Richard Jackson to Judge Fourth Annual Ralph Angel Poetry Prize - Submissions Open

For the month of April, Foundlings Press will accept submissions for the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize. This year’s guest judge is Richard Jackson. The winning poet will receive a $250 award and a limited edition broadside publication of the winning poem. Submission is free and open to all.

SELECTION AND PRIZE

The winner of the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize will receive $250 and publication of a limited-edition run of letterpress broadsides of the winning poem designed by Foundlings Press printmaker and book artist in residence Talia Ryan. The broadsides will be available for sale exclusively at FoundlingsPress.com until the run sells out.

HOW TO SUBMIT

• Entry is free

• Send only one poem as a PDF attachment to publisher@foundlingspress.com

• Submissions must be previously unpublished

• Entry window opens April 1 at 11:59pm ET and closes May 1 at 11:59pm ET

• We will disregard submissions that arrive outside that window

Past Winners

• 2023: “Moon Jar,” by Emma Aylor, selected by Victoria Redel

• 2022: “Sestina for Klein Blue,” by Emma Fuchs, selected by David St. John

• 2021: “The Biologists,” by Margarita Serafimova, selected by Mary Ruefle

Richard Jackson

Richard Jackson is the author of 17 books of poetry including The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems, Dispatches, Where The Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons, and 12 books of essays, interviews, translations, editions and anthologies. Winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA. NEH and Witter Bynner Fellowships and the order of Freedom from the President of Slovenia for his literary and humanitarian work during the Balkan wars, he has also edited 32 chapbooks from eastern European poets.

His poems have been translated into 17 languages and his books have won the U of Alabama Book Award, Cleveland State Book Prize, U Mass Juniper Prize, Ashland Poetry Press Award, Eric Hofer Award, Maxine Kumin Award, Ben Franklin Award. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies such as 5 Pushcart appearances, Best American Poems, Best of Georgia Review, Best of Crazy Horse, Prairie Schooner Anthology and others. He has given readings and lectures at dozens of universities and libraries as well as in Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Canada, England, Wales, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Hungary and Romania. Over 52 of his former UT-Chattanooga undergrads have gone on to publish nearly 130 books. He is Distinguished Emeritus Professor at UTC and founder of the Meacham Writers’ Workshops. 

Ralph Angel

Ralph Angel (1951-2020) was an American poet, translator, and educator. He was born in Seattle, Washington, as a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Washington and his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Irvine. He went on to become the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands, where he shaped the Creative Writing Department and taught for 39 years, and he was a beloved member of the MFA in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Angel’s published works included Anxious Latitudes (Wesleyan University Press, 1986); Neither World (Miami University Press, 1995), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; Twice Removed (Sarabande Books, 2001), which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award; Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 (Sarabande Books, 2006), honored with the 2007 PEN USA Award for Poetry; and Your Moon (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013), which was awarded the 2013 Green Rose Poetry Prize. His translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song, (Sarabande Books, 2006) received a Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize.

Angel’s poems have appeared in scores of magazines, and have been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Plume Anthology of Poetry, Pratik International, The Heart's Many Doors, The Best American Poetry, American Hybrid, Poets of the New Century, and Forgotten Language. Other awards included a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the Gertrude Stein Award, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association.

REMEMBERING RALPH ANGEL

Ralph Angel was a friend of Foundlings Press and contributed to the Strays series. His collection in Strays Pack 2 was his final publication before his passing on March 6, 2020.

Foundlings Press Publisher Aidan Ryan says: I remember vividly speaking with Ralph over the phone, in the first days of the new year, about his contribution to our series. His voice was like his poems: patient, clear, direct, with a laugh always waiting in the wings. Here was a celebrated poet, a senior statesman of poetry, taking a call from a stranger and offering his work (without any chance of acclaim or fair remuneration) to an upstart, unproven little press from Buffalo. I remember the gratitude, amazement, and and relief I felt when Ralph so immediately understood our spirit as a press and the thrust of the Strays project. And what a gift his poems were.

