PICS: Augury Books at the 2014 New York City Poetry Festival

On Saturday, July 26, Frances Justine Post (Beast, 2014) and B.C. Edwards (To Mend Small Children, 2012) read on behalf of Augury Books at the  4th annual New York City Poetry Festival, put on by the Poetry Society of New York. The festival took place on Governors Island, and featured three stages with over 250 poets reading their work. Check out some photos here:

Augury Books moved stages. Photo: Nicolas Amara

B.C. Edwards reads from his new book, ‘From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes’ (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). Photo: Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Frances Justine Post reads from ‘Beast’ (Augury Books, 2013). Photo: Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Thanks to everyone who came out to the reading!

More on BEAST by Frances Justine Post

More on TO MEND SMALL CHILDREN by B. C. Edwards

LAST DAY: Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

PICS: Frances Justine Post + Others Read at Poets House Showcase

Wednesday, July 23rd, Frances Justine Post (Beast, Augury Books, 2013) read at Poets House with fellow poets Emily Abendroth, Brett Fletcher Lauer, and Wendy S. Walters, as part of the 22nd Annual Poets House Showcase series coordinated by Stephen Motika. The reading series accompanies an annual exhibit at Poets House of every poetry and poetry-related text published in the United States each year. See some photos from the night below.

Left to right: Wendy S. Walters’ ‘Troy, Michigan’ (Futurepoem Books, 2014); Frances Justine Post’s ‘Beast’ (Augury Books, 2013); Brett Fletcher Lauer’s ‘A Hotel in Belgium’ (Four Way Books, 2014); Not pictured: Emily Abendroth’s ‘] Exclosures [‘ (Ahsahta Press, 2014). Photo: Nicolas Amara

Stephen Motika. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Emily Abendroth. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Brett Fletcher Lauer. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Frances Justine Post. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Wendy S. Walters. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Poets House, located in Battery Park City, is a poetry library, writing space, and venue, free and open to the public, that houses 60,000 volumes of poetry. Poetry workshops and readings are regularly held, and the building features an open floor with space for writers to browse books or create their own work. A full recording of Wednesday night’s reading is available to stream on the Poets House website—head over and listen!

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Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

Submissions Open Four More Days

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Our reading period is still open until July 31st, 11:59 PM. Submissions of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry are all welcome. For guidelines and more information, head over to the submissions page. If you’re already familiar with our guidelines, don’t wait! Click the button below to be redirected to Submittable. We look forward to reading your work!

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This Weekend: 2014 New York Poetry Festival on Governors Island

New York City Poetry Festival

The fourth annual New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island is almost here!

Augury Books will be reading on the White Horse Stage at 4pm on Saturday, July 26, with Frances Justine Post (BEAST, 2014) and B. C. Edwards (TO MEND SMALL CHILDREN, 2012). Admission to the festival is FREE, so there’s absolutely no reason to miss out!

The NYCPF is put on by the Poetry Society of New York and features a worldclass lineup including Mark Doty, Matthea Harvey, and Joyelle McSweeney, along with over 250 poets on three stages. The festivities will take place on both Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm. Come for the readings, performances, Vendor’s Village (where you can discover new poetry as well as your old favorites), artists, craftsmen, and food trucks!

Check out the press release for more info, or visit the festival’s website for more information.

Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

Frances Justine Post to Read at Poets House on Wed, July 23

Frances Justine Post

On Wednesday evening, Frances Justine Post (BEAST, 2014) will be reading at Poets House in NYC as part of the Showcase Reading Series. Joining Post are poets Brett Fletcher LauerEmily Abendroth, and Wendy S. Walters.

The event will take place in association with the Annual Poets House Showcase, a remarkable initiative to collect and exhibit to the public, free of charge, every book of poetry published each year, making the Poets House stock among the most comprehensive open-stacks collections in the country.

So go for the reading, stay for the books—or vice-versa—on Wednesday, July 23, 7pm, at Ten River Terrace (at Murray Street) / New York, NY  10282.

Learn more about the Poets House showcase and other readings this week in the New Yorker.

Post will also be reading with Augury at the New York Poetry Festival on Saturday. Stay tuned for more information on the festival and readers later this week.

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Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

Kate Angus Writes on Poetry Readership and Keeping Poetry Sales Alive

“Ripple Effect on Water” courtesy of Sergiu Bacioiu, Wikimedia Commons

Augury editor Kate Angus’s article on The Millions today discusses the audience for poetry (wider than people often think!) and strategies that independent presses such as Augury are using to increase sales. In her article, Angus shares the idea that because of the increased capability of reading poetry outside of a bookstore or a library, Americans might in fact be reading more poetry than ever. Things like the “Poetry in Motion” project in New York, along with the increase of sharing poetry through social media, have sparked a higher readership in the US, and people have access to more poetry than they did in the past.

