New anthology, “All We Can Hold”

Sage Hill Press is happy to announce that we’ll be publishing the forthcoming anthology, “All We Can Hold,” a collection of poems on motherhood.

The editors seek “a range of voices about what it means to be mother: witching-hour poems of sleeplessness, first smiles, miscarriage. The poems of broken windows and broken hearts, of first school and college days. The poems of lament and poems of fulfillment. We hope to serve as a forum for all voices, for we all have a mother.”

Editors include Elise Gregory, Emily Gwinn, Kate Maude, Kaleen McCandless, and Laura Walker.

To submit work: http://www.allwecanhold.com/

the Powder Horn Prize is now open

Sage Hill Press is now accepting manuscripts for the next Powder Horn Prize, a first book award.

Our final judge will be Nance Van Winckel, author of six poetry collections and three short story collections, and Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook/photo album. Nance is often interested in work that pushes against boundaries or form, genre, and language.

To be eligible, writers should not have previously published a full-length poetry collection (though chapbook publications are fine).

Manuscripts should be at least 45 pages in length, 1.15- or 1.5-spaced. The author’s name should not appear anywhere on the manuscript.

Sage Hill Press follows CLMP submission and contest ethics guidelines. If you are a current or former student of Nance Van Winckel, please do not submit to the contest.

Entry deadline is August 31, 2015. Entry fee is $20, and includes a copy of a past prize-winner. In your cover letter, please indicate which title you’d like, The Eyes the Window by Marci Rae Johnson, or Kill February by Jeffrey Tucker (to be published and shipped fall/winter 2015) and include your mailing address.

All manuscripts should be submitted via Submittable, accessible in the right-hand tool bar on the website, or by clicking here.

Railtown Almanac: the Prose Edition

We are now accepting prose submissions for the forthcoming edition of Railtown Almanac. We’re looking for short stories or essays by Spokane residents, or about Spokane (residents need not submit work about Spokane. Non-residents must submit work about or set in Spokane). Please submit no more than four pieces, each up to 3000 words in length. Submissions will be open until August 15, 2015.

All work must be submitted through our online submission system, which can be accessed through our homepage, or by clicking here.

Winner of the Powder Horn Prize

Powder Horn Prize finalists

Railtown Almanac

Railtown is complete! It will go to the printer on Monday, and we’ll have it in hand soon after. Our first public launch event will be Saturday, November 1 at Auntie’s bookstore, and readings throughout the end of the year at the Downtown Library, Spokane County Library locations, and the Book Parlor.

Railtown Almanac: a Spokane poetry anthology

Railtown Almanac is an anthology of poems by Spokane residents and/or poems about Spokane (poems need not be explicitly about Spokane, if written by Spokane residents). The anthology will celebrate the wide diversity of talented poets in the greater Spokane area, and we welcome submissions of any kind of poem.

We will accept submissions until August 1, and will publish the anthology to coincide with Verbatim, a literary and visual art collaboration on October 4, part of Create Spokane.

Please submit no more than five poems, using our online form, hosted by Submittable, which can be found here, or by clicking on “submit” from our homepage.

Previously published poems are acceptable, as long as the poet gets permission from the original publisher for reprinting (or if those rights have reverted back to the poet). Please let us know if the poems have been published, and where, in your cover letter.

Railtown Almanac is edited by Thom Caraway and Jeffrey G. Dodd, and will be published by Sage Hill Press.

Reading for the Powder Horn Prize

Powder Horn III will be judged by Kevin Goodan, author of Upper Level Disturbances (Center for Literary Publishing, 2012), Winter Tenor (Alice James, 2009), and In the Ghost-House Acquainted (Alice James, 2004). He teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Lewiston, Idaho.

To submit your manuscript, please use our online submissions manager. Click here for access.

The Powder Horn Prize is a first book award for poetry. Manuscripts should be 48+ pages in length. The author should not have previously published a full-length collection, though she may have published chapbooks.

The reading fee is $25. Entry deadline is June 1, 2014.

For questions, email sagehillpress@yahoo.com.

First-book prize reading

Released: The Eyes the Window

Sage Hill Press is delighted to release the debut collection of Marci Rae Johnson, our Powder Horn Prize winner.

Contest final judge Christopher Howell says. “This book is about time, time as measured, experienced, prefigured, remembered, projected, thought of, not thought of; time as it inhabits language, dreams, visions, desire; how it relates to physical movement both in and of the world; how it is framed.  All of this is conducted through the window of a real or imagined “On the Road” experience during which two people, lovers, try to see themselves and each other, in spite of the persistent change brought on by shifts in both temporal and spatial context, and the expansion and contraction of the frame.”

And from Alan Michael Parker, “Reflective and refractive, the poems in this shimmering collection offer us the promise of indeterminacy as solace, in a world where the Unknown and the Possible are one and the same. In Johnson’s unerring poems, what we don’t know seems a version of what we might wish—“maybe this is where / we see something beautiful,” she writes. Traveler, trust these fine poems, and this fine poet: profound comforts lie here, in the arms of language.”