Ralph left behind an incredible body of work, but he also left a legacy of support, guidance, and inspiration for younger poets as well as his contemporaries. I’m happy that, with Mary Angel’s blessing and assistance, we can honor Ralph in a way that feels continuous with his life’s work: By recognizing, honoring, and encouraging the work of other poets.

More information about Ralph and his poetry is available at https://ralphangel.com/.

Bianca Stone's The Black House Launch at Unnameable Books, Turners Falls, MA - Nov. 3

We’re headed back to the Valley! Join us for a celebration of the release of Bianca Stone’s The Black House Nov. 3, 6pm at Unnameable Books in Turners Falls, MA. The event will feature readings by Bianca Stone and Dara Barrois/Dixon, a short film, and a Q&A with the author. We’ll also be on hand to sell the remaining copies of The Black House.

What: The Black House Launch Party and Reading by Bianca Stone, with special guest Dara Barrois/Dixon

Where: Unnameable Books, 66 Avenue A, Turners Falls, Massachusetts 01376

When: Nov. 3, 6pm

This will be our second-ever event in Western Massachusetts—and a rare event outside of Buffalo, New York—following the release of Emma Fuchs’s Ralph Angel Poetry Prize-winning broadside “Sestina for Klein Blue” at Northampton’s Iconica Social Club last spring. We hope to see some familiar faces!

Julianne Neely Presents "Deepfake Translation Poems" at Artpark Bridges Festival Aug. 19

Artpark Bridges Festival to Celebrate Community Connections

(Lewiston, New York)—Artpark has announced a new festival celebrating its connections to the Western New York community and visiting artists from around the world. Free and open to the public on August 19th, the Artpark Bridges Festival will highlight ongoing collaboration with community groups and organizations including People, Inc., Empower WNY, Buffalo Parkinsons, and Artisans Edge, along with new work created by the artists and groups in residence at Artpark this summer, including Jon Lehrer Dance Company, David Glass, Plasticiens Volants, and poets and writers.

As part of the Artpark Bridges Festival, Foundlings Press and Carrowduff Arts will present a special production of Julianne Neely’s “Deepfake Translation Poems,” an audiovisual installation inspired by Katie Holten’s “The Language of Trees” workshops at Artpark earlier this summer and designed for a one-day-only debut at Artpark’s Gallery building. “Deepfake Translation Poems” will run from 4:20-5:20pm.

“Artpark was founded on the principle that public art is a public good, and the belief that our natural surroundings in Western New York power experiences that could only happen here," said Artpark President Sonia Clark. "We’re proud to welcome everyone to experience and celebrate the Artpark Bridges program, which reaches out into the community and ensures that all have access to our extraordinary setting and the art created and performed here every day.”

Artpark’s Amphitheater above the Niagara River Gorge.

Residents Perform New Work

Many of the performances on August 19 will include work that resident artists and groups developed in partnership with Artpark Bridges and participating organizations. 

• Jon Lehrer Dance Company will present a new work developed in partnership with the local Parkinson’s community initiated through Artpark Bridges’ ongoing relationship with the Parkinson’s Foundation. Performed on the beautiful new outdoor Grove Stage, this performance will also include favorites from JLDC’s world-renowned repertory

• David Glass, a UK-based theater artist, in collaboration with Sketchbook Theatre, will present work resulting from “Alchemy of the Extraordinary,” a devised theater and creative practice workshop for professional actors and open to public. 

• Poet and Literary Resident Robert Giannetti and Artpark Bridges Director Cynthia Pegado will present new work based on “Sensing Resonance,” a series of outdoor poetry and performance workshops that welcomed the general public and members of our WNY community writing from perspectives of sight impairment, progressive neurological disease, or mental health wellness challenges, in collaboration with local human service agencies. 

• Julianne Neely, a poet from Artpark’s inaugural literary residency, will debut an audiovisual installation, “Deepfake Translation Poems,” inspired by Katie Holten’s Language of Trees and Tree Workshop, created this summer to be performed at The Gallery at Artpark. This production is co-presented by Foundlings Press and Carrowduff Arts in collaboration with Artpark.

