One of the great joys of starting this press has involved both building new relationships and deepening established ones. In the case of our prose catalog for next year, we get to publish three new-to-us authors as well as two contributors to the Mid/South Anthology—one of whom (Ben Myers) is a longtime friend and mentor of our publisher. In addition to five full-length prose works, we’ll be publishing two prose chapbooks. We are thrilled to share these exciting works with you over the following year!
Amy Cipolla Barnes (TN): Child Craft (hybrid memoir/short fiction)
Amy Barnes is the author of two flash collections: Ambrotypes published by word west and “Mother Figures” by ELJ Editions. She has words at SmokeLong Quarterly, The Citron Review, JMWW Journal, Flash Frog, No Contact Mag, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, and many others. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads for NFFD, CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, The MacGuffin, and Narratively.
Teresa Tumminello Brader (LA): Letting in Air and Light (hybrid memoir/fiction—and Teresa’s debut!)
Teresa Tumminello Brader was born in New Orleans and lives near Lake Pontchartrain; the city, the estuary, and its denizens are the source of much of her inspiration. Her stories have appeared in several online journals, including Hobart Pulp, Halfway Down the Stairs, Landlocked, and Deep South Magazine; and in print in anthologies, such as Families: The Frontline of Pluralism, Coming Home: A 2010 Main Street Rag Short Fiction Anthology, and moonShine Review.
Shome Dasgupta (LA): Histories of Memories (hybrid memoir/short fiction)
Shome Dasgupta is the author of eleven books, including The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, Spectacles (Word West Press) and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). Forthcoming novels include Cirrus Stratus (Spuyten Duyvil), Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), and The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books). His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, New Orleans Review, Hobart, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, X-R-A-Y, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the series editor of the Wigleaf Top 50. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.
Christy Lorio (LA): Cold Comfort (prose chapbook): This is a special project to support Christy as she works through treatment for a terminal cancer diagnosis. We’ll have more information this fall and hope to publish it this year or early next year.
Christy Lorio is a photographer and writer based in New Orleans, LA. She is currently making work about living with stage IV colorectal cancer. Her essays have been published in HAD, Scrawl Place, Nurture Literary, and Entropy, among other places. She was a 2021 fellow for Arizona State University's Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference. She frequently contributes to Ochsner Healthcare’s blog and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans.
Damon McKinney (AR): Beer-Breath Kisses (prose chapbook)
Damon McKinney is an Indigenous writer from Oklahoma, and he is the former Associate Editor for Likely Red Press, a former Contributing Editor of Fiction for Barren Magazine, and a former Managing Editor for Emerge Literary Journal.
Benjamin Myers (OK): Tradition and Convention: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Education (essay collection)
Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and is the author of three books of poetry: Black Sunday (Lamar University Press, 2018), Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in The Yale Review, Rattle, 32 Poems, Image, Nimrod and other literary journals as well as in magazines such as Oklahoma Today and The Christian Century. He has been honored with an Oklahoma Book Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book and with a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His prose appears in World Literature Today, Books and Culture, First Things and other magazines. Myers teaches poetry writing and literature and directs the Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University.
Rob Roensch (OK): In the Morning, the City is the Prairie (novel)
Rob Roensch has an MFA from Cornell University. He is a Professor in the English Department of Oklahoma City University and he lives in Oklahoma City with his wife and children. He won The International Scott Prize for Short Stories in 2012 from Salt Publishing for his collection titled The Wildflowers of Baltimore. He was awarded the Peter Taylor Scholarship in Fiction to the 2018 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A novella titled The World and The Zoo was published by Outpost19 in 2020.
Keep an eye out for more information on these books as we keep working away at our forthcoming projects. You can also see next year’s full-length poetry lineup here.