News & Events
null landing is now available
We’re excited to announce that null landing by isaiah a. hines is now available.
Announcing our 19th Annual Book Prize Winner
We’re excited to announce the winner of our 19th Annual Book Prize—Isaiah Hines’ null landing!
Thank you to everyone who submitted to our 19th Annual Book Prize. We received upwards of 200 manuscripts - all of which were daring, engaging, and a joy to read. However, we can only publish one and, this year, that one is null landing by poet Isaiah Hines.
This year’s judge, Sam Ace, had the following to say about null landing -
“‘A life constituted by vertigo, by sheer spatiality, generates a zone of alteration. An opacity / that refuses to exist only in relation to time. Our love gathers, / performs the collaborative beauty of critical edge-work.’ The poems in this collection reverberate with history, reference and embodiment. Words range and jump across the page, and are interspersed with drawings, charts, and symbols. The poet has created a work of complex multi-dimensionality, much like a dance or live performance. It's not surprising that the poet asks of the reader ‘Have you considered the poetics of mathematics? of quantum physics?’ As revealed through the considerable liner notes, the poet has not only considered these things, but works in relation to artists, performers, and thinkers whose lives, past and current, intersect in layered rather than linear time.”
We can’t wait to show you all the wonderful work Isaiah is doing. His collection is as visual as it is linguistic, as cerebral as it is deeply felt. Help us welcome Isaiah Hines to the Slope family!
Isaiah A. Hines is a poet and student from Burlington, Vermont. Their writing has appeared in Engaging Black Poetics, a blog series by Nightboat Books and their performance work has been hosted by JAG Productions. They are currently completing a degree in Ethnic Studies while assisting with instruction in the Adult Education Program at Brooklyn Public Library. Their debut collection of poetry, null landing is forthcoming from Slope Editions.
Our finalists for the 19th Annual Book Prize:
Echoes, Erika Kielsgard
The Empty Kingdom, Sara Akant
Bloodline, Ansley Clark
Freak Lip: An Epistolary, Julia Cohen
Girl Country, Ansley Moon
Esau, Dan Rosenberg
108 Olivia, Maria Flaccavento
Hecho, Kell Nelson
Discordions, Whitney Kerutis
Him or Her or Whatever, Tyler Friend
Majnun, Makmak Faunlagui
Read about the finalists, and find short excerpts from their work, here!
Our 19th Annual Book Prize Finalists
Congratulations to the finalists for the 19th Annual Slope Book Prize! We received over 200 submissions this year (!!!), which we narrowed down to eleven finalists. We passed these on to judge Samuel Ace. While he picked Isaiah Hines’ null landing as winner, we wanted to celebrate the finalists. They all deserve to be published, read, thought about and wrestled with, and shared widely. They awed us in form, content, and sheer ambition. Moving from explorations of gender, inheritance, violence, language, nature, nation, death - and so, so much more - to moments of descriptive beauty to impassioned cries for a better world, these writers are doing daring, vital work. It’s also worth noting that several of these manuscripts were finalists last year. We were delighted to see them again!
We want to give a thank you to everyone who submitted during our reading period. Every single submission we received was read by multiple editors and thoroughly enjoyed. While we can’t blurb you all, please know you have our deepest thanks and respect.
Find blurbs and short excerpts below. Enjoy!
108 Olivia by Maria Flaccavento
This is the second year 108 Olivia has been a finalist for the Slope Book Prize. We were incredibly excited to see the collection again. Maria Flaccavento does something powerful within the pop culture character of Olivia Benson. She creates a savior, one who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty in the process of protecting us.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“OLIVIA,
Today in the garden, I buried two eggs in the soil between the tomato plants. Some old tradition about planting the seed of intention, then new life.
Remember in the lot next to the burned down burger joint? How you were clawing through the dirt for that small girl? Tearing through the dirt with just your hands.
I’m digging too. I’ll die digging, I’ll dig until we come out on the other side, digging farther and farther and all the way down.
Is it farther than that? Is it far enough yet?”
BLOODLINE by Ansley Clark
BLOODLINE is a collection about inheritance. The oh-so-human inheritance of disease borne through genetics, but also inherited violences, traumas, narratives, politics, and survival tactics, all swirled together in the messy web of social relations. Put another way, Ansley Clark presents us with a macro lens view of what it’s like to live as a human in the historical continuum.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“a familiar object hovers husk-lunged so close I can hear it breathe
what follows follows me
underground in clear spools unravels”
DISCORDIANS by Whitney Kerutis
DISCORDIANS is a modern take on classical Greek themes and myths. It’s part Alcestis, part conversation with women of myth, part extended dialogue between Woman, Man, and Eris, part choral melos, part stage direction. Whitney Kerutis give readers a front row seat to the daily violence experienced by women. What’s remarkable is how this violence is presented – far from being subject to, and channeled through, a patriarchal gaze, it’s instead offered as plain fact. This is a collection of fearless, urgent poems.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“Dear Antigone,
In an auditorium full of children, I light a match to my face. As in, don’t talk me out of it. When I say I have been on more than one bus with a woman speaking to herself, I mean I am cursed by a handheld mirror’s weaponized sun. I try to block out the women’s voices with my earbuds blaring, but still the soft hiss of their speeches are a deafening static, a nursery to care for the pressure of voicelessness.”