• The artistic team of the French company Plasticiens Volants, a 47-year-old performance troupe based in Tolouse, France, in residence at Artpark during this week, will discuss their create process toward a new production conceived in partnership with the Seneca Art and Cultural Center of the Ganondagan, Artpark and Rochester Fringe Festival. 

• Katerina Seda, a conceptual and social artist from the Czech Republic presented at Artpark by Claire Schneider’s CS1 Cultural Projects will discuss her new work.

Artpark will announce the complete schedule of performances soon. Limited food and drink will be available from the concessions stand by the parking lot. For more information, visit:

https://www.artpark.net/events/artpark-bridges-festival

Foundlings author and Artpark 2023 Resident Poet Julianne Neely

Foundlings Books by Julianne Neely:

Strays Pack Four: Ruefle, Neely, Toarmino

Ralph Angel Reading in Northampton, MA

On Friday, April 22, we held our first-ever Ralph Angel Reading at Iconica Social Club in Northampton, Massachusetts, marking the release of the Talia Ryan-designed broadside of “Sestina for Klein Blue” by Emma Fuchs, winner of the 2022 Ralph Angel Poetry Prize. This also happened to be the first Foundlings event outside of the Buffalo area since our participation in the Frank Stanford Festival in Fayetteville, Arkansas in September 2018.

Readers Emma Fuchs, Elle Longpre, and Lucy Wainger entranced the audience with new and old work and had books available for purchase—including Elle’s How to Keep You Alive and Lucy’s In Life There Are Many Things. It was a beautiful night and a great way to remember Ralph, whose heart and spirit flow through this prize and reading series.

Some “Sestina for Klein Blue” broadsides are still available. Order yours in our online bookstore.

Ralph Angel Reading Featuring Emma Fuchs - April 21, Northampton, MA

Ralph Angel Poetry Prize winner Emma Fuchs will join Foundlings in Northampton, MA for a reading celebrating the release of “Sestina for Klein Blue,” Fuchs’s prize-winning poem, now a limited-edition broadside designed by artist Talia Ryan. The reading and broadside launch at Iconica Social Club will include performances by Emma Fuchs, Elle Longpre, and Lucy Wainger.

What to know:

• Readers Emma Fuchs (Ralph Angel Poetry Prize Winner, 2022), Elle Longpre, and Lucy Wainger

• Iconica Social Club, 1 Amber Ln, Northampton, MA 01060

• Friday, April 21, 2023 at 6:30pm

• Limited-edition “Sestina for Klein Blue” broadsides available

We hope to see you there!

Victoria Redel to Judge the 2023 Ralph Angel Poetry Prize

For the month of April, Foundlings Press will accept submissions for the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize. This year’s guest judge is Victoria Redel. The winning poet will receive a $250 award and a limited edition broadside publication of the winning poem. Submission is free and open to all.

SELECTION AND PRIZE

The winner of the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize will receive $250 and publication of a limited-edition run of letterpress broadsides of the winning poem. The broadsides will be available for sale exclusively at FoundlingsPress.com until the run sells out.

HOW TO SUBMIT

• Entry is free

• Send only one poem as a PDF attachment to publisher@foundlingspress.com

• Submissions must be previously unpublished

• Entry window opens March 31 at 11:59pm ET and closes April 30 at 11:59pm ET

• We will disregard submissions that arrive outside that window

Past Winners

• 2022: “Sestina for Klein Blue,” by Emma Fuchs, selected by David St. John

• 2021: “The Biologists,” by Margarita Serafimova, selected by Mary Ruefle

Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel is a first generation American author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction, most recently the poetry collection Paradise and the novel Before Everything.

Redel is the recipient of the Kent State Wick Poetry Award, Graywolf  Press’ S. Mariella  Gable Award, and was a finalist for the James Laughlin Second Book Award. Her novel Loverboy was adapted for a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Her fiction, poetry and essays have been translated into 12 languages. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for The Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center.

