Looking to publish your first full-length collection?
Each year Black Lawrence Press will introduce one new writer to the literary world with the publication of a first full-length collection of poems or short stories.
"My Window Seat For Arlena Twigg is as eccentric as its title. It is also brilliant -- poem after poem of compression and a rare, quirky intensity of feeling. This book is long overdue (he has been serving our literature in other ways) from a poet who has learned his trade, his craft, and makes his own indelible music."
-- THOMAS LUX
“James Reidel’s debut collection is a marvel — partly because of the spare, unfussy elegance of his style, but more importantly because of an oddness of perception, a searching quality that makes these wry and bittersweet poems resemble those of almost no one else. Few first books of poetry possess this degree of confidence and maturity of vision.”
-- DAVID WOJAHN
“[T]he music and promise of the narrative…is simply captivating… attentive and muscular prose.”
— from the foreword by ILYA KAMINSKY
"A book as beautiful and infused with longing as the landscape it depicts, Neither Here nor There marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer. Marcel Jolley is a connoisseur of desire, and the people in his stories, caught between lives they can hardly tolerate and futures they can hardly envision, are as real and complicated as the people we know. What binds us to them is their capacity for hope — that in the next town, or in the next season, they will finally get what they seek. This is a stunning and unforgettable book."
— RYAN HARTY
"In our world of history, poverty, violence, and discontinuity, Owens locates the hinge moments, as seemingly inaccessible to observation as they are resistant to words, where revelation is possible again, even as it too stands as a sacrifice to time. I have read few younger poets today who have such a will to transfigure the ordinary. James Owens has both the will and the art to show us that such transfiguration is another name for knowledge." -- DAVID RIGSBEE
"Frank Matagrano's poems are a homage to rural America, a wild place of possibility that resists 'progress.' Matagrano's offbeat loopy narratives travel from the rural into idiosyncratic urban life and back. He has more than a gift for telling a good story, for getting the details just right -- Frank Matagrano is a poet of compassion, wit, and wisdom."
-- DENISE DUHAMEL
"If you think of the many novels whose titles are the names of characters, you'll understand where Christopher Torockio is centered as a writer. For Torockio, whatever else fiction does, it begins with memorable characterization."
Balancing world-building, a thriller-worthy plot, and high-end political dialogue, Temporary People is the kind of book that forces the reader to fight between turning the pages faster to find out what happens and slowing down to consider its arguments and to savor its sentences.
