, she now lives in Western Massachusetts, where she teaches high school English and parents her four children.

Open Reading Period for Poetry in Translation

The CSU Poetry Center invites submissions of book-length volumes of poetry in translation during an open reading period this winter. Please send 1) a cover letter describing the project and confirming any necessary permissions; and 2) a sample translation of at least 20 pages. Full manuscripts are welcome. Please email materials to associate director Hilary Plum at h.plum [at] csuohio [dot] edu. Our reading period will be open from December 1, 2020 through February 1, 2021. We expect to make decisions by early summer 2021.

Recent titles in our occasional series of poetry in translation include Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun, translated by Conor Bracken, and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev.

Shelley Feller reads from "amateur drag night/a fucking didactic"

From their book Dream Boat (CSU Poetry Center, 2020)

Recorded via Zoom on October 2, 2020

Alen Hamza reads "The Underground"

From his book Twice There Was a Country (CSU Poetry Center, 2020)

Recorded via Zoom on October 2, 2020

OCT 2nd book launch: Shelley Feller, Lauren Shaprio, & Alen Hamza