✦ This fall, we have the privilege of publishing C. Rees' debut collection, NOCTUARY. These poems excavate grief through buried histories, emergent ecologies, and poetry’s capacity to unearth and commune with the living and the dead.
✦ C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, anti-pastoralism, and hauntings. They were raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently live in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. C. holds an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.
✦ We are honored to announce the 2026 winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize, Grownfolks Blues: a musical in poems by Jae Nichelle! Arriving on your shelf this October, Grownfolk Blues is a musical-in-verse that speaks love to the down and out, using the power of creative expression to challenge oppressive systems.
✦ Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of God Themselves (Andrews McMeel, 2023) and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) (YesYes Books, 2019). A graduate fellow of The Watering Hole, Jae won the inaugural John Lewis Writing Award in poetry from the Georgia Writers Association and was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020, the Washington Square Review, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere.
Jae is a slam poetry champion, and her spoken word poems have been featured by Write About Now and Button Poetry as well as solicited for campaigns by Pfizer, Yahoo, and Natalist. She has a passion for language, linguistics, social justice, and mental health and has published articles on these subjects as well as spoken at the Furious Flower Conference, Portland Book Festival, and the National Women’s March. She believes in all of our collective ability to contribute to radical change.
✦ Next March, we are publishing Alexis N. Garcia's debut collection TIME IS A SILLY BOY. These poems delve into a personal and ephemeral archive rich with sonnets, hybrid forms, photographs, and poems as artifacts to consider the alternate clock of trans time.
✦ Alexis N. Garcia is a poet, printmaker, and educator who took their first steps on the soil of a citrus grove in National City, CA. Their cross-discipline experiments glitch traditional poetic form to construct trans time and nonlinear meaning-making. Garcia’s poems and hybrid experiments have been featured in The Hopkins Review, Poem-A-Day, beestung, Peach Mag, Apogee Journal, The Slowdown, and The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNext, among others. They graduated with an MFA in Writing from UCSD and have received fellowships from The Outpost Foundation, Jack Jones Literary Arts, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. They are currently the steward of a heart-shaped hummingbird feeder. TIME IS A SILLY BOY is their first book.
✦ This collection is the first in our partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies.