CSUPC New Releases

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2023 Essay Open Reading Results: Debut Essay Collection from Michael Loughran

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Thank you to everyone who submitted to the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Reading Period for Essays and Essay-Like Things earlier this year. We’re elated to share that we’ve selected Michael Loughran’s essay collection Windower for publication.

Michael Loughran’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia. Windower is his first book.

Windower will publish in 2025 alongside selections from our next reading period for full-length manuscripts of poetry, opening this fall.

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Forthcoming in 2024: Book-length Essay by Sam Ace

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The Cleveland State University Poetry Center is thrilled to announce our acquisition of Sam Ace's book-length essay, I Want to Start by Saying. The book will publish in 2024 alongside Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's No One Knows Their Blood Type (a novel translated by Hazem Jamjoum), as previously announced.

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton (Chax). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series.

Our 2024 catalog will also include a selection/s from the current Essay Series Open Reading Period, which runs until January 15, 2023. Selected manuscripts will be announced in late spring/early summer 2023.

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Haaaaappy Anniversary: 60 years at the CSU Poetry Center

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This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. An independent small press survives through the care and good vibes of its readers, and we thank you for participating in six decades of literary exchange and adventure. Here are the exploratory, culture-making endeavors we’re up to this year, as well as ways you might join in or support our work:

Publishing

Preorder our fall catalogue—featuring new poetry by Michael Joseph Walsh and Raúl Gómez Jattin (tr. by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott).

Follow three new series at our digital space, Exclamation’s Gauntlet—named after a poem by the Cleveland poet, playwright, editor, and composer Russell Atkins—featuring commentary on editing, process, and creativity:

And Could They Hear Me I Would Tell Them: interviews with small press authors about their newest books, publishing experiences, and the social aspects of their writing and reading lives.

Arch(d)ives: artifacts and ephemera plucked from our press’s dust, placed in personal, contemporary, and historical contexts.

Index for Continuance: a podcast series featuring conversations with workers at independent, small-press, and DIY literary presses and projects, and offering grassroots knowledge about how to edit, collaborate, reach readers, and build community (coming in 2023).

Programming

Lighthouse Reading Series: hosts eight poets and nonfiction writers annually, including a 60th-year anniversary reading and celebration in April 2023. Events are in-person and open to the public.

NEOMFA Writers at Work Colloquium: provides students opportunities to hear from visiting writers about their experiences in editing, arts administration, journalism, translation, or community programming, offering an expansive definition of literary work and where it takes place.

Bookfairs: find us at Loganberry Books' Author Alley, Lit Cleveland’s Inkubator, AWP, SMOL Fair, and Mission Creek, among other literary gatherings.

Pedagogy and Community

Graduate assistantships: we offer multiyear graduate assistantships to NEOMFA students interested in gaining experience in literary publishing and editing while pursuing an MFA in creative writing. We also teach literary editing and publishing and offer internship and volunteer opportunities.

Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Publishing and Writing: a two-year postgrad fellowship offering an emerging writer time to work toward a first or second book and professional experience teaching creative writing and engaging in community-oriented literary work in collaboration with the CSUPC. Our next application period will open in winter 2023/2024.

Cleveland partnerships: we collaborate with local writers and organizers at Lake Erie Ink, Cleveland Review of Books, The Refugee Response, Cleveland Drafts, grieveland, Lit Cleveland, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, The Dodge, Mac’s Backs Books, and Loganberry Books.

Possibilities

The CSU Poetry Center is a nonprofit independent literary press and arts center whose funding comes from book sales, individual donations, and occasional grants. To support the work we do you can buy our books, attend our events, or MAKE A DONATION.

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Summer Celebrations

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SUMMER CELEBRATIONS

Join us in celebrating our 2017 catalog, recent contest winners, author news, and reviews. If you'd like to review, teach, or host a reading for one of our authors, contact us at poetrycenter@csuohio.edu for more information.

Lily Hoang's essay collection A Bestiary is a finalist for PEN Center USA's Literary Awards in Creative Nonfiction.

Martin Rock, author of Residuum, will be included in 2018's Best American Experimental Writing.

Lo Kwa Mei-en, author of Bees Make Money in the Lion, is a finalist for the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

Leora Fridman, author of My Fault, has new prose at The Rumpus, Temporary Art Review, and Pacific Standard.

Congratulations to the winners of our annual book contests — Anna Maria Hong, Nicholas Gulig, & Shaelyn Smith — whose books are forthcoming Spring 2018.

NEW BOOK NEWS

Sheila McMullin's daughterrarium
Reviewed at Galatea Resurrects. 
Reviewed at Heavy Feathers Review.
Reviewed at Foreward Reviews.

Jane Lewty's In One Form to Find Another
Reviewed at Entropy.
Book of the Week at The Volta.
Excerpt at Verse Daily.

James Allen Hall's I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well
Reviewed at Colorado Review.
Reviewed at NewPages.
Reviewed at Queen Mob's Teahouse.
Interview at The Rumpus.
SPD's Bestsellers List / Nonfiction.

2017 Book Contest Results

The CSU Poetry Center is excited to announce the results of our 2017 book competitions. The following three books were selected from nearly 1,200 manuscripts and will be published in spring 2018. Thank you to everyone who sent us work & congratulations to the writers below.

Winner of the First Book Poetry Competition
Judge: Suzanne Buffam
Anna Maria Hong: The Glass Age

Anna Maria Hong is the Visiting Creative Writer at Ursinus College, where she teaches poetry, fiction, and hybrid-genre writing. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published fiction and poetry in The Nation, Poetry, Ecotone, POOL, Southwest Review, Fence, Best New Poets, The Best American Poetry, and Verse Daily, among other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook Hello, virtuoso! was published by the Belladonna* Collaborative and her novella, H & G, won the inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation and will be published by Sidebrow Books in early 2018.


