Tag Archives: can I get a halleluiah with that?

QuillsEdge is Pro-Diversity!

QuillsEdge Press is thrilled to announce
that our 2015 contest includes a
Pro-Diversity entrance fee of $5.00
for self-identified Women of Color

 

In our first contest last year the proportion of manuscripts we received from Women of Color did not match the number of talented Women of Color writers we know are out there, so we resolved to reach out in new ways this year.

 

Please help us by sharing our news
with your writing communities!

Our 2nd Competition Opens 11/01/2015!

QuillsEdge Press is proud to announce our 2nd Annual Chapbook Competition for Women Poets Over 50!

Our Theme: To Inhabit (a body, a landscape, an ecosystem, a dream, a memory, a nightmare, a fantasy, a place, a time)

Our Judge: Mary Ann McFadden

The competition opens November 1st, 2015 and runs through January 31st, 2016. Check back here in early October to download the guidelines and get the link to enter online!

We’ve been editing our hearts out!

Been a while since our last post – but only because we’ve been busy being editors!

The second of the two winning manuscripts just flew digitally to our designer, Joe Carlough, so layout can begin. We can’t wait to see the proofs, which will be coming soon. Soon soon soon.

Since QuillsEdge Press is dedicated to creating community, and not only to publishing “contest winners,” we’re doing something different with our first two chapbooks. Each one will have a complete winning manuscript in a front section, and then a separate section at the back where each of the other four finalists will have two poems. When you buy our books (and you WILL buy them!), you’ll also be getting four poems by each finalist as a sample of the depth and variety of poetry submitted to us.

And all six finalists will be invited to be readers for our next contest! Just like every other small press, we have to run contests to fund the work, but for us strengthening bonds between women poets is just as much our mission as publishing chapbooks.

More exciting news is coming soon, including our next competition, readings, how to BUY THE BOOKS, and announcements of new Board members!

Meanwhile, here’s part of the cover image for Lucia Galloway’s chapbook, created by poet and artist (and now BOARD MEMBER) Anique Taylor.

garlic cropped for blog

Poets that shaped us deeply – Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker:

All poets have their chosen ancestors and affinities. As an American poet I see myself in the line of Whitman, Williams, and Ginsberg, those great enablers of the inclusive democratic impulse, the corollary of which is formal openness. As a student I wrote in traditional closed forms, as did they—before they discovered the joy and meaning of open forms. To write in open forms is to improvise. Improvisatory verse is like doing a jazz solo: we know what we’ve just done, and the next line has to be connected to it, has to grow out of it somehow, but there is an essential unpredictability. This is an American invention because we act, in America, as if the future is partly shaped by the past, but is not determined by it. We are (a little bit) free.