Esau by Dan Rosenberg
Another collection making its second appearance as a finalist, Esau by Dan Rosenberg is a sort of spiritual hallucination. Taking its title from the name of Jacob’s older brother, Esau enacts the small, ordinary moments of life and enchants them with something between the sacred and the profane. It presents life as we wish it might be and are terrified it could be.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“stuck ingloriously elsewhere but
this letter finds me reading subway
cars out loud people mark a border
around me saving who from whom I
wonder at the red letter raw and
sweating they moo the commuters they
quiver all plugged in and shiny they
wait for the end of the metal’s scream
and enter consumption the letter
watches me watching and talking to
me in the blasts some air like wing beats
wets my face with difficult light I
wash thirteen days away in this light
each hair comes to hunger on my head”
ECHOES by Erika Kielsgard
What does it mean to be human on a planet in which humans are a minority species? How does the experience of life in our frail bodies compare to that of an anemone, a mantis, the wind? What about the experience of death? These are the questions Erika Kielsgard sets out to answer in ECHOES. Part poem, part prose, this collection is a cataloging of the grief we feel living, dying, and surviving.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“Swollen eye of titan arum,
carrion scent summoning
bone from catacombs’ ossuaries;
snail shells in soil at Cimetière du Père-Lachaise:
some wholly contained,
some unoccupied or secondhand”
Girl Country by Ansley Moon
Girl Country is another collection making a return appearance as a finalist. Dedicated to “the 50 million missing Indian girls,” this manuscript is a deeply felt example of art as praxis. It gives voice and agency to these 50 million women while also interrogating the author’s experience of America and its whiteness. Ansley Moon’s deft use of photographs, passports, headlines, and even mathematical tables combine with her poetry to create something which is both rhetorically powerful and emotionally moving.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“I miss tearing through flesh—
or leaving my indentation
on an upper thigh.
Mine remember the brush of your knuckles,
the erosion of skin
beneath the jaw. Or sucking
your finger until my first tooth erupted.
Despite years of metal & force,
they map the terrain & migrate back. ”
Freak Lip: An Epistolary by Julia Cohen
Julia Cohen takes a diamond sharp eye to the social position of womanhood in Freak Lip: An Epistolary. To whom is she writing? Gertrude Stein, family members, Henry James, Alexandra & Nellie, Spooner, Mary Ruefle, and Jamie McCartney, among many others. Questions of addressee fall away as text messages, letters, and photographs are woven into the collection. It becomes clear the recipient isn’t important – rather, it’s us, the readers, who get the pleasure of experiencing Cohen’s astounding insight.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“I’m also not yet aware of Gertrude Stein, not for another 7-8 years, when I’m in a college English class, when I realize she is one of the few writers who feels her way through a sentence without trying to affix a set meaning to her experience. When she explains “by written I mean made. & by made I meant felt.” When I feel a tug of both love & jealously toward the precise tumbling outward of her sentences. Feelings, like baby foxes making their way out of the dark den into the clover. ”
Hecho by Kell Nelson
Something remarkable is occurring with language inside the pages of Hecho. Drawing on Spanish words existing inside of American English – taken from a range of writers including Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich – Kell Nelson writes a collection that’s an ever-present, unfolding translation while also being something wholly its own. Hecho calls to mind the idea of the always already.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
Him or Her or Whatever by Tyler Friend
The poems are sensual and embodied, and display a physicality that often becomes more than the language they are made of. Sex and the body are written in a way that defies gender. In fact, the poems have a gender of their own. Tyler Friend writes with irreverence, humor, and sometimes deadly seriousness. We feel we’ve re-learned something from these poems - how language, in all of its mess and specificity, can be a worthy stand-in for desire.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“I have a vodka cran, & you’ll order
a rum & coke, or maybe a whiskey sour.
What’s the word for the bit of arm
between your elbow and your shoulder?
I don’t know, but I like your those, & I want
to sit in the near-dark next to you, feeling
the slight pressure where our those are touching. This.
This is what I’m trying to talk about: the ability to remain
so fully present inside a silly hunk of meat, & not
try to race my way out of it. This. This is what I’ve learned. ”
majnun by Makmak Faunlagui
Have you ever read a poem so rich in image and language, so utterly itself, that you wanted to curl up and sleep inside of it? To wake up to the poem’s morning breath which, somehow, smells like gingerbread and bergamot? In majnun, Makmak Faunlagui manages to repeat this feat again and again (and again). Faunlagui takes seriously poetry’s dictate to surprise and delight.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“sucking on percebes
you alien goose barnacle!
your protuberances from shells
much like elephant trunks
shells like cleaved rocks
moss and ferns
laurelling your mouth
studded
beds of oregano
berms of bitter
green oranges
ornamental
and reflected
against hard curved
sheets of glass
forged in izmir
vertical jungles transplanted
from south america
vermouth-blotted serviettes
bearded segway instructors ”
THE EMPTY KINGDOM by Sara Akant
The Empty Kingdom by Sara Akant is another example of a collection that foregrounds its own textual nature and the malleability of language. Moving between Old English, English, and Turkish, Akant tells a modern-day fairy tale that’s all the more moving for its starkness. These poems are ambitious and powerful.
A Small Excerpt We Loved
“It is 7am on the oversized ottoman.
It is raining in the ambulance called yabanci.
Me ? I drink sour cherry juice while floating through the office
of the newly minted airport. Centuries old men shift their aprons
into groan. In the fourth empty Playland, I decide to
let them dream. I sing to him in earnest – Baba, let them sleep.
What is it now, to be 32 at 3am, false lumps
in the breast and still humming Bruce, still falsely
humming Bruce. The dog –
I say – it barked for noon.
Shut up you horn, some bebek moaned.
But that was twenty years ago.”
An Update on Our 2020 Book Prize
To our submitters and readers: we have a small update from the editorial team about our 2020 Book Prize.
Due to COVID-19, our selection of semi-finalists and finalists was delayed. Slope’s small staff is completely volunteer-based, and, while we aimed to have a winner selected this summer, that, unfortunately, did not occur. You have our sincerest apologies.
This year’s judge, Samuel Ace, has received our finalists and we are close to announcing our latest Book Prize winner, as well as highlighting the extraordinary work of a group of finalists. Stay tuned!
Announcing our 18th Annual Book Prize Winner
We’re excited to announce the winner of our 18th Annual Book Prize—Stephanie Cawley’s My Heart But Not My Heart!
Thank you to everyone who submitted to our 18th Annual Book Prize. We received some fantastic work this year, and we want to extend our deepest gratitude for your support. It’s never gotten easier to select just one book to publish, but we are thankful for each and every submission we receive.
Chosen by Solmaz Sharif, My Heart But Not My Heart examines death, grief, and the limitations of language. Cawley speaks outside of the many ways we expect those grieving to treat their experience, refusing easy categorizations of everything from mental illness to the familial to narrative itself. In My Heart But Not My Heart, Cawley rejects narrative and any attempts to memorialize her father (whose death sparked the project) through depicting him or his life, and refuses to console even herself. She looks at what else remains.
Stephanie Cawley writes in the lineage of Susan Howe, Bhanu Kapil, Jenny Boully, and Maggie Nelson, among many others. Join us in welcoming her daring and necessary voice to the Slope family!
Stephanie Cawley is a poet from southern New Jersey. She is the author of My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions), the forthcoming Animal Mineral (YesYes Books), and the chapbook A Wilderness (Gazing Grain Press). She has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. You can find her online at stephaniecawley.com.
Our finalists for the 18th Annual Book Prize:
108 Olivia by Maria Flaccavento
Arizona SB 1070: An Act by Ryan Clark
BEDIEVAL by Ellen Boyette
Esau by Dan Rosenberg
Girl Country by Ansley Moon
Once, Eternal by Lena Tuffaha
Projectionist by Kristen Steenbeeke
Unbelievable Floridas by John Whalen
Untitled (White Combine with Arcana) by Trevor Ketner
V by Carolyn Guinzio
You can read more about our finalists here.
Our 18th Annual Book Prize Finalists
Allow us to shine some light on our own incredibly talented finalists for our 18th Annual Book Prize. While we can only publish one book (Stephanie Cawley’s My Heart But Not My Heart, to be released in Spring 2020—see our announcement here), we’d like to briefly celebrate the following finalist manuscripts, each of which had a profound impact on us this year. Thank you to everyone who submitted—without you, we’re nothing. We appreciate your support, and we wish we had the capacity to blurb every single manuscript that we are entrusted with.
Blurbing our finalists was inspired by Tarpaulin Sky—we admired how they honored their authors in their Shortlist for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards. We are always looking for ways to uplift the works we receive, and we hope all small presses can join us in giving back to the authors who support our existence.
108 Olivia by Maria Flaccavento
This is a collection to and for Olivia Benson—to and for all the Olivias in our lives, at times protecting us, at times holding our hair back. This is Maria Flaccavento’s urgent response to the violence of patriarchal systems, and is violence in turn. 108 Olivia is the future, both magical and savage. We were delighted to experience both the rawness and the talent espoused in this wonderful work.
Esau by Dan Rosenberg
Esau is like reading the Bible (or the Book of the Dead) through the gauze-like softness of a kitchen curtain. Reading Esau is like reading a river. Dan Rosenberg takes a deft eye, ceaseless in its noticing, to the mundane alienation of life. He then imbues these observations with a sense of the trembling holy, both angelic and terrible. In fact, reading Esau is a giving of yourself over to rapture and to cataloging what’s left in its wake.
Unbelievable Floridas by John Whalen
What is an unbelievable Florida? The headlines coming out of the swamp-soaked state, both comedic and heartbreaking in turn, seem to suggest nothing is unbelievable there. Until Rimbaud is birthed, kicking and scared, into its tropical storms and palm-lined sprawl. John Whalen’s collection follows Rimbaud from a childhood spent lighting fires to an adulthood spent running from them. The phrase fever dream holds hands with this writing. John Whalen creates something truly unbelievable in the most unlikely of places.
Arizona SB 1070: An Act by Ryan Clark
Ryan Clark does something incredibly important in his homophonic translation of the SB 1070—Arizona’s infamous anti-immigration bill. He takes the political and legal language present and recontextualizes it as a damning indictment against the state. Clark turns language from a weapon against those disenfranchised to a weapon against the powers that be. Arizona SB 1070 isn’t a piece of resistance writing, it transcends these popular tropes to be something more necessary, more urgent.
Girl Country by Ansley Moon
Girl Country is an impassioned cry of outrage with distinct but connected narratives. Numb acceptance, the refusal of pity, cold truths, hard facts, intentional discomfort—what does it mean to study abandonment? Ansley Moon enfolds a remarkable talent that explores the deepest symptoms of personhood. Soft but powerful, the country painted here is a dangerous one to walk in.
Once, Eternal by Lena Tuffaha
Once, Eternal has enchanting poetry that both exposes and complicates the dichotomy between the willowy softness of poetry and the inherent violence of translation. Often bucolic, Once, Eternal hides a subtle blade beneath melodic wording and artful social commentary. It is not the kind of piece to take lightly: it is a lullaby for an open wound.
Projectionist by Kristen Steenbeeke
We understand that technology has now become part of our life, but to what degree? Projectionist asks over and over about form and function—what is our new form as a personality interlinked with technology? What function does technology serve? What constitutes nature? Artfully contemplating the form and function of poetry itself, Projectionist is a beautiful self-aware reflection of survival in the modern world.
V by Carolyn Guinzio
Melancholy inhabits every line of skillfully rendered prose-poetry in the achingly sweet V. As much a window into another life as a swan song to accompany a glorious dance, V allows every page to be a miniature painting of a single person's interiority. We not only grow fond of V, we also begin to see her in our own futures, or to recognize her on the street. Lonely, sorrowful, but full of love, V is a triumph of art.
BEDIEVAL by Ellen Boyette
BEDIEVAL stretches across the ages—peahens, cell phones, pyres, epidurals, salt lamps, cauldrons, tubes of lipstick, historical torture… objects swirl in a surreal, timeless detritus to investigate the conditions of the female body, to ask how our agency begins and ends. What language do we need to identify ourselves against our illnesses? Ellen Boyette’s BEDIEVAL tinkers, thinks, and maintains poetry about and for the body’s recovery—and we’re left breathless from its imagination and scope.
Untitled (White Combine with Arcana) by Trevor Ketner
One moment in Trevor Ketner’s manuscript sings for the rest of their collection: “It’s the moving that makes one wise.” Untitled (White Combine with Arcana) spans from coast to desert to “a lake called Eden,” through lovers’ minds, from Robert Rauschenberg paintings in MoMA to Rauschenberg himself. This work’s travels, visions, somatic demands, and fragments all converge on queerness, erasure, and of whiteness being neither “blank nor is it pure”—and Slope is grateful that we bore witness to Ketner’s assembling eye.
Announcing the Winner of Slope's 17th Annual Book Prize - BJ Soloy
We’re excited to announce the winner of the 17th Annual Slope Editions’ Book Prize, picked by the luminous Ocean Vuong, is Our Pornography & other disaster songs by BJ Soloy.
We’ll publish Our Pornography & other disaster songs because, as Ocean writes, “Our Pornography is a crystalline, dusky and charmingly stubborn American text whose power rests in its desire to complicate linear time into a constellation of epicenters. This myriad-voiced long poem embraces the detritus and paraphernalia of its moment, and ushers it all, like a river carrying the grit and sparkle, truth and secrets of its undertows, toward a future not yet accounted for because the present still promises discovery. And what discoveries here in these staccato and ruptured lines that, despite everything, find a way to offer the world anew.”
Keep your eyes peeled for BJ’s collection in 2019!
Our full list of finalists includes:
MAIDS by Abby Frucht
You, Siphon by Kerry Banazek
Glorious Veils of Diane by Rainie Oet
Dead Sister by Brian Whalen
When I say wife by Hallie Wiederholt
Lilly of the Valley by Ines Pujos
Parallaxis by Michael Flatt
Blow by Mag Gabbart
Announcing Famous Times by Thea Brown
We’re proud to announce that Famous Times by Thea Brown is forthcoming from Slope.
To quote Jennifer Chang, who blurbs Famous Times,
In Famous Times, Thea Brown trains her vertiginous wit and lyricism on all that we overlook and risk losing when we start believing too much in the chaos of our lamentable contemporary moment. Yes, this is a mournful book, but sardonic and weirdly resourceful, bounding imaginatively among the horizon’s blue dot, our burnt-toast insides, adult acne, and questionable sciences like linguistics and physics. “My everyday is too much as it is,” Brown admits, balancing nervously between fragility and ferocity, and it is this “too much” that Famous Times scrutinizes with both savage attention and weary distraction. I found it mesmerizing.
