We missed this beautiful review of Constant Stranger in Arkansas Review, August 2019.
“[L]ook no further than this splendid gathering of elegies, interviews, remembrances, and life studies,” Floyd Collins writes. “One could not hope for a better introduction to poet’s turbulent life and legacy than Constant Stanger: After Frank Stanford.”
Foundlings Press is pleased to announce that Margarita Serafimova has won the inaugural Ralph Angel poetry prize, judged by Mary Ruefle.
The inaugural contest saw over 200 submissions. Ruefle and the reading group selected a longlist, a shortlist, and three finalists in addition to Serafimova, whose poem “The Biologists” takes top honors. Foundlings Press will publish “The Biologists” in a limited-edition letterpress broadside produced at Western New York Book Arts Center and available from FoundlingsPress.com.
Margarita Serafimova is the winner of the 2020 biennial Tony Quagliano/ Hawai’i Council for the Humanities International Award for innovative poetry 'recognizing an accomplished poet with an outstanding body of work', 2020 and 2021 Pushcart nominee and a finalist in nine other U.S. and international poetry contests. She has four collections in Bulgarian and two in English, ‘A Surgery of A Star’ (2020) and ‘Еn-tîm’ ('The Forest') (2021). Her work appears widely, including at Nashville Review, LIT, Agenda Poetry, Poetry South, Steam Ticket, Waxwing, Reunion Dallas, Trafika Europe, Obra/ Artifact, Botticelli, Shrew, Noble/ Gas, Great Weather for Media, Landfill, Nixes Mate. Visit.
Jack Christian
Dara Yen Elerath
Alina Stefanescu
Emily Alexander
Jen Ashburn
Frances Cannon
Will Cordiero
TJ DiFrancesco
Stephanie Yue Duhem
Sam Ferrante
Joan Glass
Jonathan Hoel
Victoria Hudson
Saba Keramati
Paul Kopp
Edward Krzeminski
Özge Lena
Ojo Taiye
Fathima Zahra
Sarah Ghazal Ali
Kyle Anderson
Sara Backer
Ansie Baird
S. Erin Batiste
Sayan Aich Bhowmik
Prince Bush
Willa Carroll
Jeffrey Chang
Martin Cossio
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Jehanne Dubrow
Aidan Forster
Lesley Graham
Anya Groner
Gabrielle Grace Hogan
Leah Kaminski
Jakob Maier
Dan Mallette
Cassidy McFadzean
Matt Mitchell
Anne Myles
Maya Owen
Jody Stewart
Marion Winik
Rachel Franklin Wood
The Ralph Angel Poetry Prize honors the memory of the late Ralph Angel, a poet, teacher, and friend to many—including Foundlings Press. The prize recognizes a single poem; the winning poet receives a $250 award and a limited edition broadside publication of the winning poem. Mary Ruefle judged the inaugural prize, introduced in spring 2021.
Foundlings Press will produce the broadsides at Western New York Book Arts Center and they will be available for sale exclusively at FoundlingsPress.com until the run sells out.
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.
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.
On Saturday June 26, 2021, Foundlings Press launched Strays Pack 4 at the North Park Theatre in Buffalo, New York.
The event featured live readings and conversation from poets Julianne Neely and Rachelle Toarmino, plus a surprise recorded performance by Strays 4 packmate Mary Ruefle.
All three poets read from their Strays chapbooks (available for purchase here). Seated on the North Park’s historic stage and beneath the theatre’s golden dome, Neely and Toarmino also discussed each other’s work, the sonnet form and “broken sonnets,” repetition and punctuation, influences, “confessional” poetry, readings and misreadings of contemporary women poets, MFA and PhD programs and workshops, and their experiences reading and studying with Mary Ruefle.
Note: Reading starts at 8:59. Aidan’s introduction and Rachelle’s reading are difficult to hear due to mic placement and acoustics issues. Audio quality picks up during Julie’s reading; the discussion and Mary’s reading are entirely audible.
In-person poetry events return to Buffalo on Saturday, June 26, as the North Park Theatre hosts Foundlings Press and poets Julianne Neely, Rachelle Toarmino, and Mary Ruefle. The event—“Strays on Stage”—will feature live readings and conversation from Neely and Toarmino along with a recorded reading from virtual guest Ruefle.
