The CSU Poetry Center is delighted to announce that our 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series judge, Shane McCrae, has chosen Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence for publication.
Below you will find a list of finalists and our next two years’ catalogs. Thanks to everyone who sent us poetry to read this year—it was an honor spending time with your work and we’re grateful for your writing, readership, and support of small press publishing.
FALL 2022
Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence
Winner of the 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series competition, selected by Shane McCrae
Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet and translator. He is co-editor of APARTMENT Poetry, and his work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, Guernica, FOLDER, Fence, Sink Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver.
+ CSUPC’s translation series selection
(Title to be announced soon)
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LIGHTHOUSE POETRY SERIES FINALISTS: Sara Deniz Akant’s Kingdom Perihan; Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s Shopping or The End of Time; Ellen Boyette’s Bedieval; Bill Carty’s We Sailed on the Lake; Myronn Hardy’s Aurora Americana; Destiny Hemphill’s The MOTHERWORLD Devotions; Carrie Lorig’s Collection/Agency; ML Martin’s Wulf & Eadwacer; Colleen O’Brien’s Reel; Allyson Paty’s Jalousie; Raena Shirlali’s summonings; Jessica Stark’s Buffalo Girl; Bp Sutton’s Other Auspices; Jay Thompson’s Like Honey; Jennifer Tseng’s Not so dear Jenny; Paloma Yannakakis’s Your every image (un)tethered
SEMIFINALISTS: Kyle Booten’s Angels vs. Numbers; Kate Colby’s Reverse Engineer; Elizabeth Countryman’s Green Island; Naazeen Diwan’s Make a Season of Me; Binswanger Friedman’s The Four Color Problem; Shanta Lee Gander’s Black Metamorphosis; Eva Heisler’s Lexicon, Studio; Stephanie Heit’s Every Horizon Turns Liquid; Claire Hero’s The Encroaching Fur; Genevieve Kaplan’s blueroombrowngreenroom; Nora Claire Miller’s The Phone Book; Daniel Moysaenko’s Speak and the Sleepers; Kate Partridge’s Thine; Elizabeth Robinson’s Vulnerability Index; Michael Samra’s the beachgoer; Stella Santamaria’s California Silence; Emma Train’s A Spreading Out, Like; Emma Winsor Wood’s Preferred Internal Landscape
FALL 2023
Rennie Ament’s Mechanical Bull
Editors’ choice selection
Rennie Ament’s debut collection of poetry was a finalist for the Burnside Review Press Book Contest and a semifinalist for Fonograf Edition’s Open Genre Book Prize before being selected for publication by CSU Poetry Center. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, Colorado Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She has been the runner-up for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace, winner of the Yellowwood Prize in Poetry from Yalobusha Review, and finalist for the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize from Newfound.
A nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, Ament has received support from Millay Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Center for Book Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Ament studied poetry at Hunter College, where she taught creative writing. She lives in Maine.
Xavier Cavazos’s The Devil’s Workshop
Editors’ choice selection
Xavier Cavazos is a Chicanx poet from the Central Washington. He is the author of Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube press, 2015), which was the winner of the Prairie Seed Poetry Prize, as well as a chapbook of poems, Barbarian at the Gate (Poetry Society of America, New American Poets Chapbook Series, 2014).
A performance artist, Cavazos is a Grand Slam Champion of the NuyoRican Poets Café in NYC, and has poetry published in ground-breaking anthologies such as Aloud: Voices from the NuYoRican Poets Café (Henry Holt, 1994), Under the Pomegranate Tree: Best Latino Erotica (Washington Square Books, 1994), Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the POEMFONE Poets (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), and poetry forthcoming in Cascadia: A Literary Field Guide! (Tupelo Press, 2022).
Cavazos is an editorial assistant at Poetry Northwest and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and the Environment from Iowa State University. He currently teaches in the Africana and Black Studies, El Centro Latinx, and the Professional and Creative Writing Programs at Central Washington University, and serves on the Executive Board for Humanities Washington.
Melissa Dickey’s Ordinary Entanglement
Editors’ choice selection
Melissa Dickey is the author of two previous books of poems, Dragons and The Lily Will, both from Rescue Press. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Bennington Review, The Spectacle, the Laurel Review, jubilat, Puerto del Sol, and Kenyon Review Online, among other publications. She has received fellowships from the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Iowa Board of Regents, and the James A. Michener Center for Writers.
Born and raised in New Orleans, she now lives in Western Massachusetts, where she teaches high school English and parents her four children.
