February, 2012:
We are delighted to announce that L. Lamar Wilson’s manuscript Sacrilegion was chosen by Lee Ann Brown as the winner of the 2012 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series. Of this collection, Brown writes: “Sacrilegion chants new songlines of the sacred and profane, radiating legions of regions we must all negotiate together. Love, life, identity and language wrestle and riff here with pure expressive power.”
L. Lamar Wilson, a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee, has poems published or forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as jubilat, African American Review, Callaloo, Rattle, Vinyl, The 100 Best African-American Poems and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. He’s the winner of the 2011 Beau Boudreaux Poetry Prize and was twice a finalist for the New Letters Poetry Prize. He is working toward a PhD in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying 20th-century African-American and Caribbean poetics. He has presented scholarship at the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History Convention in Raleigh, as well as at other conferences. He holds an MFA in writing from Virginia Tech and has been a graduate fellow at Cave Canem.
Review copies of Sacrilegion will be available in October, 2012. Advance copies can be ordered beginning in December, 2012. Anticipated publication date is January, 2013.
January, 2012: Poetry Contestants: Finalists have been sent to the judge, Lee Ann Brown. If you are in this group, you have been contacted already. We anticipate results by the end of the month.
February, 2011: The winner of the 2011 Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman is Margaret Hermes for Relative Strangers.
In the words of contest judge Jill McCorkle: “Relative Strangers is a stunning collection of stories. Every single story is vivid and memorable, and yet, equally powerful is the collective thematic effect. So many of these characters are strangers within their own families and their own lives—people thought to be dead are resurrected and another’s survival is akin to death. Change, loss, alienation; it’s all here. But so is humor and compassion and a fresh spin on the way people deal with the most vulnerable aspects of life. Margaret Hermes is a wonderful writer and this is a moving and powerful collection.”
Margaret Hermes grew up in Chicago and lives in Saint Louis. In addition to short stories that have appeared in The Missouri Review, Sou’wester, The Laurel Review, New Millennium, Thema, The Wisconsin Review, The Madison Review and Red Cedar Review, her published and performed work includes a novel, a stage adaptation of an Oscar Wilde fable, and several essays. When not writing, she concentrates her energies on environmental issues.
“Transubstantiation,” the first story in the collection, debuted in The Laurel Review (in a slightly different version) and was later anthologized in 20 Over 40 (David Galef and Beth Weinhouse eds., The University Press of Mississippi, 2006). In this collection, in which twenty seasoned authors explore the perils and satisfactions of midlife, Margaret Hermes appears in the company of such eminent literary lights as Antonya Nelson, Frederick Barthelme, Robin Hemley, and Gish Jen.
Hermes’s collection was chosen from a pool of more than 130 contest entries. Preliminary readers selected a dozen finalists to send to the final judge, Jill McCorkle. “As usual we were impressed by the high caliber of entries in this competition. Despite the economy, many very-capable writers think it’s advisable to be considered by Carolina Wren Press. They see the success of our past authors, such as Evie Shockley, Jeanne Leiby, and William Henry Lewis. We are tiny but mighty!” says Andrea Selch, Carolina Wren Press President and Acting Executive Director since 2002.
Carolina Wren Press anticipates publication of Relative Strangers in January 2012; bound galleys will be available to reviewers in September, 2011. For full details and advance orders, please visit our website.
