What's Going on @ Steel Toe Books

 

August 7, 2009
Contest Results

We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2009 poetry book prizes. 

Guest Judge Denise Duhamel, the 2009 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Western Kentucky University, selected MONEY FOR SUNSETS by Elizabeth J. Colen as winner of the Judge’s Prize.  In her judge’s citation, which will serve as a foreword for the book, Duhamel had the following to say about Colen’s haunting sequence of prose poems:  “If I were Colen’s agent, I’d pitch these poems to a movie producer as “David Lynch meets Gertrude Stein.”
--Click here to read the full press release

 

March 3, 2009:
Results of the January Open Reading Period

Steel Toe Books has selected My Father’s Kites by Allison Joseph from fifty-six manuscripts submitted during the press’s most recent open reading period.  We would like to make honorable mention of the following manuscripts:  Where I Stood Stranded by Sally Wen Mao; In Thailand It Is Night by Ira Sukrungruang; My Earthbound Eye by Alejandro Escudé; The Ghost of Cesar Chavez by David Dominguez; There, There by George Higgins; Indian Blues by Sanka Roy; Automedon Struggles by D.N. Muranaka; and Cyrillic Letters by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer.
--Click here to read the full press release

November 24, 2008:
Steel Toe Books Selects a Manuscript from its First-Ever Open Reading Period for Predominately Formal Verse

Steel Toe Books is pleased to announce that our October open reading period has resulted in the acquisition of Domestic Fugues by Richard Newman.  We did receive a number of excellent manuscripts, and as usual, we agonized and argued over the decision.  We would like to make honorable mention of the following manuscripts:  Ice-Cream Vigils by Philip Dacey; The Space of Whether God Exists by Amy Newman; Hart Island: Poems by Ned Balbo; Nothing More Happens in the 20^th Century: Haiku Dangers by Gary Hothan; My Body, Torn from Me by Anna Evans; The Breakthrough Ladder by Steven Reese; and From a Winter House: Ghazals, Haiku, and Renga by Jay Leeming.  If we had the resources (money, time, and manpower), we would want to publish all of those.
--Click here to read the full press release

July 21, 2008:
Steel Toe Books Acquires Two New Titles

Steel Toe Books is pleased to announce that our June 2008 open reading period has resulted in the acquisition of two fantastic manuscripts:  Nevertheless, Hello by Christopher Goodrich and
Blue Collar Eulogies by Michael Meyerhofer.  To all those who sent manuscripts, thanks for seven weeks of stimulating reading; you fill us with tremendous optimism about the state of contemporary poetry.
--Click here to read the full press release

December 14, 2007:

We just learned that Garrison Keillor will be reading John Guzlowski's poem, "What My Father Believed," on The Writer's Almanac on December 28.  Be sure to catch it on your local NPR affiliate.

March 28, 2007:
Steel Toe Books announces John Guzlowski's Verse Memoir Lightning and Ashes

For the last thirty years, John Guzlowski’s primary subject has been the experience of his parents before, during, and after the Second World War. Both were taken into Nazi Germany as slave laborers. His father was captured in 1940 outside of Poznan, Poland. His mother was captured near her home west of Lvov, Poland, and transported in 1942. They worked in concentration camps and the associated factories and farms until the end of the war. They met in those camps.
—Click here to read the entire press release.

February 26, 2007:
Steel Toe Books Catches Prairie Fever

Bowling Green, KY—Steel Toe Books is proud to announce the launch of an exciting new title, Prairie Fever, by Mary Biddinger of Akron, Ohio.  This is Biddinger’s first book, and we consider it an auspicious debut, as strong as any first book of poems that the poetry world has seen in years.
—Click here to read the entire press release.