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What's Going on @ Steel Toe Books

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.  Each has been offered a standard royalties contract, along with a $500 advance.  Please join us in congratulating these authors, whose works were selected from 252 submissions. 

We would also like to make honorable mention of ten other manuscripts that caught our attention:  A Dream of the Northwest Passage by Robert Cooperman, Speechless by Christopher Cunningham, The More Difficult Beauty by Molly Fisk, The Honey of Earth by David Graham, Dust Runner by Jessica Jewell,  Domestic Fugues by Richard Newman,  The Space of Whether God Exists by Amy Newman, Prometheus in Akron by Doug Ramspeck, Our Common History by Samn Stackwell, and To Make A Long Story Short by Matt Zambito.

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.

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.

August 23, 2006: Results of the Open Reading Period
Bowling Green, KY—Steel Toe Books has acquired three new titles, which we plan to publish in 2007. We selected Prairie Fever by Mary Biddinger and Worthless by John Guzlowski from 111 manuscripts sent to us during our open reading period in June. Additionally, we solicited Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes by James Doyle.
—Click here to read the entire press release.
June 2006: Open reading period:
Steel Toe Books is holding an open reading period during the month of June 2006.
—Click here for more information about the open reading period submission process.
May 4, 2006:
Steel Toe Books is pleased to announce the publication of Ken Waldman's fifth full-length poetry collection, Conditions and Cures. "Full of poems that stand alone as consummate achievements, Conditions and Cures nevertheless coheres as a book about life-and-death verities, strategies for survival or triumph or at least coping gracefully. The comic is one of those strategies, and Ken Waldman is often at his most hilarious when he's addressing subjects another poet might murder with solemnity."
—Click here to read the entire press release.
April 8, 2006:
Steel Toe Books selected Becoming the Villainess as its first solicited manuscript. We at Steel Toe Books agree with Ilya Kaminsky, winner of the prestigious Whiting Writer's Award and the Dorset Prize, when he states that “in this splendidly entertaining debut, Jeannine Hall Gailey offers us a world both familiar and magical.... The wild and seductive energy in this collection never lets one put the book down... Her delivery is heart-breaking and refreshing, so the poems seduce us with the sadness, glory and entertainment of our very own days. Propelled by Jeannine Hall Gailey’s alert, sensuous and musical gifts, the mythology becomes our own.”
—Click here to read the entire press release.
March 19, 2006:
Steel Toe Books selected Blue Positive from 115 manuscripts submitted during its open reading period last summer. We at Steel Toe concur with distinguished poet and Virginia Tech professor Bob Hicok, who writes “Martha Silano’s poems are full of sex and birth and food, mind and body. Their richness of detail makes reading this book like entering a home: there is a bustle to her language as she tries to gather everything she loves…. By the end of Blue Positive, I trust both her surprise and her wisdom.’” —Click here to read the entire press release.
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