Newfound

✨PREORDER ✨ Who breaks the cycle, and what does breaking it cost? Winner of the 2023 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, better hands eulogizes legacies of violence, underscored by a fervent desire of becoming. Mathews guides readers across and through “the infinity pink” in poems that drip a reverence tinged with resentment. Their debut chapbook engages myth, nature, and the body to honor the past and summon uncertain, ecstatic futures beyond.

PRAISE

“The eye—the I—is rigorously generous across these poems. They don’t attempt to rebuild a world or define a world, rather they do something more powerful and difficult: they dare an intimate lexicon and imagery wild and energetic enough to bare the overwhelm of the unknown world and our relationship to and relationships within it. The lines flicker, from light to dark, a wet shine, an earthen darkness, a scar, a seed, the body and body of language, bordering the ecstatic. Images tremble and transform, become both familiar and surprising, under the pressure of the speakers’ unrelenting desires and I was lucky to find myself wandering the blur between memory, moment, and the impossibility of what might happen next. Within these poems is a bold embrace of sensuality and how language can be our portal to collapse the temporal and spatial hierarchies of ancestor and descendant—the poems seem to say: we are who we are from and we become what becomes us next.”
—Natalie Diaz (), author of Postcolonial Love Poem

THANK YOU to everyone who joined the conversation and made our 2024 zoom launch reading a joy! 💚✨☺️

💌 Join us for RE: READING / Sunday, 20 October at 1 pm CST / Yunkyo Moon-Kim, Sarah Kersey, and Elissa Favero in dialogue & celebration of their 2024 chapbooks out this month / Zoom link in bio! 💞✨

✨ PREORDER ✨ Selected for the 2023 Newfound Prose Prize: Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian weaves natural and family histories of Scotland and south central Montana with Indigenous histories, languages of science and of women, memories of Catholic childhoods, fragments of poetry, and songs of lament and of praise. Proceeding through the alphabet and experimenting with forms that call to mind displacement and settlement, plant growth, taxonomies, and genealogies, writer Elissa Favero reckons with her family’s immigrations West and the burdens and gifts of inheritance as she seeks a place she can call home.

PRAISE
“Children of River and Trees is a celebratory meditation on nature and history. Each essay is a wisdom seed that fosters a gorgeous entanglement, a breathtaking vision of rootedness and flight. Favero is a conjurer. This collection is magic!”
—Debra Magpie Earling

“Elissa Favero’s Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian is, at heart, about the amplitude and absences of what we can know—about place, history, and ancestry. ‘There’s the order we impose and the wild mystery that pulses beneath,’ Favero points out. And true, with thematic depth and formal intricacy, Favero negotiates between those senses of order and mystery, uncovering the palimpsestic, sometimes problematic layers encompassed by a single self. The result is a work that fuses the past and the present, intimacy and breadth, lyricism and ethics.”
—Rick Barot

✨ PREORDER in bio ✨ Selected for the 2022 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize: Apricots grow in Suncheon, korea, where the author was born. The mountain unfurls bodies. Underneath them, the bedrock leaks saltwater. In Transuding, Yunkyo Moon-Kim seeps across dream states and borders in ecological forms. Constantly transforming, permuting, and mutating, the poems leap toward imagined oneness, toward un-demarcating both nations and gender.

“I return to Yunkyo Moon-Kim’s Transuding again and again, drawn by the promise of ruin and resuscitation, the blade of the self against the whetstone of remembering. The poems here resist the mitotic impulse of borders, the stultifying boundaries of gender, following instead ‘queer orbits’: they refract, mirror, splinter, then give way.”
—Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations

✨ PREORDER in bio ✨ Selected for the 2022 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize: Apricots grow in Suncheon, korea, where the author was born. The mountain unfurls bodies. Underneath them, the bedrock leaks saltwater. In Transuding, Yunkyo Moon-Kim seeps across dream states and borders in ecological forms. Constantly transforming, permuting, and mutating, the poems leap toward imagined oneness, toward un-demarcating both nations and gender.

“I return to Yunkyo Moon-Kim’s Transuding again and again, drawn by the promise of ruin and resuscitation, the blade of the self against the whetstone of remembering. The poems here resist the mitotic impulse of borders, the stultifying boundaries of gender, following instead ‘queer orbits’: they refract, mirror, splinter, then give way.”
—Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations

✨ PREORDER ✨ Selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Chapbook Series, “Residence Time” speaks of not only who crossed the Atlantic during the Middle Passage, but who is still suspended in the water. In her debut poetry collection, Sarah Kersey () investigates her linguistic, spiritual, and familial origins through storytelling.

Congratulations, Andrea Gibson !!

Very excited to share that Éric Morales-Franceschini won the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry! Éric won our 2021 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize for his chapbook, "Autopsy of a Fall" (https://newfound.org/shop/eric-morales-franceschini-autopsy-of-a-fall-print-e-book/).

https://www.fresnostatenews.com/2023/02/02/georgia-author-wins-2022-philip-levine-prize-for-poetry/

Georgia author wins 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry - Fresno State News The Fresno State Master of Fine Arts Program in creative writing announced Georgia author Éric […]

Two February readings with ! ❤️‍🔥✨ Hear André read from HAUNTINGS, his powerful 2022 Newfound Prose Prize winning chapbooks.

The results of the 2022 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize are in! ✨ Thank you so much to everyone who shared a manuscript with us. 💜

Winner: Yunkyo Moon-Kim

Finalists: Stephanie Niu, Jasmine An, Ukata Edwardson

Semi-Finalists: Aldric Ulep, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Aiden Heung, Hope Joseph, hector son of hector, Abigail Minor, Kelly Gray, Valerie Vargas, Mary Rose Manspeaker

Guest judge: Donika Kelly

Panel judges: C. Butler, Kaveh Bassiri, Joan Kwon Glass, Meg E. Griffitts, Itiola Jones, Rayya Liebich, Yesenia Montilla, Winniebell Xinyu Zong