Doors will open at 11 a.m. and the event will start promptly at 11:30 a.m. Guests will clear the building by 1:30 p.m. so that the North Park can begin its afternoon and evening programming. Copies of Strays Pack 4 and other Foundlings titles will be available—as will the North Park’s famous real-butter popcorn and other concessions.
“We’re thrilled to be bringing live poetry back to Buffalo with our friends at the North Park,” said Aidan Ryan, publisher of Foundlings Press. It’s incredible to reflect that just two months ago this would have been unthinkable. But now that it’s safe to gather in groups, we’re going big—big voices, the big stage, big buckets of buttery popcorn.”
“Mary, Julie, and Rachelle are some of today’s leading poets—a living legend, two celebrated innovators, and three dear friends of the press,” Foundlings editor in chief Max Crinnin added. “In addition to powerful new poems, I expect a scintillating conversation that will leave us all with much to think about for weeks to come.”
Strays on Stage celebrates the fourth release of Strays, a beloved series of limited-edition micro-publications from Foundlings Press. Each pack, hand-bound in Buffalo, features original work by three poets. Pack 4 features collections by Ruefle, Neely, and Toarmino. Pack 5, available for pre-order in December, will feature Derrick Austin, Jessica Fjeld, and Nicholas Rattner translating the Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román. Previous contributors have included Kazim Ali, Ralph Angel, Ramón García, Jakob Maier, Andrew Grace, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Robin Lee Jordan, Richard Jackson, and Ata Moharreri. Strays Packs 4 and 5 are supported in part through the New York State Council on the Arts and its DEC Grant program, administered locally by Arts Services Initiative (ASI).
Julianne Neely received her MFA degree from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship, the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize, and a Schupes Fellowship for Poetry. She is currently a Poetics PhD student and an English Department Fellow at the University at Buffalo. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, VIDA, The Poetry Project, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review and more.
Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.
Rachelle Toarmino is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Sundress Publications, P-Queue, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She is the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag and currently serves as the assistant managing editor of jubilat. She lives between Buffalo and Western Massachusetts, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst.
Foundlings Press is a literary publishing partnership based in Buffalo, New York. Foundlings earned a reputation as a pint-sized poetry powerhouse with the publication of the feted Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford (2018), a seminal anthology with over 30 contributors; and for Strays, an ongoing series of micro-publications that brings together work in packs featuring three poets twice annually. The press has also developed a robust catalog of full-length books of poetry and chapbooks. Foundlings holds a biennial chapbook contest that pairs the winning poet with a guest artist and book designer, and also facilitates the annual Ralph Angel Poetry Prize, honoring one poem with a limited edition broadside publication.
For more information or to place bulk orders, contact:
Aidan Ryan
Learn more at foundlingspress.com.
L to R: Rachel Stempel and Julie Molloy
The third biennial Wallace Award from Foundlings Press goes to the poet Rachel Stempel.
The Wallace Award—a prize we introduced in 2017—honors a chapbook and pairs the winning poet with a guest book artist to create original cover art for the publication. The award is named for Wallace “Wally” Canham, Art Director Darren Canham’s dog and our little band’s beloved mascot, lodestar, and occasional production assistant.
Submissions for the 2021 Wallace Award opened in late fall 2020. This year saw the largest-ever batch of entries. From this outstanding field, Foundlings Press recognized the following finalists:
Eric Benick
Shantha Bunyan
Selena Cotte (@selenacotte)
Kristen Steenbeeke (@ksteenbeeke)
Rachel Stempel (@failed captcha)
Rachel Stempel, winner of the 2021 Wallace Award from Foundlings Press, is a genderqueer Ukrainian-Jewish poet and educator. They are a staff writer at Up the Staircase Quarterly and EX/POST MAGAZINE and a poetry editor at MAYDAY Magazine. They are the author of the chapbook BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT (Finishing Line Press 2022) and their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Porter House Review, New Delta Review, Penn Review, and elsewhere. They currently live in New York with their rabbit, Diego.
Rachel’s chapbook Interiors will be available for purchase in winter 2021.