Redel is on the graduate and undergraduate faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. She has also taught in the Graduate Writing Programs of Columbia University, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was the 2013 McGee Professor at Davidson College. 

Ralph Angel

Ralph Angel (1951-2020) was an American poet, translator, and educator. He was born in Seattle, Washington, as a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Washington and his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Irvine. He went on to become the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands, where he shaped the Creative Writing Department and taught for 39 years, and he was a beloved member of the MFA in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Angel’s published works included Anxious Latitudes (Wesleyan University Press, 1986); Neither World (Miami University Press, 1995), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; Twice Removed (Sarabande Books, 2001), which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award; Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 (Sarabande Books, 2006), honored with the 2007 PEN USA Award for Poetry; and Your Moon (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013), which was awarded the 2013 Green Rose Poetry Prize. His translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song, (Sarabande Books, 2006) received a Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize.

Angel’s poems have appeared in scores of magazines, and have been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Plume Anthology of Poetry, Pratik International, The Heart's Many Doors, The Best American Poetry, American Hybrid, Poets of the New Century, and Forgotten Language. Other awards included a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the Gertrude Stein Award, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association.

Remembering Ralph Angel

Ralph Angel was a friend of Foundlings Press and contributed to the Strays series. His collection in Strays Pack 2 was his final publication before his passing on March 6, 2020.

Foundlings Press Publisher Aidan Ryan says: I remember vividly speaking with Ralph over the phone, in the first days of the new year, about his contribution to our series. His voice was like his poems: patient, clear, direct, with a laugh always waiting in the wings. Here was a celebrated poet, a senior statesman of poetry, taking a call from a stranger and offering his work (without any chance of acclaim or fair remuneration) to an upstart, unproven little press from Buffalo. I remember the gratitude, amazement, and and relief I felt when Ralph so immediately understood our spirit as a press and the thrust of the Strays project. And what a gift his poems were.

Ralph left behind an incredible body of work, but he also left a legacy of support, guidance, and inspiration for younger poets as well as his contemporaries. I’m happy that, with Mary Angel’s blessing and assistance, we can honor Ralph in a way that feels continuous with his life’s work: By recognizing, honoring, and encouraging the work of other poets.

More information about Ralph and his poetry is available at https://ralphangel.com/.

Coming Spring 2023: A Memoir of Frank Stanford in High School

We’re excited to reveal the first title in our 2023 catalog: “Subiaco’s Unofficial Poet Laureate”: A Memoir of Frank Stanford in High School, by Leo A. Lensing.

Coming Spring 2023

Leo Lensing’s vivid and critical account of the poet Frank Stanford in high school.

Lensing was a classmate of the poet Frank Stanford at Subiaco Academy, a college preparatory school for boys run by Benedictine monks at Subiaco Abbey that towers over the hamlet of Subiaco, Arkansas, near Paris, Arkansas on State Highway 22 between Little Rock and Fort Smith. Stanford transferred to Subiaco from the public high school in Mountain Home, Arkansas, in 1964; he and Lensing graduated on May 27, 1966.

Vivid, critical, and erudite, this memoir draws on archival research, interviews with monks, classmates, and other contemporaries, the growing body of Stanford scholarship, and Lensing’s original close readings of Stanford’s poems. The book illuminates previously unexplored corners of the poet’s adolescence and early development as a writer and a thinker, especially in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation.

Subiaco’s Unofficial Poet Laureate will be available for pre-order in late winter 2023 and copies will go out in the mail in the spring.

To request a digital review proof, titles for resale or institutional collections, or other information, contact us: publisher[at]foundlingspress.com.

About the Author: Leo A. Lensing

Leo A. Lensing is professor of Film Studies emeritus at Wesleyan University and lives in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. He is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and writes occasionally for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His publications include The Anarchy of the Imagination (1992), a selection of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s essays and interviews, and Arthur Schnitzler’s Träume (2012), a German edition of the Viennese writer’s dream journal.