News & Announcements

CSU Poetry Center Announces 2017 Publications

Selections include books by Jane Lewty, Sheila McMullin & James Allen Hall

2017 poetry publications

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center, one of the few independent university presses to focus on poetry and prose, has announced its 2017 publication list. The selections highlight the diversity in form, emotional power and emphasis on social criticism that have long been key tenants of the Poetry Center’s works. The list includes Shelia McMullin’s book of poetry daughterrarium, Jane Lewty’s poetry book In One Form to Find Another, and James Allen Hall’s essay collection I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well.

“We’re proud to have worked on these three stunning collections over the course of the last year; from editing to production to promotion the authors were a delight and we’re thrilled to celebrate such an enormous accomplishment,” says Caryl Pagel, director of the Poetry Center.

The Poetry Center hosts a series of competitions each year for emerging essayists and poets and publishes the winners as part of their catalogue. The poems in Daughterrarium, which won the Center’s 2016 First Book Poetry Competition, reflect hostile aggression against an embodied woman, spectral tendencies to dissociate, and the intersection of shame and anger. In One Form to Find Another won the Open Book Poetry Contest and focuses on the female body and how the aftermath of trauma such as sexual assault can linger via unexpected and unidentifiable physical symptoms. The winner of the Essay Collection Competition, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, chronicles familial histories, mental illness, and addiction via a series of interconnected lyric essays.

To obtain further information on these books and the authors as well as to purchase copies, visit http://www.csupoetrycenter.com/.

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center was established in 1962, and is a national non-profit independent press under the auspices of the Cleveland State University Department of English. It has published nearly 200 rangy, joyful, profound, astonishing, complicated, surprising, and aesthetically diverse collections of contemporary poetry and prose by established and emerging authors. It also serves as an educational resource for undergraduate and graduate students by providing assistantship and internship opportunities as well as involving students in the editorial and production aspects of literary publishing.

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