We have been quietly putting the pieces of our 2024 catalog together as 2023 wraps up. Although this year we kept our genres split between the seasons, in the future we will be trying to spread them out across the calendar to keep readers of all kinds engaged whenever and wherever they find us. After our current round of poetry chaps concludes in March 2024, we’re eager to share these four full-length poetry collections with you next year:
Todd Osborne (TN/OK/MS): Gatherer, April 2024
Gatherer considers themes of masculinity, family, and the faith that can elude us without entirely fading away. This debut inhabits a voice coming into adulthood in the midst of absence through the pandemic and a shifting sense of home.
Todd Osborne is a poet and teacher originally born in Nashville, TN. His poetry has previously appeared at EcoTheo Review, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a poetry reader for Memorious and a feedback editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. He lives and writes in Hattiesburg, MS, with his wife and their three cats.
William Woolfitt (WV/TN): The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go, June 2024
The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go explores climate change, the Anthropocene, and environmental racism from an Appalachian perspective. The poems are about forest fires, creek floods, drought, Cherokee removal, convict labor, the songs that can still be sung in the Mountain South—a land that’s stolen, spoiled, and strange.
William Woolfitt is a poet, prose writer, and editor. He is the author of six books, including Spring Up Everlasting (poetry) and Ring of Earth (short stories).
Justin Carter (TX/IA): Brazos, August 2024
Brazos centers on growing up in southeast Texas, with poems that try to capture the many complicated sides of that world and the people that inhabit it. Subjects in this debut range from football games and oil drilling to ghosts and bath salts, and everything in between.
Justin Carter’s poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.
Frances Schenkkan (LA/TX): Whitewash, October 2024
Whitewash is the result of research into the racially tense city of Shreveport, Louisiana, during the civil rights era. The book’s poems are voiced by several speakers, some of whom are imagined. Schenkkan’s poems also investigate slave-owning within her family and conflicting messages of the Southern Baptist Convention. A central question of the book is how complicit white children were in racism and whether adults attempted to keep them from seeing injustice.
Frances Schenkkan is the author of Mr. Stevens’ Secretary (University of Arkansas Press). A National Poetry Series finalist, her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, POOL, and Third Coast, among others. She lives in Austin.
We’ll also have updates soon about more chapbooks and a wide range of prose titles! Be on the lookout in the coming months for cover reveals and pre-order links to get a head start on your poetry goals for 2024.