Follow: @failedcaptcha
Julie Molloy is an illustrator, designer and art director at Block Club, an award-winning branding and strategy agency in Buffalo. Her gallery work debuted in 2014 in her solo show, Inside Voices, a series exploring the relationship between our public faces and private lives. She has since been featured in The Public and elsewhere, displayed her work at events with partners like Peach Mag, and taken on a wide variety of illustration projects, including designing the cover of Matthew Bookin’s chapbook Palace (Ghost City Press, 2018) and many private commissions. Based in Buffalo, she is currently living and working in Mexico City.
View: https://www.juliemolloy.com/
Follow:https://www.instagram.com/juleeclip/
2017: Lytton Smith—My Radar Data Knows Its Thing—Order Here
Guest Artist: Stephen Fitzmaurice
2019: Nicholas Molbert—Goodness Gracious—Order Here
Guest Artist: Edreys Wajed
OK, so we’re a little late. Although we’re almost four months into the new year, we’re pleased to announce our 2021 catalog. We hope you’ll agree that it was worth the wait.
Our 2021 lineup includes two full-length poetry collections, a bilingual anthology of poems and narratives from the Mexico-U.S. border, the 2021 Wallace Award winning chapbook, and the continuation of our Strays series with two new packs, featuring seven fantastic poets.
Additionally, for the first time, Foundlings is offering a tiered subscription model for book and merch purchases. While books, chapbooks, zines, and more will still be available directly on our website, friends and fans can subscribe through our Patreon page and automatically receive new titles as we release them: https://www.patreon.com/foundlingspress.
Our year kicks off in earnest in June with the release a new edition of Sancta by Andrew Grace, originally published in 2012 by Ahsahta Press, which ended its run last year. The book will feature a new cover design by our own Darren Canham, which we’re pleased to reveal today. Sancta is available now for pre-order and scheduled for shipment in June.
In August Foundlings will publish Hunger of Images by Marta del Pozo. The collection was originally published in 2016 a Spanish-language edition as Hambre de imágenes by Alhulia Press, and received the Antonio Gala poetry prize. Foundlings will publish a new bilingual edition of the book, featuring translations by the author. The book will also feature a new cover with original art by Claudio Abate, the late Italian photographer. Hunger of Images is available now for pre-order and scheduled to ship in August.
Foundlings Press has selected poet Rachel Stempel’s chapbook Interiors as the winner of the 2021 Wallace Award. Guest artist Julie Molloy will design original cover art for the manuscript, which will be out in winter 2021. We’ll be sharing more information about Rachel and their winning manuscript soon.
In December Foundlings will release a bilingual anthology of poems and narratives from the Mexico-U.S. border, edited by Gabriela Zavela and Peter Temes. Zavela is the Executive Director at Resource Center Matamoros and President and CEO of Asylum Seeker Network of Support. Temes the founder and president of the Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations (ILO) and the author of several books, including, with Gerry Crinnin, the poetry collection I Know You Know, and with Florin Rotar, We The People: Human Purpose in a Digital Age: A Guide to Digital Ethics for Individuals, Organizations and Robots of All Kinds. Together, Zavela and Temes have worked with migrant writers predominantly from the refugee camp at Matamoros, Mexico to collect poetry and personal narratives spanning over five years of migrant experiences.
Strays, our scrappy series of hand-bound micro-publications, will also continue, thanks to the generous support of the New York State Council on the Arts and its DEC Grant program, administered locally by Arts Services Initiative (ASI). Pack 4, out this summer, will feature original “stray” collections by Mary Ruefle, Julianne Neely, and Rachelle Toarmino. Pack 5, available for pre-order in December, will feature original poems by Derrick Austin and Jessica Fjeld along with Nicholas Rattner’s translations of the Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román.
Strays Pack 4 is available now for pre-order.
All the titles mentioned above will be available for pre-order in our online store soon. Now, readers also have the option of subscribing to receive new titles automatically.
Since our beginnings as a magazine in 2015, Foundlings has been on an uneven journey toward a sustainable publishing model. As a small, volunteer-run operation without institutional backing or foundational grant support, we discovered that traditional small press publishing and distribution models would inevitably lead us to insolvency. We have been lucky, though, to welcome and grow a base of dedicated and supportive readers readers. To stay close to those readers, reach an even wider audience, and keep our book prices affordable, we’re now going to offer our titles via monthly subscriptions.
