New Prose Titles (2024)

Check out our list of recent acquisitions for next year

One of the great joys in running a small press is being discovered by writers who send us their work—and getting to discover them! We’ve been excited to receive some stellar submissions the past few months and are ready to announce new prose acquisitions for 2024.

This lineup features writers mostly new to Belle Point, with the exception of our Louisiana friends Shome Dasgupta and Kirsten Reneau. Shome’s first collection with us, Histories of Memories, is due this October, and we published a Prose Series installment featuring Kirsten in December. We are also thrilled to be adding the inimitable Oklahoma writer, Rilla Askew, to our catalog. Read on below to learn more about these talented writers and their forthcoming projects!

Rilla Askew is the author of five novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction. She’s a PEN/Faulkner finalist, recipient of the Western Heritage Award, Oklahoma Book Award, and a 2009 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2002, and was selected for Oklahoma’s One Book One State reading program. Askew’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Tin House, World Literature Today, Nimrod, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and elsewhere. Her latest novel, Prize for the Fire, is about the Early Modern English martyr Anne Askew, who was burned as a heretic in 1546.

• About the book: Two of Her features five stories centered on female protagonists that span the past several decades. Whether trying to escape from Oklahoma or feeling the pull back home, each woman seeks to navigate the bonds that wound them and the places that keep them tethered to their primal roots.

Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), Cirrus Stratus (Spuyten Duyvil), Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West Publishing House), The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books, Forthcoming), i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Contest), Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press), Pretend I Am Someone You Like (Livingston Press), Spectacles (Word West Press), Mute (Tolsun Books), and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His prose collection, Histories Of Memories, will be published by Belle Point Press. His fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Jabberwock Review, New Orleans Review, New Delta Review, Necessary Fiction, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. His fiction and poetry have been anthologized in Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press), The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (&Now Books), and Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press). His work has been featured as a storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story, and his stories and poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Of The Net, Best Microfiction, and the Orison Anthology. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at @laughingyeti.

• About the book: Atchafalaya Darling is a collection of Louisiana-themed short stories relating to local music scenes, crawfish, alcoholism and recovery, lost minds, houseboats, basketball, frogs, Eastern and Western cultures, the Circle K, rivers, identities, cricket, the rural, the city, and electric memories. Each story is about memory, lost or found, sprinkled like spice into the red of the crawfish. The story collection is an homage to Cajun culture, providing glimpses into this world, like a series of faded Polaroid pictures held under the sun. 

Chase Dearinger’s work has appeared in Bayou, The Southampton Review, Fiddleback, Heavy Feather Review, Short Story America, and was featured in Ain’t Nobody Can Sing Like Me (Mongrel Empire Press), an anthology of Oklahoma writers. He holds an MFA from the University of Central Oklahoma and a PhD in Creative Writing from Texas Tech University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University.

• About the book: This New Dark is a genre-bending novel that explores the haunted, broken hills of Eastern Oklahoma. Over the course of just two cold days in November, the residents of Seven Suns will each face their own kind of weird: There’s Wyatt, a dope-growing Muscogee whose obsession with a black cougar that shouldn’t exist begins to uproot his life. The teenager who lives with him—Randy—who is outraged at the world, confused about his sexuality, and haunted by the bones of his mother. And there’s Esther—a dutiful, god-fearing court bailiff who finds herself thrust into the position of county sheriff, forced to find the missing girl whose disappearance sets everything in motion. Inexorably bringing them all together is a nameless cowboy junky who may or may not be some ancient shapeshifting evil. All of them must overcome this new dark while dealing with the violent undercurrents of family, religion, addiction, and death.

A native Nebraskan now nestled into the Missouri Ozarks, Matt Miller is a lifelong partisan of Middle America. His essays have appeared in Front Porch Republic, The Windhover, The New Territory, and others. His permaculture garden contains dozens of native and Ozark-adapted plants. Always, as Adam Zagajewski has it, he is trying “to praise the mutilated world.” He is Assistant Professor of English at College of the Ozarks.

• About the book: Matt Miller’s debut essay collection, Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden, journeys through the garden year and the church year to uncover how life in the garden and in the liturgy can help us rediscover our bodies and our sense of time, thereby helping us reach toward that sense of wholeness we all seek. 

Kirsten Reneau is the author of Meeting Gods in Basement Bars and Other Ways to Find Forgiveness (Ethel). She graduated with her MFA from the University of New Orleans. Her work has been featured in The Threepenny Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She was the winner of the 2022 Reed Magazine Challenge in Nonfiction, and her work has been anthologized in books such as Best Microfiction 2021 and others. In her free time, she volunteers with The Daily Drunk and the podcast Micro.

• About the book: Primarily composed of lyric essays, Sensitive Creatures looks at the traumatic effects of sexual assault, exploring the wreckage we do to ourselves and the healing, for better and worse, that takes place after. Each essay includes a different animal link to help blend the relationship between the subject matter and the natural world, exploring the endless cycles that bind us to our surroundings.

Jim Roberts grew up in rural East Texas, but now lives and writes in Miami Township, Ohio. His fiction has appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Rappahannock Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine as well as being nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice named to the finalist list for the Screencraft Cinematic Short Story Award. His debut short story collection Of Fathers & Gods was recently longlisted for both the Santa Fe Writers Project Annual Short Fiction Prize and the W.S. Porter Prize.

• About the book: Of Fathers & Gods is a debut collection of short fiction that delves into the relationships between fathers and their children: the good, the bad, and the awful. In this emotionally charged collection, a young expectant father, on the edge of homelessness, loses his religion and duels with a street preacher; fifty-year-old twins—survivors of foster care, war, and prison—fight over the decision to finally meet the father who abandoned them before birth, and hold him to account; and a Pulitzer-winning, ageist professor seeks to quash the writing dreams of an elderly student while coming to terms with how much love he’s lost as a result of his career. These nine stories open a window into the most primal elements of the human condition—childhood and parenting—and show us how, try as we might, we can never fully escape the bonds of blood.