Anne Lesley Selcer Wins 2014 Poetry Chapbook Contest
Gazing Grain Press is pleased to announce that judge Dawn Lundy Martin has selected Anne Lesley Selcer as the winner of our 2014 feminist chapbook contest for poetry/hybrid manuscripts! Her chapbook from A Book of Poems on Beauty will be published in September. We'll have a launch and celebratory reading during Fall for the Book on Saturday, September 13.
We are also happy to announce that Dawn Lundy Martin has named Kevin McLellan's manuscript Before the Door as runner-up. We will publish excerpts from Before the Door as a miniature this year.
Dawn Lundy Martin's comments on Anne Lesley Selcer's from A Book of Poems on Beauty:
"from A Book of Poems on Beauty by Anne Lesley Selcer challenges the notion that beauty and the feminine have no place in postmodern art as much as it reinvents these notions for contemporary readers. It tells us that “beauty is a particular unit of duration / … each hour a room / is a form of sadness.” These poems are fresh in their negotiations of the aesthetic realm; in it, beauty is not monument, and neither does the female body laze absently on the chaise. Instead, the hot energy of this language pulls us from everything we thought we know about beauty and the feminine, and casts us into journeying investigation in which nothing is reconciled. Selcer’s are the kinds of poems we need to survive this century, to be encouraged to think and enact something new."
Anne Lesley Selcer recently served as a columnist for SFMoma's Open Space and has one book, Banlieusard, commissioned by Artspeak gallery. Writing has been anthologized in NW Edge III: the end of reality, The Physics of Context, The Feeling is Mutual: A list of our fucking demands, and most recently in It's Night in San Francisco, but it's sunny in Oakland. A chapbook is forthcoming with supersuperette press, and another was published with the Dusie Kollektiv in 2011. Poems have appeared in The Clackamus Review, Dusie, Where Eagles Dare, and in the artist book Aunt Maude's Scrapbook by Sydney Hermant, and are forthcoming in Fence. Writing on art has been commissioned by galleries Centre A, the Or, the Helen Pitt, and by artists Aurel Schmidt and Abass Ackhavan, and has appeared in Fillip and Doppelganger magazines. In San Francisco, she was a member of the now defunct Nonsite Collective. In Vancouver, she created and curated an interdisciplinary series for poets, researchers, and artists called the Chroma Reading Series.
from A Book of Poems on Beauty is an ongoing, research based project which has produced poems, essays and video.
Kevin McLellan is the author of the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, forthcoming) runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, Western Humanities Review, wicked alice, Witness, and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA, and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at URI.
We are also pleased to recognize the following outstanding manuscripts:
Finalists
Kristin Abraham, Swallow Your Archetype Erin M. Bertram, from The Vanishing of Camille Claudel Emma Bolden, A Portrait of the Female Body in Dead Metaphors Jill Darling, Hannah Ensor, & Laura Wetherington, you are Travolta tight pants tight Sara Renee Marshall, If I Pull Marigold Apart From a Flower Billie R. Tadros, inter: burial places Carolyn Williams-Noren, Small Animals
Semi-finalists
Sharon Charde, Incendiary Colleen Coyne, Meryl DePasquale, Opal C McCarthy, & Molly Sutton Kiefer, Kept Ghosts: A Choral Aubade j divina erickson, DSMonsters: A Field Guide Declan Gould, Creating a Chain Reacting and Dis-figuring Tanya Paperny, Short-Shorts Becca Shaw Glaser, Fragile Selves Baking a Cake as Big as the Empire State Building Naomi Tarle, Letters and Songs from a City