First Book Honorable Mentions: Megin Jimenez’s Lone Stories; Melissa Barrett’s Moon on Roam.

First Book Finalists: Bryan Beck’s Countryman; Emily Brandt’s ManWorld; Ashley Chambers’s The Exquisite Buoyancies: A Sonography; Ansley Clark’s Bloodline; Samuel Corfman’s Luxury, Blue Lace; Scott Cunningham’s Ya Te Veo; Binswanger Friedman’s The Four Color Problem; Pamela Hart’s Mothers over Nangarha; Amelia Klein’s Brilliant Dust; Davy Knittle’s get on like houses; Christine Larusso’s Mar; Rebecca Liu’s Mutter Tongue; Anna Mebel’s The Princess of Animals Invents Loneliness; Soham Patel’s ever really hear it; Nicholas Regiacorte’s American Massif; Robert Yerachmiel Snyderman’s Deform; Bronwen Tate’s Probable Garden; Candice Wuehle’s FIDELITORIA: fixed or fluxed.

First Book Semi-Finalists: Robyn Anspach’s Samson Speaks of Darkness; Micah Bateman’s Civil Servants; Timothy DeMay’s Avenue; Jonathan Dubow’s The Booth; Katherine Factor’s A Sybil Society; Judith Huang’s You, Riverine; Kimberly Kruge’s In-Migration; Megan Leonard’s What Queen What Binary Star; Paige Lewis’s No More; Jessica Marsh’s The Long Modify; Kelly Nelson’s The Possibility of My Absence; Michael Peterson’s Repeater; Cherry Pickman’s Islanders; Lacy Schutz’s Meathead in America; Bret Shepard’s Living As Magnets; Dennis James Sweeney’s In the Antarctic Circle; Grey Vild’s Ain’t Never; Sara Wainscott’s Insecurity System.

Winner of the Open Book Poetry Competition
Judges: Rebecca Gayle Howell, Lo Kwa Mei-en, & Lee Upton
Nicholas Gulig’s Orient

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin. The author of North of Order (YesYes Books) and Book of Lake (Cutbank), he currently lives in Fort Atkinson, WI and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
 

Open Book Finalists: Samuel Ace’s Our Weather Our Sea; Sarah Boyer’s Righteous, Chrillis, My Mimi, & The Owl; Caroline Cabrera’s (Lack begins as a tiny rumble); Kristen Case’s Principles of Economics; Lorene Delany-Ullman’s Souvenir; Brandi George’s Faun; M.C. Hyland’s The End; Krystal Languell’s Quite Apart; Michelle Lin’s The Year of the Horse is Dead; Kristi Maxwell’s Bright and Hurtless; Alexis Pope’s That Which Comes After; Michael Robins’s With Love, Etc.; Kent Shaw’s Too Numerous; S.A. Stepanek’s somebody, maybe: a love poem; Terese Svoboda’s 40 Days/Nights; Gale Thompson’s Expeditions to the Polar Seas; Daneen Wardrop’s Catch My + Slips So Easy.

Open Book Semi-Finalists: Geoff Bouvier’s Potential Soldier; Lisa Fay Coutley’s Tether; Dot Devota’s By Abundant Delinquencies; Michael Tod Edgerton’s Yet Sensate Light; Stevie Edwards’s Lush; Laura Eve Engel’s I Write To You From the Sea; Henry Israeli’s Notes Toward a Revolution; Jason Koo’s More Than Mere Light; Dora Maelch’s Stet; Beth Marzoni’s There Was During a Sudden; Alexis Orgera’s Monster, Fall; Meghan Privitello’s One God at a Time; Alicia Rabins’s Fruit Geode; Mara Adamitz Scrupe’s & Bless The Survivors; Purvi Shah’s Miracle Marks; Jon Thompson’s Notebook of Last Things; Andrew Wessels’s The Sunshiny Field.

Winner of the Essay Collection Competition
Judge: Renee Gladman
Shaelyn Smith: The Leftovers

Shaelyn Smith grew up in northern Michigan, and received an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the University of Alabama. She now lives in Auburn, AL. Her work can be found in Essay Daily, storySouth, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Forklift, OH.

Essay Collection Finalists: Jennifer Militello’s Knock Wood; Addie Tsai’s and in its place--: An Ode to Frankenstein; Laurie Blauner’s I Was One of My Memories; Diana Arterian’s Arrangement of Parts; Kisha Schlegel’s Fear Icons; Joshua Bernstein’s In Josaphat’s Valley; Toni Mirosevich’s Spell Heaven; Beth Peterson’s Theory of World Ice; Sarah Minor’s At Home With River Animals; Sejal Shah’s Things People Say.

Essay Collection Semi-Finalists: Julie Marie Wade’s The Hourglass; Charles Green’s Ways of Being Afraid; Noah Eli Gordon’s Dysgraphia; Krista Eastman’s The Painted Forest; Frank Light’s Far and Away; Michael Levan’s Gravidarum; Matthew Schultz’s Other Places; Jill Darling’s The Collateral Media Project; Brenda Iijima’s End Empire, Apparition On; Rachel Peckham’s The Aviatrix.

Spring 2015 Catalog Just Released!

Click on the books below or visit Small Press Distribution's website to purchase a copy of the following titles:

Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles, by Lee Upton

Festival, by Broc Rossell

50 Water Dreams, by Siwar Masannat

I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev