June Road Press

03/16/2026

03/16/2026

Get to know our July 2026 Spotlight Poet Mary Simmons, nominated by The Notebooks Collective! Her book Mother, Daughter, Augur is available from June Road Press, and she will participate in a Q&A for our community and give a public reading during our upcoming summer residency.

03/11/2026

Our extended reading period is drawing to a close! Submit up to three place-based or otherwise aligned poems to our poetry road trip project by this Sunday, March 15. Full details at www.juneroadpress.com/submissions!

And if you’ve already submitted, thanks for your patience—we’ve decided to send all responses after the reading period closes, but we’ve been reviewing along the way and will move quickly once all submissions are in and considered. It’s shaping up to be a quite the collection, so stay tuned 👀

03/09/2026

Turns out talking nonstop for three days means not taking many pictures, but here’s a roundup of our AWP people and moments—attempts at selfies and serious shots with rock-star authors Diana Whitney, Abbie Kiefer, Hila Ratzabi, and Mary Simmons at our fun corner-table home base, a night out (with obligatory Baltimore crab cakes not pictured), and a CLMP-sponsored panel on small presses winning prizes that we had the honor of being part of on Saturday (JRP editor Sara, shortest of the set, still had a voice and everything). This was a bookfair to remember, and if you stopped by to talk with Sara or Jon, the ever-friendly guy behind the table and world’s most supportive small-press spouse, thank you—you were part of what made the week so wonderful and the best reminder of why we’re doing this and hope to keep doing it, slowly, deeply, warmly, June Road Press style, for a long time to come. Look for us next year in Chicago for round five! 🤩 (Missing you, and and and !)

03/09/2026

We got some great news right in the thick of AWP: Mary Simmons’s debut collection from this fall, Mother, Daughter, Augur, is a Foreword INDIES finalist! That’s a first for us, and what an honor it is to be included among the powerhouse presses in this poetry finalist lineup, which you should check out at www.forewordreviews.com/awards/finalists/2025/poetry-1/! 🤩

03/07/2026

We managed to pause the joyfully relentless Friday flow of AWP *just* long enough to take a group picture with all the press authors in attendance this year: Abbie Kiefer, Hila Ratzabi, Diana Whitney, and Mary Simmons (here with editor Sara Arnold, shown actually not talking for like a minute; if you stopped by the table and talked to her, you probably gathered how much she loves this). One more day of our fourth bookfair! Will Sara lose her voice again this time or break the streak? Come find out and get some chocolate and a free audiobook! 🤷‍♀️🎉

03/05/2026

All set up and excited for day one of the bookfair! If you’re at AWP in Baltimore this week, stop by table 849 to say hi and see what we’re all about. We have *so much* chocolate. 📚🍫🕺

03/02/2026

We’ll be at AWP this week in Baltimore! Visit us at the bookfair—table 849—to flip though our books, listen to audio clips, learn more about the press, snag a little giveaway, and grab some chocolate for the road. Four remarkable press authors will be there! Chat with publisher/editor Sara before she loses her voice by the third day from sheer exuberance! We’re a friendly bunch—come say hello! 🪩🎉

02/16/2026

Time for a two-minute master class? There’s a wonderfully rich new interview in Gulf Coast with our author Abbie Kiefer that begins with this short deep dive into the poem that ends her book, called “Certainty”—it’s well worth a read. You can pick up a copy of Certain Shelter and meet Abbie in person at AWP in Baltimore in a few short weeks (at the press table, 849)! 🤩 Full interview here: https://gulfcoastmag.org/stories/poet-as-plumber-or-an-awful-lot-of-mess-an-interview-with-abbie-kiefer,4892?

02/11/2026

Poet Karen Sherk Chio has written a beautiful new review of Mary Ardery’s Level Watch for The Adroit Journal—check it out at https://theadroitjournal.org/2026/02/09/level-watch/!

01/15/2026

Well, we’re nearly a month into 2026, and it’s already feeling like a year that could use more poetry in it. Our next project is to publish a one-of-a-kind anthology of place-based poems—be that place a region or city or town, a river or lake or coastline, a landscape, an intersection, a grounded memory, a house, a room, a bedside, a tree, a sense of home, a moment in time—that have real presence, a collection of resonant voices from across the country exploring rootedness and movement, loosely framed as a road trip. Think of it as a mixtape meets a photo album meets a field guide, made of poetry.

As with our full-length collections, the emphasis will be on the work of women and emerging writers, but this will be a transitional volume for the press and is open to anyone. Submission is free—through Duosuma instead of Submittable this cycle—and we’ll consider up to three poems each. And to capture the broadest range of contributors and consider them in conversation as the project takes shape, we’ve extended the reading period until March 15, after AWP.

P.S. If you’ve already submitted, thanks for your patience—we’re planning to begin rolling acceptances along the way, and those poems will help form the scaffolding for the rest of the book. We’re going slow. It’s going to be beautiful. 🛣️

12/02/2025

It’s time for our next annual winter reading period! We’re open for submissions until February 1, and we’re mixing things up this cycle—instead of full-length manuscripts, we’re looking for individual poems for inclusion in our first anthology, with a projected publication date of late 2026.

This anthology will be loosely organized as a cross-country road trip: a tour of new voices from different regions of the United States. In keeping with the spirit and orientation of our full-length collections, we’re particularly interested in work that engages in meaningful ways with nature or place—the more specifically place-based or regionally inflected, the better suited to this project.

We’re accepting submissions of up to three poems via Duosuma, and you can find full details and a link to submit your work at the press website (www.juneroadpress.com/submissions). ❄️✨