Announcing Beautyberry by Cassie Donish
We’re proud to announce that Beautyberry by Cassie Donish is forthcoming from Slope.
To quote Mary Jo Bang, who blurbs Beautyberry with devotional enthusiasm,
This is a book of boundaries, objects, intersections. A book of multiple selves caught in the midst of self-definition. A book of conflagrations (“my hair / yesterday’s / fire caught / in a disaster”). A book inhabited by all the poets who came right up to the edge over which this book falls (“I consider any verge / a haunting”). A book by a daughter of Dickinson but of this moment. This book is not afraid to address abstractions: What is the beloved? What is a body? What is knowledge? This book barrels toward showing us what can’t be told. If I could, I would quote every word of this book. Instead, you should read it. “The words fall out, click against the table.”
Mini-Interview with Ocean Vuong, Judge for Slope Editions’ 17th Annual Book Prize
Slope had the chance to chat with Ocean Vuong, the judge for this year’s book prize, on a small handful of poetry topics we thought might be of interest to potential submitters. Check out Ocean’s answers below, and don't forget to submit to our book prize here.
Slope Editions: What do you consider a "poem"?
Ocean Vuong: Something that complicates the very questions that necessitate the text's creation.
SE: How do you start writing a poem? How do you know when a poem is "done"?
OV: I mostly start a poem in my head, language clanks in there, like a pennies in a can, I suppose--until rhythm and meaning collaborate into something that excites, terrifies, surprises. As for "doneness," I don't really know. I'm not sure I'm actually ever done with anything, let alone a poem. But sometimes I just let things go. Sometimes a poem is "done" not so much because I'm through with it, but because another poem, or scrap of language, has found its way in, saying "Look at me! Look at me! Do you know who I am? I'm you, but better!" Naturally, I drop everything and follow it--often to a dead end or, even more likely, a beautiful starless night of which I'm inside, surviving with emotional intensity while watching Netflix. C'est la guerre.
SE: Who are some writers you draw inspiration from?
OV: Lorca, Rimbaud, Kim Hyesoon, Ben Lerner, Wong May, Cathy Park Hong, Kayo Chingonyi, William Brewer, Natalie Diaz, Grace Paley, Eduardo C. Corral, Sally Wen Mao, Rosemarie Waldrop, Mary Ruefle, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Chen Chen, Jenny Offil, C.D. Wright, Linh Dinh, Etheridge Knight, Angel Nafis, Jean Valentine, Bei Dao, Zachary Schomburg, Morgan Parker, Solmaz Sharif, Rick Barot, Jaques J. Rancourt, Sandra Lim, Jenny Johnson, Wendy Xu. There's a poet named Mark Pajak from the UK whose work I love. His debut, Spitting Distance, contains poems that work, for me, like little dark hallways you can wander in and lose yourself.
SE: What are you reading right now?
OV: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. It's wild. Also, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, which is also wild.
SE: How do you feel about the idea of a poetry book as an art object?
OV: I feel really good about that. That's a nice great thing, when we tend to fabrication and production, too, as art making.
Want to join the Slope Editions team?
Slope Editions, an independent poetry press based in the Pioneer Valley, is currently looking for a new Special Projects Editor!
About Slope
Founded in 2001 by Chris Janke and Ethan Paquin, Slope was one of the very first independent presses/online journals in the country— we’ve since transitioned to only publishing books and chapbooks. Our most recent titles include this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all I had so i drew it by Keegan Lester (chosen by Mary Ruefle) and Speech Rinse by Vanessa Couto Johnson. You can take a look at our website to see more of what we’ve done in the past: www.slopeeditions.org
Slope Editions is a micro-press. We publish, as volunteers, between one and four titles a year, mostly funded through our contests. As a tiny operation, our positions take the shape of the people involved. We have no office, and we hold weekly meetings during which editors check-in with the progress on their various independently-run projects, and we look forward to the individual and sometimes idiosyncratic contributions that individual editors make.
About the Job
This newly-created position will be even more in flux than other Slope jobs. While also participating in the editorial process of selecting finalists for our annual chapbook contest and book prize and releasing a new full-length in the fall, the Special Projects Editor will work on developing new creative projects in collaboration with the Managing and Assistant Managing Editors. The Special Projects editor will have wide discretion to propose and implement new publishing projects, including projects of their own creation. Two projects that the Special Projects Editor will be asked to investigate are: a political pamphlet series in response to the current political climate, and a resurrection of slope dot org, our currently dormant online journal. We are also open to planning Slope events or readings, managing reading tours for our writers, developing grant-based programs, and more.
The ideal candidate must be adept at taking the reins and working independently, as well as collaborating over long distances. Because we are a tiny organization, anyone in this position will be considered, should they desire, for other roles: Assistant Managing Editor, Managing Editor, etc, when those positions are open. Because each editor operates quite independently, we rely on and strongly emphasize skills of that allow for self-management and an ability to follow-through, to identify and complete tasks in a timely manner.
The Special Projects Editor should feel comfortable working remotely while also participating in a weekly phone or skype meeting to discuss different projects and creative directions.
Please indicate if you have any past experience working in an editorial position with a magazine or press. Grant-writing experience or experience working for a non-profit is a plus.
Compensation
Every job at Slope Edition is a volunteer position. While we expect regular attention to current tasks, the hours per week can vary widely, and each editor has control over their own hours. We expect this to be a very part-time position. In addition, Slope Editions is happy to work with existing internship programs with universities to provide oversight, reporting, and grades when necessary for academic credit. In addition, Slope will provide letters of recommendation to future job prospects. We consider ourselves to be participants in a large literary community which is more-often-than-not financially undercompensated. We are not blind to the ways in which free labor can be exploitative, and we strive to work with our volunteers that their own needs are met along with the needs of our organization. In the 15+-year history of Slope Editions, editors have often found that the skills built during one’s time at Slope Editions can lead to important entries on a CV or resume. We also find a reward in helping to shape the literary landscape, something that every staff member at Slope has an opportunity to engage in through our editorial meetings, manuscript screenings, and reading periods.
To Apply
Please send a cover letter and resume to our Managing Editor, Emily Hunerwadel, at slope.editions@gmail.com by February 15th. We will begin holding interviews with prospective candidates in late January/February 2018.
Thanks,
Slope Editions
Terri Witek Wins Slope Editions' 16th Annual Book Contest, Selected By Dawn Lundy Martin
We are thrilled to announce the winner of our 16th Annual Book Prize: The Rape Kit by Terri Witek, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin for publication in 2018.
Of the winning manuscript, Martin writes, “Terri Witek’s The Rape Kit is a powerful procedural collection of poems that unearths the obstructionist nature of the bureaucratic apparatuses that proclaim to attend to the trauma of sexual violence. But that’s just the beginning. The range and depth of this book is astonishing in its precision, and in its probing. The Rape Kit manages an unrelenting force of return to languages of steely repression, thereby stealing power from the gaze of the apparatuses and those behind it. It is a miraculous accomplishment. Witek’s collection is rare and necessary and a fire in throat of a culture that has no appropriate language for rape and its aftermath. Her approximation here strokes the aura of a pain that cannot be spoken. It takes multiple approaches—renderings of interior architectures, absences, diagrams, historical overlay, erasures, and language repetition—but in the end, Witek’s The Rape Kit is a grand success, the best we’ll get. Fresh, relevant, and heartbreaking.
The Rape Kit is Terri Witek’s sixth book of poems—her work has been included in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Slate, Hudson Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Her poetry often traces the breakages between words and images: she has collaborated with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) since 2005. Their works together include gallery shows, video, performance and site-specific projects—these have been featured internationally in New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon, and Rio de Janeiro. Collaborations with digital artist Matt Roberts (mattroberts.com) use augmented reality technology for smart phones to poetically map cities and have been featured in Matanza (Colombia), Lisbon, Glasgow, Vancouver, and Miami. With Lopes she team-teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas, and she also runs Stetson’s undergraduate creative writing program, where she holds the Sullivan Chair. terriwitek.com
We would also like to congratulate our finalists, listed below in no particular order:
Miracle Marks by Purvi Shah
Echo’s Errand by Keith Jones
What It Doesn’t Have to Do With by Lindsay Bernal
Hard Some by Hailey Higdon
The Feminology of Spirit by Lynarra Featherly
FIDELITORIA: fixed or fluxed by Candice Wuehle
Too Numerous by Kent Shaw
Quite Apart by Krystal Languell
Negotiations by Paul Hlava
After June by Sara Renberg
Solastalgia by JM Miller
A Paper Likeness by Heidi Reszies
Announcing the Winner of Slope Editions’ 5th Annual Chapbook Contest
Slope Editions is pleased to announce the results of our 5th Annual Chapbook Contest. We are thrilled to publish The Body Beside Herself by Julianne Neely in 2018!
Julianne Neely is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship and was awarded the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize. Her writing has been published in The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, LEVELER, Pacifica Literary Review, New Orleans Review, and more. Find her online: @juleneely.
We also want to extend congratulations to our four finalists. We've read so many incredible manuscripts over the course of this reading period—thank you for entrusting Slope Editions with your work!
The Adversaria: Four Closet Dramas by Samuel Corfman
Since Sunday by Brittany Tomaselli
Billet Doux by E.C. Belli
Roses in May by Jill Mceldowney
Announcing “Instrument of Gaps” by Felicia Zamora
We are thrilled to announce that Slope Editions editorial staff has selected Instrument of Gaps by Felicia Zamora from our 2016 Fall Open Reading Period for publication!
