Announcing Our 2019 Titles

Augury Books is delighted to announce our 2019 titles! Congratulations to t’ai freedom ford whose poetry collection & more black, chosen from our January Open Reading Period, will be published in the spring, and Arisa White, whose hybrid-memoir Who’s Your Daddy? will be published in the fall. 

This year we received over 550 submissions during our open reading period and were thrilled to discover so many manuscripts of great promise. We commend the many talented authors who sent us their work and are grateful for the opportunity to read their manuscripts!

About the author:

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Obsidian, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over is available from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

About the book:

From the author: & more black is a collection of what ford calls “Black-ass sonnets” that take their cues from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets. For ford, the word “American” conjures the spirit of her ancestors. In that way, the poems are rebellious, outspoken and, as she says, “take no shit.” They investigate Black art, Black bodies, Black sexuality, and Black language, unapologetically and with a capital B.

 

About the author:

Cave Canem graduate fellow Arisa White is the author of Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, A Penny Saved and Black Pearl. Her book You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened was nominated for the 29th Lambda Literary Award and the chapbook “Fishing Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates cultural events and artistic collaborations that center narratives of queer and trans people of color. She serves on the board of directors for Nomadic Press and is an assistant professor at Colby College. arisawhite.com

About the book:

Arisa White’s Who’s Your Daddy?, a hybrid memoir combining poetry and creative nonfiction, is a meditation on paternal absences, intergenerational trauma, and toxic masculinity. Who’s Your Daddy? asks us to consider how the relationships we are born into can govern us, even through absence, and shape the dynamics we find and forge as we grow. White lyrically moves across distance and time, from Brooklyn to California to Guyana. Her book enacts rituals that plumb the interior reaches of the heart to assemble disconnected and estranged parts into something whole, tender, and strong. 

A 'Thank You' + An Update

Photograph by Nicolas Amara

Photograph by Nicolas Amara

We’d like to take a moment to thank Pen & Brush for hosting our dual book launch this past Friday for You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened by Arisa White, and Say Something Nice About Me by Sara Schaff. Arisa’s book is now available online through Small Press DistributionSay Something Nice About Me will be available to the public through SPD come November 1st.

 

Many thanks, as well, to our wonderful designers, Mike Miller and Isabella Giancarlo, whose time and effort ensured these books printed just as beautifully as they read.

 

We’re very grateful to all who have followed us through the launch of our two newest titles. Please keep an eye on our (and our authors’) social media channels for upcoming material!

An Update on Our New Titles for 2016

Despite a long radio silence, we here at Augury Books have been hard at work preparing two new books for a late 2016 release. While covers have previously been posted by authors via social media, we would like to formally introduce cover art (by the wonderful Mike Miller) for both You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, by Arisa White, and Say Something Nice About Me, by Sara Schaff.

 

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You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened by Arisa White. Cover design: Mike Miller

 

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Say Something Nice About Me by Sara Schaff. Cover design: Mike Miller

 

We are incredibly grateful to those of you that have continued to follow us through 2016. Please see Arisa’s and Sara’s respective author pages for more information about each title. We look forward to bringing these books into the world, and will post updates about launch parties in the coming months.

Arisa White to Read at James Tate Tribute

Tomorrow evening, Arisa White, whose full-length poetry collection you’re the most beautiful thing that happened is forthcoming from Augury this fall, will read in tribute to poet James Tate at The New School. Several other poets will be reading to honor Tate as well, including John Ashbery, Matthea Harvey, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorothea Lasky, Charles Wright, and Matthew Zapruder. In addition, David Lehman will be introducing, and music will be provided by Eve Beglarian and Charles Wuorinen, with vocals by Maya Sharpe.

This event is open to the public, and seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Find out more about this event on The New School’s website.

An Excerpt from ‘you’re the most beautiful thing that happened’ by Arisa White

 

There are little words
that can fit in little places
if you say them small enough.

To fit a song into a pore
you have to be prepared
for the day it will sweat.

If words could stick on people,
if spoken, they would become
a different creature.

Blinded and you’re turned
five times around. Nothing
in you knows what it knew.

It’s the best part of the game:
Prick the girls you like best
while pinning on the donkey’s tail.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the author of the chapbooks Disposition for Shininess and Post Pardon. With funding from the City of Oakland, Post Pardon was adapted into an opera. Her full-length collections Hurrah’s Nest and A Penny Saved were published in 2012. Her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, won the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival Award and was nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Award, the 82nd California Book Awards, and the 2013 Wheatley Book Awards. Member of the PlayGround writers’ pool, her play Frigidare was staged for the 15th Annual Best of PlayGround Festival. One of the founding editors of HER KIND, an online literary community powered by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Arisa has received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from Headlands Center for the Arts, Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a 2013-14 recipient of an Investing in Artist Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, which funded the dear Gerald project, a regional representative for Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and a faculty member in the BFA Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Her poetry has been widely published and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. Arisa is a native New Yorker, living in Oakland, CA, with her wife, Samantha.

More on Arisa White.

Our Poetry Selection for 2016

In the Giant’s Lair (1892) by Gerhard Munthe, Wikimedia Commons

Following a plentiful reading period full of outstanding work, Augury Books is very happy to announce Arisa White‘s you’re the most beautiful thing that happened as our poetry selection for 2016. We received so many great submissions, and paring down one manuscript from our finalist pool was a difficult feat. We are glad to highlight the work of our poetry finalists here:

Architect, Garden by Andrew Seguin

brightness this by Franciszka Voeltz

I Wanted Everything by Elizabeth Whittlesey

Majnun by Mark Faunlagui

Pinocchio: The Whale Years by Patrick Moran

Schematics for Manhood & Flight by Joe Jimenez

Snow Farmer by Benjamin Gantcher

there are some things that are easier to mention by Aimee Herman

When I Was an Octopus by Gregg Murray

On behalf of the editors, we thank you all for your extended patience. Stay tuned for more on Arisa, an excerpt from her manuscript, excerpts from several of our finalists, and a prose selection in November!