PUBLISHING NEW WOMEN POETS SINCE 1997
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Submissions to the Perugia Press Prize closed on November 15, and we send our appreciation to all the women who sent their work our way. We’ll have results in March, and we look forward to a winter of reading your poetry and choosing the 2024 winner. In considering what we are grateful for in this season and beyond, you all top the list. ♥️
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* #GivingTuesday Kicks Off Our Annual Appeal *
Dear Friends of Perugia Press,
Building community is at the heart of Perugia Press. When so much of our country and the world seems fractured, the value of community rises. By “community,” we mean strong connections both within the organization and between our press and other organizations. We also mean friends of the press, like you, who help sustain our mission by reading our books, submitting to our contests, attending our events, and making donations that support Perugia’s work. Here are some examples:
- In dozens of events and readings over the years, poets we published 25 years ago meet and read with our newest poets. This is a cornerstone of how we build community within Perugia.
- For instance, our 2000 prize winner, Catherine Anderson, our 2010 winner, Melody S. Gee, and our 2023 winner, Carolina Hotchandani, have a reading planned at the St. Louis Poetry Center.
- This year, we collaborated with Black Writers Read to host readings and conversations with poets Lisbeth White and Lynne Thompson. Other recent partnerships were forged with the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Phosphorescence series and the Straw Dog Writers “Celebrating Voices of Resistance” initiative.
- Our monthly Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight continues to highlight the work of women poets of color (November’s spotlight is on Palestinian-American poet Deema K. Shehabi - see below). Plus, we donate 5% of our book sales to support organizations that promote the work of women of color.
What does it take to create a welcoming, ongoing, healthy community like ours? It takes hard work, care, dedicated poets, staff, and volunteers, and, of course, financial resources.
Donations are an integral part of how we fulfill our mission to celebrate and support the work of women poets. As part of our community, please consider a year-end gift to our press.
With gratitude,
Rebecca Olander, Editor/Director and the Perugia Press Board
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Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight
November 2023 Poet: Deema K. Shehabi
Photo by Omar Khorsheed
At the Dome of the Rock
Jerusalem in the afternoon is the bitterness of two
hundred winter-bare olive trees fallen
in the distance. Jerusalem in the soft
afternoon is a woman sitting at the edge of the Mosque
with her dried-up knees tucked beneath her, listening to shipwrecks
of holy words. If you sit beside her under the stone arch
facing the Old City, beneath the lacquered air that hooks
into every crevice of skin, your blood will unleash
with her dreams, the Dome will undulate gold, and her exhausted
scars will gleam across her overly kissed forehead.
She will ask you to come closer, and when you do,
she will lift the sea of her arms from the furls
of her chest and say: this is the dim sky I have
loved ever since I was a child.
From Thirteen Departures from the Moon, Press 53, 2011
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* Readings & Roots *
You can see our virtual readings there, as well as our video series
entitled “Readings & Roots: Perugia Poets on Poetic Process,”which brings Perugia poems, and the process and stories behind them, to life through the voices and ideas of our poets. The third installment comes from L. I. Henley, who reads and discusses her poem “Junk Pile as Seen from My Kitchen Table” from Starshine Road (Perugia, 2017).
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* Perugia Poet News *
for the Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest and published
Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing Runner-Up in
Calyx for her essay “The Weeping Fig Waits for No One.”
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PERUGIA PRESS
PO Box 60364, Florence, MA 01062
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