“...& you speak to the mouse in the oven drawer; how no coax, no out-out, simple
intonations as before a hymn; you remember the weight of the log in small palms
& he, riding the lawn mower in circles, Best be done now; & the bulbous shadow
moving, then not; the sweat of you in cower; how we forgive ourselves least…”
Felicia Zamora is the author of the books Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize from University of Notre Dame Press (2017) and & in Open, Marvel from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press (2017). She won the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse, and authored the chapbooks Imbibe {et alia} here (2016) and Moby-Dick Made Me Do It (2010). Her published works may be found or forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Review,Columbia Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, jubilat, Meridian, Notre Dame Review, North American Review, OmniVerse, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine,The Adirondack Review, The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse Daily, Witness Magazine, West Branch, and others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. She lives in Colorado with her partner, Chris, and their three dogs, Howser, Lorca, and Sherlock.
We at Slope Editions are grateful for the many exciting submissions and gestures of support sent our way during our special open reading period this fall. Though we unfortunately won’t be able to publish several exciting manuscripts, we’d like to recognize seven honorable mentions, listed below in alphabetical order:
- I Microwave My Nintendo Gamecube by James Ardis
- us mouth by Nikia Chaney
- Solastalgia by JM Miller
- Confessions II by Anis Shivani
- Our Pornography & Other Disaster Songs by BJ Soloy
- NEAR, AT by Jennifer Soong
- FIDELITORIA: fixed or fluxed by Candice Wuehle
Announcing: Slope Editions 16th Annual Book Prize!
Slope Editions is accepting full-length poetry manuscripts for its 16th Annual Book Prize from January 16th until March 15th, 2017. This year's contest will be judged by Dawn Lundy Martin. The winning poet will have their book of poems published in 2018 by Slope Editions and will also receive $1000 and free copies of the book in lieu of royalties. We especially encourage submissions from poets of color, women, and LGBTQ poets.
Dawn Lundy Martin received her PhD in literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (2007), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; DISCIPLINE (2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and several chapbooks. Her latest collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, (2015) won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Good Stock, Strange Blood is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2017. Martin co-founded, with poet Terrance Hayes, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh. With Vivien Labaton, Martin also co-edited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004). She is the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation (New York). Her video installation work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and Good Stock on the Dimension Floor, a 52-minute video opera for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at the Whitney Biennial in 2014. She has been a member of HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican, a global artist collective, and is a part of the Black Took Collective, a multimedia performance group of three.
Deadline: March 15, 2017
Entry Fee: $25 for electronic submissions, paid via Submittable (link below). $22 for paper submission: payable to "Slope Publishing Inc.," in the form of a check or money order, and must accompany submission. See below for address.
Electronic Submission Guidelines: 40 to 90 pages as formatted in standard 8 &1/2 by 11 MS Word or PDF document submitted through Submittable (link below). Your name should not appear anywhere within your manuscript. Please include a title page with book title only, a table of contents, and an acknowledgements page with manuscript.
Paper Submission Guidelines: 40 to 90 pages, typed, and bound only by a clip. Include two title pages (one with book title, name, address, telephone and e-mail; one with book title only), table of contents, and acknowledgments page with manuscript. Submissions must be postmarked no later than March 15, 2017. No Federal Express, UPS, or other overnight mail services, please. Submissions should be sent by first-class mail to our editorial address:
Slope Editions 15th Annual Book Prize
c/o Christopher Janke, Senior Editor
847 Bernardston Road
Greenfield, MA 01301
For more information, please visit our "Contests" page on our website. Check back here for further announcements and contest information.
Announcing Slope Editions' 2016 Open Reading Period!
Slope Editions is accepting full-length poetry manuscripts for its 2016 Open Reading Period from August 15th until September 5th. The chosen manuscript will be announced in the fall of 2016 and published in 2017 by Slope Editions. Visit our Submittable page to submit: https://slopeeditions.submittable.com/submit. The poet whose manuscript is chosen will receive 30 copies of their book. We especially encourage submissions from poets of color, women, and LGBTQ poets.
Details and Guidelines:
Eligibility: Any American poet/translator writing in English is eligible, unless that person has a close personal or professional relationship with any Slope Editions staff members. Any manuscript that has appeared or is forthcoming as a printed book, e-book, or chapbook will NOT be considered. We will not be reading these manuscripts blind—no need to remove names or contact information.
Electronic Submission Guidelines: 40 to 90 pages as formatted in standard 8 &½” by 11” MS Word or PDF document submitted through Submittable. Please include a title page with book title, a table of contents, and (if applicable) an acknowledgements page with the manuscript.
Paper Submission Guidelines: We will not accept any paper submissions during this open reading period. If you have extenuating circumstances which prevent digital submission, contact slope.editions@gmail.com.
Entry Fee: $5, paid via Submittable.
Deadline: September 5th, 2016. All deadlines Eastern Standard Time.
Revisions: Slope Editions will only accept minimal edits on the chosen manuscript before publication. No revisions will be considered during the reading period.
Entrants to the Slope Editions Open Reading Period may also be considered for additional Slope Editions publications. Entrants being considered for these publications will be notified. We offer sincere thanks to all entrants and readers for supporting Slope Editions and small press poetry.
We can't wait to read your work!
Keegan Lester Wins Slope Editions' 15th Annual Book Contest, Selected by Mary Ruefle
We are thrilled to announce the winner of our 15th Annual Book Prize: this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all I had, so I drew it by Keegan Lester, selected by Mary Ruefle for publication in Spring 2017.
