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.
