where to submit your book this spring
opportunities, reading recs, quotations, & more
Happy Friday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Opportunities
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Opportunities:
Emily Stoddard compiled this wonderfully thorough spreadsheet of small/university press opportunities that has been really helpful to me as I explore options for where to submit my manuscripts.
There are a lot of deadlines coming up in the next few weeks/months, and I was able to unearth ~a little more information~ about a few of these presses, thanks to the generous and patient publishers & staff who were willing to answer my questions. I thought I’d share that additional information1 with you here, in case any of you are submitting your poetry collections this spring/summer.
Deadline: May 1
Entry fee: $32 (which, to my knowledge, is the most expensive reading fee apart from the National Poetry Series’ and Copper Canyon Press’.)
The prize includes:
-Publication
-$2,000 cash prize
-20 free copies of your book
-additional copies for 40% off list priceThe honorable mention prize includes:
-Publication
-$1,000 cash prize
-20 free copies of your book
-additional copies for 40% off list price
Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry
Deadline: May 1
Entry fee: $25
The prize includes:
-$2,000 cash prize
-royalties of 5% once 500 copies are sold; royalties of 10% once 5,000 copies are sold
-50% royalties on ebooks ($5/copy goes to the author)
Word Works Books — Open Reading Period
Deadline: May 31
Reading fee: $20
Publication includes:
-Royalties after the first 1,000 books are sold
-30 author copies; 30 print copies to be sent to potential reviewers
-40% discount on additional books; 50% discount if you buy 100+ copies at once
Parlor/New Measure Poetry Prize
Deadline: June 1
Entry fee: $28
The prize includes:
-$1,000 cash prize
-20% royalties
-40% off all books published by Parlor Press
-75-125 promotional copies to be sent to potential reviewers/contests (and/or the author, I think?)Additionally, the founder mentioned that the Press provides support for additional contest entries for their winners—I assume that means that, if you want to submit your book for additional prizes post-publication (here a few examples), the press will help you with the submission fees. Lovely.
Deadline: June 15
Entry fee: $25
The prize includes:
-$1,000 cash prize
-royalties
-discounts on any books purchased from the Press (your own or those of others)Additionally, the Press is open to considering subsequent poetry collections by its authors (no contest; no reading fee).2
What I’m reading this week:
Emphatic Intimacies, Be Oakley
A Publisher’s Perspective on the Art Book Fair: A Critical Response, Be Oakley
Women, Chloe Caldwell
Quotations:
Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
-Sharon Olds
Even I, at my most wild, would probably stop and reflect a little if I suddenly realized I had to convince people that I wasn’t advocating for public lynchings. At the very least, I’m pretty sure someone in my life would care about me enough to call me up and say, “Hey, you’ve been screeching about nonsense on the internet for two days straight. You gotta take a break.” And whenever I see someone go on a multi-day threading adventure like this one, I just wonder why someone isn’t telling them the same thing. Don’t you have like a family member or friend or, heck, a coworker, even, who could tell you to take a walk around the block and cool off?
The role of the artist […] is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest […] to make the world a more human dwelling place.
-James Baldwin
Apologizing for slow replies is a symptom of unrealistic demands in an always-on culture. Work is presumed to be the dominant force in our lives. Instead of making space for leisure and rest, we have to keep monitoring our communication channels, ready to drop everything at any time. Being reachable around the clock means living at the mercy of other people’s calendars. It’s a recipe for burnout. And it prizes shallow reactions over deep reflection. We wind up rushing to get things done instead of doing them well.
How quickly people answer you is rarely a sign of how much they care about you. It’s usually a reflection of how much they have on their plate. Delayed replies to emails, texts and calls are often symptoms of being overextended and overwhelmed. If the message isn’t time-sensitive, we should count delays in weeks or months, not days or hours.
Rethinking what counts as late is especially important for people who are prone to beating themselves up for being unresponsive. Namely, women. Women apologize more than men, because they tend to have a lower threshold for what qualifies as offensive behavior. This isn’t in their heads — it’s in the culture around them. We still live in a world that places unfair pressure on women to drop everything for others. When a man takes a week to respond, he must be busy with something important. If a woman takes even a day to reply, it feels as if she’s failing to live up to the duty of care.
I didn’t yet know that other words for “tame” are “subjugate” and “oppress.” It would be decades before I learned that everything I did to belong was an act of self-erasure, and that it estranged me from myself and the deeper connections I had to my family and culture.
In middle school, I came to understand that my nose was my biggest problem. “If only she had a different nose, she would be much better-looking,” relatives and family friends said. “Don’t smile — your nose broadens in a way that makes it worse!” When my parents rented a video of “Little Women,” I found a kindred spirit: Amy March, who used a clothespin to reshape her nose while she slept. I tried the Amy method, but what I really took away from her character was the idea that beauty and class mobility were related. By the time she was 16, Amy was “the flower of the family,” lovely and artistic and marriageable. By reshaping your nose, in other words, you could reshape yourself and the future available to you.
A memory resurfaced, loosened by grief.
There is something freeing about the persistence of our bodies. No matter how much I try to tame or oppress my physical reality and its cultural giveaways, it will continue to follow the blueprint it inherited — the one written by my predecessors.
The Gurlesque describes an emerging field of female artists now in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s who, taking a page from the burlesque, perform their femininity in a campy or overtly mocking way. Their work assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends.
-Laura Glenn Glenum
Nostalgia for digital platforms is pretty pointless: We have so little control over them that when we lose them we can’t be too upset. And yet I still feel slightly betrayed and destabilized by the changing internet order.
Touch has become a dangerous action.
-Be Oakley
Publishing, unlike many art forms, is a tactile practice in which touch is an essential aspect of the art itself.
-Be Oakley
Printed objects become a powerful tool that shows a new kind of intimacy.
-Be Oakley
I find myself longing for a pre Covid-19 touch, a thing that we all took for granted.
-Be Oakley
I think we all long for a touch that you can really feel.
-Be Oakley
Tweets:
God, I miss being able to embed these. But, fine. Here are links to a few!
Finally,
Thank you, as always, for reading.
-Despy Boutris
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I still have a few follow-up questions that have yet to be answered, so I’ll update this newsletter with that information once I receive an email back.
This is good! We like this! Yay for building a long-term relationships with your publisher, if you have a good experience with them.