Category: poetry books

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Madville’s 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Screen capture from the Pushcart Press Website. It shows the logo of a man pushing a cart and has a block of text about the press. http://www.pushcartprize.com/index.html

The 2025 Pushcart Prize

Madville has made our nominations for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. The prize will be awarded in several categories for short pieces. It was a hard decision, because we published such amazing work this year. The Pushcart Prize accepts six nominations per small press or magazine and “any combination of poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs or stand-alone excerpts from novels.”

Our editors weighed in on their favorites, and this is what we chose:

“James and Jim Ponder Enough” by Jim Minick from his poetry collection The Intimacy of Spoons (Madville 2024).

“Sorry” by Laura Last from the anthology, Fantastic Imaginary Creatures, edited by Gerry LaFemina (Madville 2024).

“Neighbors Helping Neighbors” by Julie Liddell Whitehead from her linked story collection, Hurricane Baby (Madville 2024).

“Shelley and the Slipping Away” by A. Rooney from the linked story collection, The Lesser Madonnas (Madville 2024).

“The children turn themselves into ICE” by linda ravenswood from her poetry collection, a poem is a house (Madville 2024).

“Bird Call Koan with Glossary” by Yiskah Rosenfeld from her poetry collection, Tasting Flight (Madville 2024).

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Wild Wind – we know who’s in

Cover for Wild Wind:Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen edited by Sandra and Ron cooper with a preface by Willy Braun of Reckless Kelly. The cover shows an abstract, multi-colored painting of a guitar with white lettering superimposed over it.

Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen

edited by Sandra Johnson Cooper and Ron Cooper, with a preface by Willy Braun of Reckless Kelly

Coming November 19, 2024

This anthology of poems and short stories is an homage to Texas singer/song-writer Robert Earl Keen, who stands in the songwriter/storyteller tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, John Prine, and Keen’s contemporaries Lyle Lovett and James McMurtry. The poems and short stories here are each inspired by Keen’s songs, some expansions of themes of Keen’s songs, others move in creative directions suggested by the characters in his work. Keen’s songs are impressive for their literary sensibility (he was an English major at Texas A&M University) and have influenced many songwriters as well as authors of fiction and poetry.

Contributors:

  • Preface: Willy Braun
  • Poetry: Alan Birkelbach – Rick Campbell – Greg Clary – Andy Coat – Rupert Fike – Carl Freeman – Carol Kraus – karla k. morton – Jeff Newberry – Garrison M. Somers
  • Fiction: Heath Bowen – Michael Cody – Ron Cooper – Sandra Cooper – Patrick Michael Finn – Scott Gould – Donna Wojnar Dzurilla – Bobby Horecka – Patti Meredity
  • Memoir: Kim Davis­­
  • Screenplay: Janna Jones

South Carolina natives Sandra Johnson Cooper and Ron Cooper have lived in Florida since 1988 and have been fans of Robert Earl Keen for nearly as long. They both teach at the College of Central Florida where Sandra specializes in American literature, and Ron specializes in philosophy and world religions.

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Appalachian Studies Conference

Our Instagram ad to promote the 7 Madville authors who attended the 47th annual Appalachian Studies Conference. They are pictured here in thumbnail, Jim Minick, Linda Parsons, Darnell Arnoult, Pauletta Hansel, Susan O'Dell Underwood, Dana Wildsmith, and Lisa J. Parker

Our Madville poets did a fabulous job of representing us at the 47th Annual Appalachian Studies Conference

The theme was, Beloved Community: Pride in Identity, Culture, and Geography, and the conference took place March 7-9, 2024, at Western Carolina University, in Cullowhee, North Carolina. The Madville poets in attendance were Jim Minick (The Intimacy of Spoons), Linda Parsons (Valediction), Darnell Arnoult (Incantations), Pauletta Hansel (Heartbreak Tree), Susan O’Dell Underwood(Genesis Road and Splinter), and Lisa J. Parker (The Parting Glass and This Gone Place). (Dana Wildsmith (With Access to Tools) couldn’t make it.)

This is the first year we’ve attended this conference, but our poet, Jim Minick had this great idea… After all, we have so many wonderful poets from the region, It makes sense for us to participate in regional conferences. And look how happy they all are!

Madville poets, Lisa J. Parker and Pauletta Hansel manning the Madville table at the Appalachian Studies Conference
Madville Publishing poetry editor, Linda Parsons with another friend in poetry.
Madville poets Darnell Arnoult and Linda Parsons with a young poetry lover.
Madville poet, Jim Minick, reading from his new collection.
Copies of Linda Parsons' books on the Madville table at the Appalachian Studies Conference. The book has a bright pink cover and the title is Valediction. Linda has two other books from other press on the table as well, Candescence, and This Shaky Earth
Jesse Graves with Linda Parsons.
copies of Jim Minick's new book, The Intimacy of Spoons on the table to tempt poetry lovers to buy it.
The wonderful Pauletta Hansel grinning big. She's dressed all in red (she always is!)
Kari Gunter-Seymore with Linda Parsons. Both are white women with very light blond hair and glasses, and they have happy grins.
Sherry Stafort with Pauletta Hansel
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2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Winners

close up photo of book pages

We received 74 total submissions. The first round was read by Joshua Robbins and Darius Stewart. Winners were chosen from a shortlist of amazing work by final judge, Marilyn Kallet, Knoxville Poet Laureate from June 27th, 2018-July 2020. For more information about the contest and the judges, visit The Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Submission Page.

Winner

Amanda Chimera, by Mary B Moore

Mary B. Moore’s five poetry books include Dear If, Orison Books 2022; Flicker, Dogfish Head Prize 2016; The Book Of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center 1998; the prize-winning chapbooks are Amanda and the Man Soul 2017, and Eating the Light 2016.

Mary’s poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR), Poetry, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Nimrod, Gettysburg Review, Terrain, and more. She has won Birmingham Review’s Collins Prize and NELLE’s Three Sisters Award, and she won second place in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Award, and third in Terrain’s awards.

Runner Up

Incidental Pollen, by Ellen Austin-Li

Ellen Austin-Li’s work appears in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, and many other places. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks—Firefly (2019) & Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021).

Ellen is a Best of the Net nominee. A Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship recipient, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen co-founded the monthly reading series, “Poetry Night at Sitwell’s,” in Cincinnati, where she lives with her husband in a newly empty nest. You can find her at www.ellenaustinli.me.

Honorable Mention

Red Camaro, by Dwaine Rieves

Thanks much for reading and considering Red Camaro…very kind…all best.

Dwaine Rieves is a medical imaging scientist in Washington, DC. His collection, When the Eye Forms, won the Tupelo Press Prize for Poetry.

Short List

  • Four Junes, by Sara Dudo
  • The Ugliest Girl in Columbiana County, by Elizabeth Tussey
  • Kentucky Pathways, by David Cazden
  • Everywhere, Everywhere, by Jeffrey Bean
  • A Legacy of Birds, by Sharon Ackerman

Previous Winners

2022

The winner: a poem is a house, linda ravenswood

a poem is a house pushes against the borders of poetry to emphasize how all borders are a construct: geopolitical, literary, and personal. Each poem in this outstanding collection reinvents itself, employing a range of forms, such as visual poems and broken poetry cycles, to recreate vivid details of the speaker’s experiences as someone who grew up in California with Mexican ancestry. Readers experience a state of bardo,
a sense of existing between states: between different cultures, between safety and violence, and perhaps most of all, between past and present. Like memory itself, these poems thrive on elision, repetition, and reversal. a poem is a house is a dazzling accomplishment that presents a new and unique poetic vision. —Charlotte Pence, final judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, and author of Code

The runner-up: Tasting Flight: Poems by Yiskah Rosenfeld

A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually but searches to
internalize such knowledge. All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flightis a book that sings back to the exploding
stars. —Charlotte Pence, author of Code and judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize

2021

The winner: The Parting Glass: Poems by Lisa J. Parker

The Parting Glass, like the old Irish song, is a toast to the places and people who make up the author’s roots and base. However Appalachian at its root, it tells a universal story about what grounds and keeps us, even as we move in cities and circles far from home. At its core, this book brings the thread of downhome with its voices and song, to the cities and cultures the author moves through. The poems raise a glass to those still at the table and to those already gone, to homecomings and deployments, to the navigation of love and grief.

The Parting Glass: Poems by Lisa J. Parker front cover is a photograph of a snowy landscape across a plane to a horizontal line of trees beneath a bright blue sky. One set of footprints leads to the trees.
Splinter, poems by Susan O'Dell Underwood. Weathered yellow board with red lettering for title.

The runner-up: Splinter by Susan O’Dell Underwood

A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually but searches to
internalize such knowledge. All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flightis a book that sings back to the exploding
stars. —Charlotte Pence, author of Code and judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize