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Recent News
- 10/02/2024
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University of Akron Press Publication Named National Book Award Finalist
The University of Akron Press announced that its recent publication, Something About Living, by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, winner of the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize, is one of only five titles on the short list for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry. This is the second time in seven years The University of Akron Press has had a publication selected for the National Book Awards, distinguishing it as among the most prestigious publishers of poetry in the nation.
- 09/26/2024
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2024 Akron Poetry Prize Winner
Matthew Olzmann, this year’s judge, has chosen Paperweight by Ryan Teitman of Glenside, Pennsylvania, as the 2024 Akron Poetry Prize winner. The contest received a total of 603 entries in 2024.
Regarding the winning manuscript, Olzmann states:
A cloud and a ghost enter a bar. A girl walks across an ocean. One poem has a speaker who used to be a dog; in another, he turns into a rock. Ryan Teitman is an expert at taking an unlikely premise, then building and inhabiting a little world around it. These poems often reminded me of improvisational theater in the best way: how they embrace their impossible materials, and escalate with wit and humor, often in the service of some greater mystery. But what I admired most about this book is how it evolves over time: at the beginning, I was drawn to the imaginative force of the poems. By the end, I was moved by their vulnerability and tender grace. Paperweight is a collection that will linger with me for years to come.
- 05/28/2024
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UA Press to Publish Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography
The University of Akron Press is excited to announce that it will publish Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography, a new book edited by artist and cultural strategist Tonya Lockyer. This book features essays from and interviews with thirty artists and advocates from the dance and the performing arts worlds, sharing first-hand stories of creative administration in action through case studies, interviews, life tools, and experiments.
- 11/03/2023
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University of Akron Press to Publish The Deletions by Sarah Green as 2023 Akron Poetry Prize Editor’s Choice
The University of Akron Press is excited to announce that it will publish Sarah Green’s poetry collection The Deletions as the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize editor’s choice. The Deletions was also selected as runner-up by contest judge Sandra Beasley.
Of The Deletions, Beasley states:
How do we build beauty around absence; or, perhaps even more eerie, how do we scaffold presence around the act of disappearing? This poet uses masterful storytelling, personal revelation, and shapely, musical stanzas to unpack the lonely spaces of contemporary life. A straightforward litany of The Deletions’ themes—elegy, divorce, infertility, climate change—pales beside the realized ache of the individual moment, shot through with wry and exacting wit: “I think he thinks I’m sedated but I am just / awake saying hi to everyone like usual except / there’s iodine on my torso / there’s lidocaine in my feelings.” These poems gather a lifetime of loss into their arms, crush the reader into that messy embrace, and defiantly holler towards hope.
- 10/06/2023
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University of Akron Press to Publish A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers, Edited by Julie Brooks Barbour and Mary Biddinger
The University of Akron Press is pleased to announce that it will publish A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers, edited by Julie Brooks Barbour and Mary Biddinger, in the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. This volume features essays by ten writers who share advice on caring for the artist behind the creative work. Each essayist also includes a writing prompt to help spark inspiration for readers. The University of Akron Press plans to release the book in Spring 2024.
- 09/28/2023
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2023 Akron Poetry Prize Winner
Sandra Beasley, this year’s judge, has chosen Lady Smith by Jess Smith of Lubbock, TX as the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize winner. The contest received a total of 612 entries in 2023.
Regarding the winning manuscript, Beasley states:
Lady Smith crackles and reckons, urgent in syntax and imagery, as it unpacks a series of troubled relationships not just with others but with body and self. Let us be clear that the systems designed to regulate and manage violence commit, in themselves, a kind of violence, as when an academic bureaucrat asks, “Did you wear bare legs in some / goosebumped hope for this exact preamble?” Or, in lines from nimbly titled, darkly funny “DARVO”: “Sounds like dashcam, like // doorway, like bard, like darnedest, / like the flabbiest acronym, though / it was intended to tighten // the duration of comprehension.” The poet’s title evokes a particular model of gun, but the collection ultimately invokes something more powerful—survival instinct, a desire to devour and thrive, a dare to pleasure and be pleasured, to “pink and thick and glisten”—and the strange, unapologetic intimacies that can save someone’s life once shared. Maybe yours.