Of the winning manuscript, Ruefle writes, “Falling in love while losing a loved one and watching the war news on TV? Life is difficult, and the poems in this marvelous collection ask a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? Each poem supplies part of the answer--to go looking, to make mistakes, to be confused, to be wounded, to keep moving toward a new life. “The expression of our faces when we almost get to where we are going”--that is the expression we have while reading this book, which has the pace of an intense, anticipated journey, one that acknowledges that language is a problem, that art, science, and history are problems, but nonetheless many disparate lives, both past and present, somehow meld into one small life lived, and when that life speaks--“mouth deliver us to the present”--we sit up and listen, for the experience of reading has handed us a strange joy.”
We're so excited to bring this book to you!
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Keegan Lester is a poet splitting time between New York City and Morgantown, West Virginia. His work appears or is forthcoming from: The Boston Review, CutBank, The Journal, Sixth Finch, Boaat and The Atlas Review among others and has been featured on NPR, Coldfront and the New School writing blog. He is the co-founder and poetry editor for the journal Souvenir Lit, and is mentoring high school students for The Adroit Summer Mentorship program. He tours solo and sometimes with the New York City Poetry brothel and sometimes with the Travelin' Appalachians Revue. He earned his MFA from Columbia University.
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We would also like to congratulate our finalists, listed below in no particular order:
- Coolth by Hajara Quinn
- And And And by C Dylan Bassett
- you were never seen far from your coat by John Duvernoy
- There's Something Happening Outside! by Sara Peck
- small siren by Alexandra Mattaw
- Inlanders by Jesse Lichtenstein
- Futurologist by Doug Paul Case
- Our Pornography & Other Disaster Songs by BJ Soloy
- Out of Nothing, Through A Brightness, Into Nothing by Jonathan Weinert
Announcing the release of Ben Mirov's ghost machines!
Slope Editions is excited to announce that ghost machines by Ben Mirov will be available for purchase at our table at the 2016 AWP Conference in Los Angeles, CA, as well as on our website starting on March 31st, 2016.
ghost machines, Ben Mirov's third full length book of poetry was chosen as the winner of our 14th Annual Book Prize by Douglas Kearney.
A descendant of Mirov’s previous collections, Collected Ghost (H_NGM_N Books, 2009), and Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010), ghost machines utilizes the tools of its predecessors, but in new ways—further blurring the line between poem & examination, poem & specter.
About the collection, Kearney writes, “Reading ghost machines, I am reminded of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, J Dilla’s Donuts, or DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing.... In these sonic works, archives reanimate into loop driven compositions that stave off endings. Refrain riddles these poems, deepening echoes that re-orient and destabilize. “A frozen lung tree”—a persistently repeated phrase, is an anatomical metaphor, an abstracted image of networks, part of a grotesque arbor—but in all cases, unable to provide air, the tree’s vital fruit. Yet, these poems refuse stasis, the repetitions shuffle in interval, adding new fragments from Rilke, Pound, Borges, and a video gaming manual, gently accumulating new possibilities."
Mirov is the author of Hider Roser (Octopus Books, 2012), and Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) which was selected for publication by Michael Burkard, and chosen as one of the best books of poetry in 2010 for Believer Magazine's Reader Survey. He is also the author of the chapbooks My Hologram Chamber is Surrounded by Miles of Snow (YESYES, 2011), Vortexts (SUPERMACHINE, 2011), I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010), and Collected Ghost (H_NGM_N, 2010). He is a founding editor of PEN America's Poetry Series, and an editor-at-large for LIT Magazine. He grew up in Northern California and lives in Oakland.
We also want to remind you that submissions for our 15th Annual Book Prize, judged by Mary Ruefle, are still open until April 15th! For more information and to submit, see our submittable page.
We are so excited to be able to share this book with the world!
Announcing the Winner of our Fourth Annual Chapbook Contest!
Slope Editions is pleased to announce the results of our Fourth Annual Chapbook Contest. We will be publishing speech rinse, a chapbook by Vanessa Couto Johnson, in Spring 2016. We are so excited to share this beautiful manuscript with you!
We also want to extend congratulations to our five finalists. We've read so many incredible manuscripts over the past month—thank you for entrusting Slope Editions with your work!
Finalists:
Jennifer Liberts Weinberg's Tender Organs
Sam Corfman's An Opaque Flower Digging
Chris Salerno's We Were All Why
Kylan Rice's Natch
and E. Kristin Anderson's 17 seventeen XVII
Vanessa Couto Johnson’s poems have appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, Cobalt Review, The Destroyer, Posit, and Two Serious Ladies, among others. Her first chapbook, Life of Francis, won Gambling the Aisle's 2014 Chapbook Contest, and another chapbook, rotoscoping collage in Cork City, is forthcoming from dancing girl press in fall 2016. She has a BA in English and philosophy from Rice University and can be described as a Brazilian born in Texas (dual citizenship). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is currently a Lecturer at Texas State University, where she earned her MFA.