Thanks to the ease of sharing poems through email and social media, it’s possible that poetry’s audience might be greater now than ever. According to The Academy of American Poets director Jen Benka, the Academy’s Poem-a-Day has over 300,000 readers, so large an audience that the Hearst Corporation recently partnered with the Academy to include the poems in their online and print newspapers and magazines.”

While the readership for poetry might have increased, book sales are down overall when it comes to people wanting to actually buy poetry. In her article, Angus outlines some of the ways that smaller presses are trying to keep poetry sales alive, such as widening readership in general by branching out to publish other genres in hopes that someone reading a short story might see what else a press has published, therefore becoming interested in the published poetry.

Our hope is that readers who like the prose we publish may discover, as they poke around our catalog, that they like the poetry too (and vice versa). “

For more on poetry readership, as well as many other ways that presses are trying to increase the sale of poetry, check out Angus’ full article here.

Only 10 days left in Augury’s reading period – Submit your manuscript now!

Meghan O'Rourke to Lecture at the Mayapple Center

Meghan O’Rourke, photo by Sarah Shatz

The Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanities will kick off their Creative Writing guest lecture series on Monday night, July 21, with a lecture by editor, essayist and poet Meghan O’Rourke. The Center, located in Stamford, Connecticut, provides programs, retreats and residencies that cover writing, literature, music, and art therapy, in a “distinctly 21st century climate.”

Augury Books editor Kate Angus, who is also Mayapple Center’s Creative Writing Advisor, will be introducing O’Rourke on Monday night. For more information on the Center and to register, visit Mayapple’s site.

Meghan O’Rourke began her career as one of the youngest editors in the history of The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Redbook, Vogue, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. O’Rourke is also the author of the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for both the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. One of three judges chosen to select Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007, she has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and a finalist for the Rome Prize of the Academy of Arts and Letters. A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up, and Marfa, TX.

 

Shelly Oria in The Paris Review; New Book Forthcoming

Shelly Oria, photo by T Kira Madden

Friend of Augury and fiction author Shelly Oria, whose short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv O, is forthcoming from FSG and Random House Canada (November 2014), appears in this summer’s issue of The Paris Review with her short story, “My Wife, in Converse,” quoted here from TPR’s site:

The last time we had sex, it was cold out and they said a storm was coming. My wife was shivering in fear, making a list to steady herself. For a while I was trying to cross things off—candles, eight gallons of water, move things away from windows. Check, I would say cheerfully at her, check check check. But the more I crossed off, the longer the list got, and the more anxious my wife seemed. She was sitting on our bed, her upper body low like it was trying to reach her knees. I stood close behind her, put my hands on her shoulders. Honey, I said, and she tilted her head back and looked up to meet my eyes. There was such fear in her face, and I hadn’t thought this through; ‘honey’ was all I had.”

Read more here, or you can find the full short story in The Paris Review’s Summer 2014 issue, also featuring new work by Joy Williams, Henri Cole, Zadie Smith, Jane Hirshfield, and more.

For more on Oria and her work, visit her website.

Pre-order the upcoming New York 1, Tel Aviv 0.

Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, is forthcoming from FSG and Random House Canada in November. Shelly’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, and fivechapters, among other places, and has won a number of awards, including the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. Shelly curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village and teaches fiction at Pratt Institute, where she also codirects the Writers’ Forum.

VIDEO and AUDIO: New Work from Maureen Alsop in ‘Menacing Hedge,’ ‘Your Impossible Voice,’ and More

Image courtesy of Fred J, Wikimedia Commons

Maureen Alsop (Mantic, Augury Books, 2013) has emerged with new pieces in her short video series for literary journal Your Impossible Voice. “Portentum” and “Esopus” now join “Sweepspear” and “Terrestris” to complete the YIV series.

Watch the videos for “Portentum” and “Esopus” here; find out more about YIV here.

Also, listen to Alsop read four new poems in this summer’s edition of Menacing Hedge, and check out her new work in First Literary Review-East.

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Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

Gulf Coast Now Accepting Entries for 2014 Barthelme Prize

Gulf Coast is now accepting entries for the 2014 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. The contest is open to pieces of prose poetry, flash fiction, and micro-essays of 500 words or fewer. Established in 2008 after American postmodernist author Donald Barthelme, the contest awards its winner $1,000 and publication in the journal. Two honorable mentions will also be awarded.

This year’s contest will be judged by award-winning author Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories, Scribner, 2006).

For more details and guidelines, head over to Gulf Coast.

Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!