Persea Books

09/12/2022

Paradise Close with Lisa Russ Spaar - In Person!

Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia is hosting Lisa Russ Spaar for an author talk this Thursday at 6pm! Fiction and poetry lovers, this one's for you.



Get your free tickets:

Lisa Russ Spaar is bringing us her gorgeous fiction debut! She will be talking with Kelly in person at the store. About the Book: In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade—fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support—finds herself alone in an ancestral...

09/09/2022

Our annual first-book prize is now open for submissions!


The Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize is open to women writers yet to publish a full-length book of poems. The winner receives publication and an advance of $1,000, and has the option of attending a six-week, expenses-paid residency at Civitella Ranieri, an amazing foundation for the arts housed in a fifteenth-century castle in Italy 🏰.

Previous winners include Molly McCully Brown, Kimberly Grey, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Valencia Robin, Alexandra Teague and many others!

Find Persea Books on Submittable for more information: https://perseabooks.submittable.com/submit.

We can't wait to read your work!

09/01/2022

Persea Books has been publishing Lisa Russ Spaar for nearly two decades. In celebration of this pillar in the literary community and the Persea family, save 25% on all of Lisa's books through the end of Septmeber with code PARADISELISDA at checkout. Thank you, Lisa, for your words and your work!
https://www.perseabooks.com/bookshop

08/14/2022

Love Song for the Dying — EcoTheo Collective

"The baptism Macari seeks happens not in church but at the shoreline..."
Anne Marie Macari's HEAVEN BENEATH reviewed at EcoTheo:

Heaven Beneath: Poems by Anne Marie Macari. Persea Books, 2020. 88 pages. $15.95. Anne Marie Macari’s fifth poetry collection begins with the epigraph: Oh Matchless        Earth, We Underrate the Chance to Dwell in Thee Macari chose

08/10/2022

"Some people she prayed for, their names could be a poem..."

Read "Praying" by Nicholas Montemarano, author of IF THERE ARE ANY HEAVENS, up at The Adroit Journal.

https://theadroitjournal.org/2022/08/09/praying/

07/03/2022

I Had a Mane Once

from Rocket Fantastic (Persea Books, 2017) by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

06/14/2022

Shelf Awareness with a great review of Nicolas Montemarano’s touching memoir, IF THERE ARE ANY HEAVENS.
🌅
The sensitivity, the grief in Montemarano’s memoir is palpable and deeply personal but will speak to countless readers. We are lucky to have played a role in bringing this tender and exigent book to you.
http://ow.ly/mwCz50JxEzs

06/08/2022

The winner of the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky Editors' Choice Award is Each Luminous Thing by Stacie Cassarino. Persea will publish this gorgeous collection in Fall 2023. Congratulations, Stacie!

Stacie Cassarino is the author of the poetry collection Zero at the Bone (2009), which received a Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award, and a critical work, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2018). She is a recipient of the 92Y "Discovery"/The Nation prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Agni, Gulf Coast, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives in Vermont with her three daughters, and teaches at Middlebury College.

We'd also like to recognize the following outstanding finalsts: Host by Lisa Fay Coutley, Civilians by Jehanne Dubrow, In Another Country by Andrea Jurjević, Twang by Ben Klein, and This Brutal Vanishing by John McCarthy. Many thanks to these poets, and to the hundreds of others, who submitted to this year's contest.

05/26/2022

Visit Lit Hub for more of this honest, informed essay on ventures into prose by Lisa Russ Spaar. Thank you, Literary Hub! And thank you, Lisa!

http://ow.ly/crmp50Jj0jY

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of five books of original poetry plus a collection of essays and she is the editor of three poetry anthologies. She was a 2014 Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Paradise Close is her first novel and it will be published on May 31, 2022 by Persea Books.

05/02/2022

Wildness and Containment: A Conversation on Formal Structure and Poetic Surprise

Poets & Writers brings us a beautiful conversation between poets (& spouses) Jay Hopler & Kimberly Johnson: http://ow.ly/t5rn50IXcKl. We look forward to their forthcoming books!

Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson discuss their new books, the techniques and craft decisions they used in writing these collections, and the occasion to which both books respond: Hopler’s diagnosis of terminal prostate cancer in 2017.

04/26/2022

It's for Brice Patricelli's new anthology of 21st century short stories, IN THE BETWEEN. Contributors include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Roxanne Gay, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Joy Baglio, & more.



http://ow.ly/5rB450IyB1t

04/22/2022

Happy 🌍. Today for our highlights we get a glimpse from Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s book of poem and collage, Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones (Persea Books, 2018). http://ow.ly/saMf50IQ8vH

04/22/2022

Patrick Rosal today for 🖤

http://ow.ly/BM4850IQ8eM

04/12/2022

Happy to BORDER VISTA, debut poetry from Lexi Rudnitsky prize winner Anni Liu. Janine Joseph calls it "a masterful, singular debut.”



https://www.perseabooks.com/border-vista

04/01/2022

No here: it’s ! Today, an excerpt from “Vineyard in Spring” by Lisa Russ Spaar, first published in Satin Cash but also in Madrigalia, Lisa’s new & selected. 🕊



http://ow.ly/vTGy50IyzVY

04/01/2022

Post posts may have slowed, but we thank y'all & Philly for a great year. We didn't have to ship a single book back!
📸: , author of IF THERE ARE ANY HEAVENS & , author of BORDER VISTA (that book signing line 🤩). Both forthcoming from Persea!

03/09/2022

Dear —See you at Booth #764. 😊 New books, special deals, & book signings! Come say hey to Patrick Rosal, Lisa Russ Spaar, Caki Wilkinson, & more.

03/04/2022

Poets—you still have until Monday, March 7th to submit to the Editor’s Choice book competition. For more information, visit our website, our Submittable manager, or send us a DM!

In memory of Lexi Rudnitsky.

02/28/2022

We’re delighted to collaborate with Alice James Books for a poetry jamboree during this year’s AWP conference—a celebration which has been years in the making!

If you’re headed to Philly next month, join us Friday the 25th of March at Time Restaurant, where a lineup of readers from Persea Books and Alice James Books will perform. Incredible talent, free hors d’oeuvres, and a cash bar.🍸

02/25/2022

A colorful display of fictions by Earl Lovelace. 📚

Earl Lovelace was born in Toco, Trinidad in 1935. His many books include the novels While Gods Are Falling, winner of the Independence Literary Award; Salt, winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize; and The Dragon Can’t Dance.



Photo courtesy of Georgina Capel.

01/14/2022

Persea Books

We are thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry is Date of Birth by Shawn R. Jones! Date of Birth will be published in Spring 2023. Congratulations to Shawn, and also to our finalists: Fay Dillof, Suzanne Manizza Roszak, Alyssandra Tobin, and Natalie Tombasco.

The next entry period for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize begins on September 1, 2022. Currently, we are accepting submissions for the Lexi Rudnitsky Editors Choice Award via Submittable. Visit www.perseabooks.com for details and guidelines for either poetry contest.

Independent publishers since 1975

01/06/2022

Happy (1st!) book birthday to ARRHYTHMIA by Emily Van Kley. Yep, we're celebrating a !

What happens to the vibrant particulars of a life when it ends? A tribute to q***r friendship, this book weaves chronic griefs with the stab of a loved one’s sudden absence.

http://ow.ly/xtnZ50EVmsk

01/03/2022

Poets! We are currently accepting manuscript submissions for the Lexi Rudnitsky Editors Choice Award, open to those who have published at least one previous full-length poetry collection. Americans living anywhere in the world or people living in the United States regardless of nationality or status are eligible. Previous winners include Amy Newman, Michael White, Shane McCrae, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Gary Young, and others.

