Introducing Belle Point Chaps
Our first chapbook series will include five Mid-Southern poets.
Belle Point Press is happy to announce the five authors and titles for our first chapbook series! Two of these writers—Jack B. Bedell and Renee Emerson—are also featured in our forthcoming Mid/South Anthology. Writers from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri will be represented, though they also sometimes roam to other places.
We plan to publish these chapbooks Winter 2022-Spring 2023 after we finish the anthology. Learn more about these poets below.
Jack B. Bedell (LA): All the Woods' Wild: The Story of the Swamp Witch of Maurepas
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Cheap Pop, Heavy Feather, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, and other journals. His most recent collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
Renee Emerson (MO): The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants
Renee Emerson is a homeschooling mom of seven, and the author of Church Ladies (forthcoming from Fernwood Press, 2022), Threshing Floor (Jacar Press, 2016), and Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014). Her poetry has been published in Cumberland River Review, Windhover, and Poetry South. She adjunct teaches online for Indiana Wesleyan University, and blogs about poetry, grief, and motherhood at www.reneeemerson.com.
Megan Nichols (AR): Animal Unfit
Megan Nichols lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Iron Horse Literary Review, Dialogist, and The Threepenny Review. She was a Spring 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and is a poetry reader at Variant Lit.
Nikki Ummel (LA): Hush
Nikki Ummel is a queer writer, editor, and educator in New Orleans. Nikki has been published or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Adroit, Hobart, The Georgia Review, and more. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and twice awarded an Academy of American Poets Award. She is the 2022 winner of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, Associate Poetry Editor at Bayou Magazine, and curator of the Gold Room reading series and anthology. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com.
Kyle Vaughn (AR): The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places
Kyle Vaughn is the author of Calamity Gospel (forthcoming from Cerasus Poetry, 2022) and Lightning Paths: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises (NCTE Books, 2018) and the co-author/co-photographer of A New Light in Kalighat (American Councils for International Education, 2013). His poems have appeared in journals such as The Journal, A-Minor, Adbusters, The Boiler, Drunken Boat, Poetry East, Vinyl, the museum of americana, and The Shore (2021 Pushcart Prize nomination). www.kylevaughn.org / twitter: @krv75 / insta: @kylev75