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Great Poetry Giveaway 2014!

big poetry giveaway 2014

QuillsEdge is proud to join the Big Poetry Giveaway organized by Kelli Russell Agodon over at Book of Kells Poetry Giveaway 2014. What a marvelous idea she had five years ago to spread the poetry love around! We’re giving away 4 great poetry books by our demographic – innovative women poets over the age of 50! To win one, post a comment saying which book/books you’d love to receive, and at the end of National Poetry Month we’ll choose a winner for each book by some manner of random drawing.

First Book – Gold, the newest collection from Barbara Crooker, who will be the judge for our first competition. WE LOVE THIS BOOK! Grief, aging, loss, aging, the magic of the year’s natural cycle, sex, gold leaves and blue skies.


Another favorite, Mrs. Dumpty by Chana Bloch. From a review:

The poems in Mrs. Dumpty are about “a great fall,” the dissolution of a long and loving marriage, but they are not simply documentary or elegiac. What interests Chana Bloch is the inner life: how we are formed by our losses and our parents’ losses, how we learn what we need to know through our intuitions and confusions, how we deny and delay and finally discover who we are.


Book Three – Kamiko Hahn’s The Artist’s Daughter.


Book Four – The Usable Field by Jane Mead. Jane teaches in the MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation where the two of us met, so we’ve gotten to hear her astounding work. Jane Mead can be lyric and harsh, musical and startling in the same poem. This is a great book!

Launch Weekend Summary – Thoughts from Jane

Exciting weekend at the Saturday launch at Split This Rock. And on the trip home with Elliott batTzedek, we discussed all the ways of expanding our combined visions for QuillsEdge Press. It is a shared vision: How to recreate a chapbook press into something more like gathering place for a growing community of women poets and artists.

We are connected in many ways: a common love of poetry, of beauty and art. We share a generational kinship, a sense of purpose and practice. As the rain pounded against the windshield, we rolled past Amish Farms, the silos of rural Pennsylvania. In the pelting rain we happily brainstormed ideas of how to create inclusion and use the website to spread the word of different opportunities and resources–links to woman-significant websites, book reviews, conferences and retreats that might appeal to you.

And up our sleeves, some new models of how to make a chapbook contest more than just a chapbook contest with one winner. Chapbooks are small books, and we imagine each one as an entry into other rooms of opportunity. Stay tuned. There’s more to come. So much more to come! (Jane)

Celebration Time!

Exhausted after all the work leading up the launch and the book fair, we headed out to eat, through pouring rain and evening traffic, ending up at The Parva in Bethesda, MD. Wow – the best plantain chips either of us had ever had, plus great Chilean red wine for Jane and a Columbian mojito for Elliott.

If you’re ever in Bethesda, go eat here!

Up and Running at Split This Rock!

QuillsEdge Press had our coming out party at the Social Justice Book Fair during the Split This Rock Poetry and Politics Festival. We had a great time, talked with lots of poets, pushed our introvert selves to socialize and hand out business cards, and came away exhausted and happy. Hey, we’ve launched a press!