Editor Interview: The Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize

poetry books & broadsides

Agni, Another Chicago Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, The Believer, Bomb, Boston Review, Diagram, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Nimrod, Normal School, Oversound, Paris Review, Pleiades, Southeast Review, VQR, Zyzzyva... There's just so many places that do great work.
There's also a lot of presses doing really cool things. Too many to consider listing all of the places we admire. But in the interest of shouting out a few: we did an event recently with Airlie Press and their editorial model is fascinating. Two Sylvias does really interesting stuff with books and objects. Black Ocean has been great forever. We miss New Issues Poetry & Prose a lot. Black Lawrence. University of Pittsburgh. YesYes. The Cupboard is weird and great. We're also stoked to be so close to a bunch of university presses that do great stuff too -- Akron, Kent State, Cleveland State Poetry Center...
There's just too many. Don't let anyone tell you the literary world is collapsing. There's never been so much great publishing.

Oh man. That's the worst question. We'll go to our grave listing Allen Ginsberg first. But then: Richard Siken, Maggie Nelson, Albert Goldbarth, Nick Flynn, Milan Kundera, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Terrance Hays, Frank O'Hara, Eula Biss, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jeanette Winterson, Ryan Van Meter, Gary Snyder, Patricia Smith, Martha Collins, Haruki Murakami, Keats, Larkin, Kerouac, W.C. Williams, late-career Yeats (and then occasionally also early career Yeats), sometimes Rauan Klassnik, lately Saeed Jones and Mathias Svalina -- too many others........
Also, we only publish poetry books, but since you asked: we love Robert Rauschenberg, Esao Andrews, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, and the crazy installations of Maurizio Cattelan. If you write poems that feel like any of these, we're into it.

We've been around since the late '60s.
We're in a growth period -- we just starting publishing broadsides in 2023 and translations in 2021.
We are small -- the people who screened your manuscript when you first submitted will also be working it over as it nears publication. That can mean we work a little slower than most places, but we also care deeply about the books we produce.
We're deeply invested in collaboration, and are trying to reach outward more and more the last few years. That means collaborating with artists and designers (for our broadside contest); with authors and translators on our translation series; with other presses on events and joint projects; and with writers on complicated manuscripts that are exciting and memorable. We're looking for ways to become a part of new conversations all the time.

Care deeply about the poems -- both the subject matter of them and the "objects" themselves.
Care deeply about the total manuscript -- we consider the book itself to be the manuscript's final poem.
If you care profoundly about the work, you'll put your best foot forward. That's what we want.
There's no particular style or subject matter that we favor, nor that we automatically resist. We just want to be captivated by the work -- we want the energy to grab us, or the emotions to devastate us, or the phrasing to thrill us. Or (ideally) all of those things.
One piece of advice we'd give anyone putting a book together: start well. Don't waste any time clearing your throat: break our hearts from the first. There are spectacular books that break any rule we can come up with (including this one), but we find that too many manuscripts suffer for starting in neutral. We want to be breathless; take us there.

I'm resisting this because there are a million extraordinary exceptions to anything I could say. But that's not helpful, so I'll offer this:
An exciting submission brings urgency and energy in its voice, does interesting things with form, explores something meaningful (even if it's only meaningful to the speaker), and has a coherent thread that holds it together as a book. It cares about layout on the page and the music of the line (even if that music is choppy and staccato). And while it feels petty to say this, a great submission has interesting titles -- book title, or section titles, or poem titles.
I think I'm just describing a submission that demonstrates that the writer thought about how books come together as well as how poems come together, and then tried to assemble an interesting one. That probably doesn't help. Sorry. That's the best I can do.

Most do everything right. A few people try to email us manuscripts outside the reading period, which we don't generally accept (unless we've published that author before).
Some also ask if we can waive the reading fee. We really can't. Despite being affiliated with a university, we are self-funded. We write for grants and we sell books, but the most reliable income for us is contest reading fees. We just aren't in position to waive them. We try to stay around at the industry average (and for the broadside contest, below it), but we couldn't publish books if we didn't charge for the contest.

Whatever they want to tell us. I look over the cover letters, but they don't affect the decision. I just find them interesting.
If there is some complex conceit that I need to understand in order for the book to make sense, I appreciate hearing that in the cover letter. But honestly, if the poems are good enough, I'll stay with the project long enough to figure out the conceit anyway.

This varies greatly. If the first few poems grab me, I'll keep going to make sure it maintains that quality/intensity/etc. If they don't, I often skip around in the manuscript a little, to see if maybe the writer hit their stride later.

The finalists go to an outside judge -- an accomplished poet who is advertised while submissions are still being accepted. Sometimes I'll pluck an "editor's choice" out of the finalist stack, after the judge has picked a winner.

Honestly, this question is a tiny bit exhausting to consider. I'm going to pass. Let's just say it's full of magic and dancing and eros. Also email. A staggering amount of email. Next question.

We collaborate with the author. We read really carefully, and have suggestions -- sometimes about individual poems, other times about the order within the book. But we wouldn't accept a manuscript if we were just going to try to rewrite it.
My feeling is that we're working on a set of binary facts:
On one hand, it's ultimately the author's book.
On the other, we put our name on it too (so it matters that we can feel proud of it too).
On one hand, the author knows what they're trying to do with a particular moment in the book.
On the other, we have fresh eyes on this particular manuscript (which are also honed from reading several hundred submissions to land here), so we may catch some implication or inconsistency that the author misses...
Both parties want the book to be amazing, so we just try to work together as much as possible.

As many awards as the book qualifies for. The author may suggest contests as well (especially local or theme-centric awards that we may not know about).