This summer, Foundlings Press is partnering with Artpark to welcome nine poets and writers as the inaugural class of a new literary “mini-residency” program.
Poets, Writers, and Performers Pair for Inaugural Artpark Literary Residency Program
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.
Printmaker Talia Ryan Joins Foundlings Press for the Annual Ralph Angel Poetry Prize
Visual artist and printmaker Talia Ryan is joining Foundlings Press as the resident artist of the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize. Working at the Western New York Book Arts Center, Talia will design and produce a limited-edition broadside for Emma Fuchs’s “Sestina for Klein Blue", which guest judge David St. John selected for the second annual Ralph Angel Poetry prize. The broadside will be available from Foundlings Press in late 2022.
View some of Talia’s recent work, including textile prints, lino, intaglio, letterpress incorporated, and book arts, below:
The Ralph Angel Poetry Prize
Established in 2021, the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize honors the late Ralph Angel, a friend of Foundlings press who appeared in the inaugural Stray in January 2020 before his passing that spring. Each year, Foundlings welcomes single-poem submissions, and a guest judge picks one work to honor with publication in a limited edition broadside. In the first year of the prize, guest judge Mary Ruefle selected Margarita Serafimova’s poem “The Biologists.” Foundlings Art Director Darren Canham produced the limited edition broadside at the Western New York Book Arts Center (WNYBAC) in Buffalo. In the second year of the prize, guest judge David St. John selected Emma Fuchs and her poem “Sestina for Klein Blue,” which will be available later this year.
About Talia Ryan
Talia Ryan is a Buffalo-based artist and art educator. She is primarily a printmaker and painter, but her wide-ranging practice has included photography, textiles, and sculpture. PAUSA Art House hosted the first solo exhibition of Talia’s work in December 2019, and she has joined group exhibitions at the Castellani Art Museum and Nazareth College Calacino Gallery. In the summer of 2021 she was awarded an artist residency at the WNY Book Arts Center, where she is now a teaching artist. She holds dual BA and MA degrees in Studio Art and Art Education from Nazareth College. In addition to working as a studio artist, she teaches advanced studio and AP art at Buffalo Academy of Science Charter School in downtown Buffalo.
Follow
IG: @taliaryan.art
Foundlings at Fitz to Launch Strays Pack Six, Sept 17
Strays Pack Six will officially launch September 17 at Fitz Books in Buffalo, New York. The party will start at 7pm with readings beginning at 7:30.
Pre-Order Strays Pack Six: Powell, Jarboe, Falck
We’re thrilled to announce the lineup for Strays Pack Six: D.A. Powell, Canese Jarboe, and Noah Falck.
Launched in January 2020, the Strays series comprises packs of original “stray” poetry, with three poets in each pack. Strays have included sequences, experiments, crowns, scraps, fragments, miscellanea, and more. Check out previous packs in out store.
Pre-order Pack Six and check out the original cover art by each of the poets below.
Orders will ship in September 2022.
D.A. POWELL
D. A. Powell's books include Repast, Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys, and Chronic. Powell received the 2019 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the University of San Francisco.
CANESE JARBOE
Canese Jarboe is the author of the chapbook dark acre (Willow Springs Books, 2018) and a 2022 Nō Studios Artist Grant recipient. Their recent work has appeared in Southeast Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. From rural southeastern Kansas, Canese splits their time between the farm and Wisconsin where they are a PhD student in creative writing and AOP Fellow at UW-Milwaukee. More at https://www.canesejarboe.com/.
NOAH FALCK
Noah Falck is the author of Exclusions (finalist for the 2020 Believer Book Award) and Snowmen Losing Weight. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Poetry Daily, Poets.org, and have been anthologized in Poem-A-Day 365 Poems for Every Occasion. He lives and works in Buffalo, New York. More at https://www.noahfalck.org/.
Teaser: Pack Six Covers
