First Matter Press

12/18/2025

First Matter Press is seeking a featured cover artist to collaborate on cover art for one poetry title during our upcoming 2026 production cycle.

🔗 Apply here: https://firstmatterpress.submittable.com/submit
Deadline is January 18.

We welcome artists working in all mediums. We are especially drawn to artists with a distinct visual language that carries clearly across their body of work.

Our 2026 poetry title is a collection centered on decolonization: dismantling colonial ideas and systems, and rebuilding through Indigenous-centered, collectivist ways of being that support the self, the community, and the environment.

This call is open to all artists, with particular interest in submissions from Latino/a/x, Chicano/a/x and Indigenous artists, and priority consideration for artists located in the Pacific Northwest. We can only accept applications from U.S.-based artists at this time; sorry no international submissions.

Our process is collaborative. The featured artist will select or generate the final cover artwork in dialogue with the author, the manuscript, and our editorial team. For examples of past cover art, please see book covers featured at firstmatterpress.org.in

12/03/2025

Now for a 2026 update! FMP is excited to announce the selected author & title of our 2026 Prima Materia First Chapbook Award. Congrats, for A Casual Apocalypse in Acapulco ✨✨✨

We were so impressed by this year's submissions! We want to thank our finalists for considering us as a home for their work 💚

12/01/2025

We are so proud of our 2025 authors and their, now, Pushcart-nominated works!

If you haven't picked up a copy of these books yet, they can be found (with free shipping today!) via Bookshop.org

11/10/2025

Thanks to all who visited us at the Portland Book Festival! It was a blast to see you!

Our next adventure is at the OMSI After Dark Art Lab November 12, 2025 | 6-10 pm. We'll be there with our latest titles and fun poem making activities. Please visit their website for details.

Grab a drink and roam the museum at OMSI After Dark. This month, we're exploring the "A" in STEAM with the science of art.

11/04/2025

Still buzzing a month later ✨ grateful for everyone who came through, bought books, hugged authors, and enjoyed all the poetry in the room with us!

First Matter Press 2025 Release Reading
Oct 4

The Dying Room by Annemarie Eayrs (.r.e)
first you must destroy the world by Claudia Saleeby Savage ()
Waling waling palpitations by nawa angel a.h. ()
Brava by Violeta Garza (.poeta)

Cover Art by Pearlyn Tan ()

Funded by grants from , , Arts Access Fund and

10/01/2025

Join us for Makerspace at Portland Poetry Confluence this weekend! Saturday, October 4 at 10am Makerspace offers an open, collaborative space for poetry-making with Collage, Erasure, and Exquisite Co**se. Join us to slice text into new shapes, uncover hidden meanings, and build poems together through chance, play, and unexpected connection. No prior experience required — just bring curiosity and a willingness to explore.

09/20/2025

LAUNCH EVENT - SAT, 10/4

Join First Matter Press in celebrating the launch of our 2025 titles: The Dying Room by Annemarie Eayrs, Brava by Violeta Garza, first you must destroy the world by Claudia Saleeby Savage, and waling waling palpitations by nawa angel a.h. Covers feature art by Pearlyn Tan. 

Readings begin at 6pm
Literary Arts, 716 SE Grand Ave
Free & open to the public 

We hope to see you there!

09/15/2025

It’s release day for first you must destroy the world by Claudia Saleeby Savage! Available now at Bookshop.org and major online book retailers. If you supported this author with a preorder, deliveries are in process now! Cover art by Pearlyn Tan.
***
first you must destroy the world is a searing poetic reckoning, where ancestral memory and political rupture converge in forms that gleam and stagger. Claudia Saleeby Savage draws from Arab poetics, erasure, and theatrical invocation to confront war, exile, motherhood, and erotic survival. These poems speak through rithā and ghazal, through absences carved by grief, and densities charged with longing. The story rings clear but never sacrifices the mysticism that lets poetry sing. In a voice both intimate and immense, Saleeby Savage rebuilds a war-torn and tender lyric terrain where personal and collective losses collide—and something sacred floats in the wreckage.
***
Claudia Saleeby Savage is an Arab American poet, essayist, and mama with Multiple Sclerosis whose writing and performance explores displacement and the landscape of the body and has been featured in print, on stage, and in galleries throughout the country. She is the author of first you must destroy the world (First Matter Press, fall 2025), metal used for beauty alone (from The Poetry Box for print + voice), Bruising Continents (Spuyten Duyvil), and The Last One Eaten: A Maligned Vegetable’s History, with recent print work in Poetry Northwest, Ni**od, About Place, and River Teeth.
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First Matter Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. This literary arts project is supported by Regional Arts and Culture, The City of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture, Oregon Cultural Trust, and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition.

09/15/2025

It’s release day for Waling waling palpitations by nawa angel a.h.! Available now at Bookshop.org and major online book retailers. If you supported this author with a preorder, deliveries are in process now! Cover art by Pearlyn Tan.
***
Waling waling palpitations is a genre-defying debut that pulses with q***r lineage, decolonial reclamation, and lush, embodied ritual. Part drag spell, part orchid archive, this lying hybrid artifact blends poetry, photo-memory, ancestral invocation, erasure, and two decades of q***r love letters into a prismatic offering. nawa angel a.h.—also known as Moonyeka—moves through performance, mythology, and intimate ephemera to reclaim matrilineal histories and diasporic q***r desire with fearless, feral beauty. Waling waling palpitations refuses containment—blooming, mourning, and shimmering across form, language, and land. It is archive. Event score. Heart opening its many mouths.
***
nawa angel a.h., widely known as Moonyeka, is a chimeric creator with a multi-embodied presence in performance, qt nightlife, writing, experimental media, teaching artistry and divination praxis. They center kilig as a compass to conjure erotically charged revolutions with animistic unapology, risque’, and Ilocano imagination. nawa’s past publications can be found in smoke and mold; Khôra; The Holy Hour anthology by Working Girls Press; Seventh Wave’s On Q***r Family Anthology; Instruction Manual for a New Era with PNW Conceptual Art Center; Lilac Peril. They have been the recipient of residencies, awards and fellowships including Tin House, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art CXL, In Surreal Life, George Newsome Humanitarian Award, Mary Gates Research Award, Arc Fellowship, and Andy Warhol Foundation’s Precipice Fund Award. nawa exists in the in-between, frequently emerging on Tongva, Chumash, Chinook, Puyallup, Duwamish lands; the Coast Salish sea. Waling waling palpitations is their first book.
***
First Matter Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. This literary arts project is supported by Regional Arts and Culture, The City of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture, Oregon Cultural Trust, and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition.

09/15/2025

It’s release day for The Dying Room by Annemarie Eayrs, recipient of the 2025 Prima Materia First Chapbook Award. Available now at Bookshop.org and major online book retailers. If you supported this author with a preorder, deliveries are in process now! Cover art by Pearlyn Tan.

***

The Dying Room is a haunting and precise debut that navigates the shifting terrain of transracial adoption and identity. Moving between poetry and prose—told in fragments, crossings, and missing memories—Annemarie Eayrs crafts a lyric journey through dislocation, inheritance, and the slow, uncertain process of self-recognition. In these pages, the search for origin becomes both mythic and documentary—charting the blurred lines between origin and invention, history and dream. With restrained intensity and sharp, intimate imagery, The Dying Room makes space for dissonance, tenderness, and what can only be imagined into truth.

***

Annemarie Eayrs is a writer and transracial adoptee from China who writes words she wishes she had when she was young. Raised in Minnesota, she now lives with her wife and their many pets in SE Portland.

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First Matter Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. This literary arts project is supported by Regional Arts and Culture, The City of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture, Oregon Cultural Trust, and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition.

09/15/2025

It’s release day for Brava by Violeta Garza! Available now at Bookshop.org and major online book retailers. If you supported this author with a preorder, deliveries are in process now! Cover art by Pearlyn Tan.
***
Brava is a bilingual gut-punch of a debut—fierce, funny, and full of heart. Violeta Garza speaks from the messy middle: too Mexican, too white, too tender, too loud. These poems claim space in the body, in memory, in each awkward threshold. Drawing from ancestral memory, q***r joy, and the ache of in-betweenness, Brava blends humor with heartache, sacred rage with laughter. Garza turns shame into sass and silence into sound. Brava is a bold offering for anyone learning that being brave sometimes means becoming unapologetically yourself.
***
A multilingual poet, storyteller, and weaver, Violeta Garza is the textbook middle child in a family of Mexican immigrants. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Foglifter, and Acentos Review, among others. They have performed their original poems and stories for Texas Public Radio, The Alamo Chapter for Human Rights, The Center for Refugee Services, and elsewhere. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, she lives a sweet, q***r life in Yanawana (San Antonio, Texas), with her partner and an adequate number of potted plants.
***
First Matter Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. This literary arts project is
supported by Regional Arts and Culture, The City of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture, Oregon Cultural Trust, and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition.

07/15/2025

📣 Upcoming Event - SUN, 7/20 at 4:30pm Pacific 📣

Please join us virtually for our first installment of the annual Convos in Cohort series. This event will feature selected readings from our 2025 authors and their upcoming titles followed by a thematic discussion.

RSVP for Zoom access at the link on our bio.