For more information or to submit your collection, visit the contest page on Submittable: https://tinyurl.com/4u83r66r

12/20/2021

Did you hear Molly McCully Brown on The Paris Review Podcast yet? We've got the link for you here: http://ow.ly/xmyf50HfXFT.

In this episode, Molly reads "If You Are Permanently Lost". She joins writers George Saunders, Monica Youn, and Venita Blackburn.

And here's where you can find Molly's book of essays upon your falling in love with her captivating work: https://www.perseabooks.com/bookshop/places-ive-taken-my-body-essays

12/01/2021

Madrigalia — Persea Books

She is a beauty! MADRIGALIA hailed one of the 11 Best Book Covers of November by Lit Hub. lithub.com/the-11-best-bo…

Cover art: Julie Heffernan
Cover design: Small Stuff NYC
Poems (deemed "sensuous, ecstatic" by Emily Temple): Lisa Russ Spaar

ow.ly/j1ce50H14fZ

This career-spanning volume portrays in stunning fashion Lisa Russ Spaar’s exquisite obsessions: spiritual hunger, lingual pleasures, bodily decay. The “ringleader of a stunning lexicon” (Shenandoah), Spaar’s poems are both colloquial and sumptuous, hyper-attuned to contemporary idiom while ...

11/25/2021

552: Hammond B3 Organ Cistern

"...at the core of this poem is the light that comes after the clouds have cleared." ✨
Listen to Ada Limón read Gabrielle Calvocoressi's "Hammond B3 Organ Cistern" on The Slowdown Show. It will be the best 5 minutes of your day: https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2021/11/24/552-hammond-b3-organ-cistern.

Today's poem is Hammond B3 Organ Cistern by Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

11/23/2021

Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of DISPATCH, has been awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation . Congratulations to Cameron, as well as all the fellows and awardees.
🤍

11/20/2021

"Studying Bulosan is studying the history of work itself…Bulosan gives us things economics don’t: the stories of workers and their interior lives.” —Patrick Rosal in USA Today

Phaedra Trethan’s article on , Filipino writer and labor organizer who migrated to the US in 1930, consults Pat and features him reading. It’s a must read (and watch, and listen).

Even if you’re a non-subscriber, you can hear Rosal recite “The Changing Hymn (Allegory of the Singing Lover)" here: https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2021/11/18/poet-patrick-rosal-last-thing-life-us-and-philippines/8656722002/.

Photo by Joe Lamberti.
Illustration by Mara Corbett.

11/16/2021

Welcome to the world, MADRIGALIA: New & Selected poems by Lisa Russ Spaar. “Lisa Russ Spaar sounds like no other poet writing today.” —Jennifer Chang, The Believer

11/05/2021

Here is Emily Van Kley’s vertical poem “Bodies” from her new collection ARRHYTHMIA. This aerial interpretation choreographed & performed by the poet herself will surely move you!

ARRHYTHMIA is available from local and on-line booksellers everywhere!

10/31/2021

It is the last day to submit your poetry ms for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize! Winner receives publication, $1K, & a 6 wk residency in Italy with . Please note submission deadline is 11:59pm EDT.



http://ow.ly/2wzq50GwLYc

10/29/2021

Just three more days to submit yr poetry ms for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize via . Winner receives publication, $1k, & an expenses-paid 6-wk residency with !



http://ow.ly/OGix50GwLWM

10/25/2021

We're still accepting submissions through the end of the month! Dm to a friend who hasn't heard. 💌

10/10/2021

THE MAN GRAVE by Christopher Salerno, winner of the 2020 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, is now available. We hope you enjoy Salerno’s inventive, important poetry. 💐

“…in poem after poem Salerno dwells on even the most brutal, bitter parts of memory. Read this book to think deeply about what it means to be a man in 21st-century America.” —Patrick Phillips

Christopher Salerno has authored more than ten books, including four previous poetry collections. A graduate of the Bennington College MFA program, he currently teaches as a Professor of Creative Writing at William Paterson University.

Cover art: Bob Schneider
Cover design: