Alice James Books

07/23/2025

Seattle: this one’s for you!

Join us August 12 at Hugo House for "Towards Collective Liberation"—a live poetry event celebrating FREELAND by Leigh Sugar, featuring readings by Ally Ang and Shelby Handler.

✨ 6–8pm PT | In Person | Theater Lobby
📍 Register now: https://tinyurl.com/5y5xfu34

07/22/2025

📣 Registration is now open for Weekends at AJB: A Virtual Masterclass Gathering with Shara McCallum & Brian Turner! ✍️📚

Spend a weekend writing, reading, and in deep conversation with two of Alice James Books’ most acclaimed poets. This special online masterclass (Sept 20–21) is made possible by the generosity of the poets, who are donating their time in support of AJB, and is designed to foster meaningful creative exchange in a small, focused setting.

🎓 $500 | Online
📆 Limited spaces available — register at bit.ly/AJBmasterclass
✉️ Can’t make it? Join our email list to hear about future sessions.

07/15/2025

We’re halfway there! 📖 Together, we've raised 50% of our $2K goal 💛

With just two weeks left, help us finish strong! Every bit of your support helps us bring more poetry into the world.

🎁 Join us & be entered to win a year of signed books: https://bit.ly/BefriendaBook

07/08/2025

This , shop where poetry comes first!

From July 8–11, we’re offering 30% off all AJB titles, plus a free book when you buy two—a better deal than anything you’ll find on Amazon this week.

Plus, when you buy directly from us, you’re not just adding a book to your shelf. You’re backing bold voices, sustaining the work of a small press, and making space for stories that need telling.

Shop with intention. Read with heart.
Thanks for believing in poetry—and in us. 💛

SHOP: https://bit.ly/ShopAJB

07/01/2025

We’re honored to announce that Alice James Books will publish THE REDISCOVERED BEAUTY ROOM, a new collection by returning AJB poet Jeffrey Thomson, in May 2027.

Executive Director and Publisher Carey Salerno praises the book’s “tight lyric poems driven by gentle music and cadences,” noting: “They observe the speaker’s surroundings with an eye towards beauty... These poems feel gentle, as if they are resisting being intrusive and resist lamentation.”

Learn more: https://tinyurl.com/w3prnd9j
Preorder now at a discount: bit.ly/rediscoveredbeautyroom 🌟

07/01/2025

This July, help bring a new collection of poetry into the world.

Our "Befriend a Book" fundraiser invites you to support one of 11 forthcoming titles from Alice James Books by directing your donation to the part of the process that matters most to you:

✍️ Editorial – help shape the manuscript
📦 Production – bring the physical book to life
📣 Promotion – connect it with readers

📚 Each donation enters you for a chance to win a signed copy of all 11 books—a shelf of poetry from some of today’s most vital voices, including debut and award-winning authors.

Choose the book. Choose the impact.

📖 Give now: https://bit.ly/BefriendaBook

06/25/2025

We're thrilled to reveal the cover of ALL THE POSSIBLE BODIES by Iain Haley Po***ck, forthcoming this September from AJB.

📖 Po***ck’s third collection is an emotionally candid and intimate portrait of our varied identities as Americans: the ways we treat one another, the value we assign to each other’s lives, and the persistent internal conflict that tugs between our desires and greater duty. How do we make peace with our hypocrisy and complicity in a social order that harms us all? Can and should we?

🔊 Sound on to hear Iain read from the collection!
🎨 Cover art: "Eakins Hand" by Samuel Murray (1894), Smithsonian
🔗 Preorder now at bit.ly/possiblebodies

06/24/2025

Look who’s in Poets & Writers! 🎉

We’re honored to see Leigh Sugar’s FREELAND featured in the latest “Page One,” alongside such powerful new work. Thank you, Poets & Writers, for the love 💫

More at https://tinyurl.com/4rc

06/19/2025

This Juneteenth, we honor June Jordan — poet, activist, and truth-teller.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” ✊

May her legacy continue to inspire and challenge us.

06/18/2025

We’re thrilled to welcome Rosebud Ben-Oni back to Alice James Books for her newest collection, THE LAST GREAT ADVENTURE IS YOU, out June 2027 🙌

These intellectual and expansive poems “let us experience the way in which Ben-Oni's brain processes ideas, theories, memory, past/present/future. We consider our flaws, our faults, and how they leave us exposed, how we should be protected and instead are devoured.” —Carey Salerno

🔗 More info: https://tinyurl.com/last-great-adventure (LINK IN BIO)
📚 Preorder now and get 20% off: https://bit.ly/last-great-adventure

06/12/2025

Esther Lin’s essay, “I Was Undocumented for 21 Years. This Is Why I Tell My Story,” is now featured in TIME Magazine 🌟

As immigration and deportation dominate the national conversation today, Esther's journey—arriving undocumented from Brazil at age four and living without status until 27—couldn’t be more timely.

Esther is the author of COLD THIEF PLACE, published by AJB in March, and this deeply personal piece further underscores why we believe so strongly in her work.

Deep thanks to TIME for amplifying Esther's voice and using their platform to bring such a powerful story to a wider audience.

📰 Read it now: https://tinyurl.com/djs8xdx2

06/10/2025

FREELAND by Leigh Sugar is out today from 🖤🤍

An urgent, devastating, and formally inventive debut, FREELAND traces an impossible love story between the author and an incarcerated writer — a bond that crosses the physical, political, and social boundaries of the U.S. prison system.

Through poems that interrogate mass incarceration, race, whiteness, mental illness, disability, and memory, Leigh Sugar offers a fierce, unflinching testimony of what it means to love, resist, and imagine freedom in the shadow of state violence.

"Freeland is a vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world." —Idra Novey

Available wherever books are sold:

Leigh Sugar's poetry collection, FREELAND, published by Alice James Books.