We’re debuting the following patron tiers through Patreon:
Fans - Chip in $2/month for our eternal gratitude and recognition on a new patrons and supporters page of our website (under construction).
Friends - For only $4/month, subscribe to our Strays series. That means you’ll get two packs a year - totaling six limited-edition original works by a wide variety of poets and writers.
First Readers - For $8/month, subscribe to the Strays series, all of our full-length poetry releases, and our chapbooks - and get free digital downloads of all the hard copies we send you.
Constant Strangers - For only $10/month, you won’t miss a thing* - we’ll send you every full-length title, chapbook, zine, limited edition release, Strays pack, and anthology or collection that we publish.
*Almost. This doesn’t include hardcovers or coffee table books. We’ve never published a hardcover edition or a coffee table book, but we might in the future.
Learn more and sign up to support at our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/foundlingspress.
In Sancta, divinity irradiates. The afterlife approaches nuclear, dangerous and fascinating, a mysterium tremendum fascinans that can kill you with overexposure.
—Kascha Semonovitch in The Rumpus
Sancta dismantles the weighty abstractions of God, loss, redemption, and loneliness. And there, Grace finds himself standing in the middle of a wilderness. This is the book’s thrilling core—a space that does not dissipate after study, that is steadfastly interior and exterior, self and circumstance.
—Daniel Moysaenko in The Volta
It is a collection that rewards multiple rounds of reading, lingering, holding lines in suspension, dipping. The effect of moving through the poems is like watching Marker’s San Soleil. There’s a mesmerizing drift into and out of stages of consciousness, and rich philosophical ruminations on the ravenousness of the eye, along with the vexed desire to represent, to seize and ingest the flux of experience as image(s).
—Jenny Xie
Click through to learn more about Derrick Austin, Jessica Fjeld, Andrew Grace, Julianne Neely, Marta del Pozo, Nick Rattner, Juan Andrés García Román, Mary Ruefle, Rachel Stempel, Peter Temes, Rachelle Toarmino, and Gabriela Zavela.
Foundlings Press is a literary publishing partnership based in Buffalo, New York. Foundlings earned a reputation as a pint-sized poetry powerhouse with the publication of the feted Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford (2018), a seminal anthology with over 30 contributors; and for Strays, an ongoing series of micro-publications that brings together work in packs featuring three poets twice annually. The press has also developed a robust catalog of full-length books of poetry and chapbooks. Foundlings holds a biennial chapbook contest that pairs the winning poet with a guest artist and book designer, and also facilitates the annual Ralph Angel Poetry Prize, honoring one poem with a limited edition broadside publication.
Strays Packs 4 and 5 are possible through the generous support of NYSCA and ASI.
We’re very pleased to share that Mary Ruefle will judge our inaugural Ralph Angel Poetry Prize.
We announced the prize, which honors the late poet Ralph Angel, in March. Submissions are open (and free) through April. The inaugural prize will recognize a single poem; the winning poet, selected by Mary Ruefle, will receive a $250 award and a limited edition broadside publication of the winning poem. The broadsides will be available for sale exclusively here at FoundlingsPress.com until the run sells out.
Entry is free
Send only one poem as a Word or PDF attachment to publisher@foundlingspress.com
Submissions must be previously unpublished
Entry window closes April 30 at 11:59pm ET
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.
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.online/.
Mary Ruefle | Photo Credit: Matt Valentine
Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.
More information about Mary and her poetry is available at http://maryruefle.com/.
For the month of April, Foundlings Press will accept submissions for a new prize in honor of the late poet Ralph Angel. The inaugural Ralph Angel Poetry Prize will recognize a single poem; 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.
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.
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.online/.
The winner of the inaugural 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.
Entry is free
Send only one poem as a Word or PDF attachment to publisher@foundlingspress.com
Submissions must be previously unpublished
Entry window closes April 30 at 11:59pm ET
Zack Grabosky, author of the poetry collection Blazes, connected over Zoom for a conversation with Gerry Crinnin, fellow poet and compatriot from their days in the SUNY Binghamton Creative Writing Program. Zack read several poems from Blazes and talked with Gerry about the genesis of the book, his travels through New York and Pennsylvania, fatherhood, and other poets they both studied under and befriended, like the great Milton Kessler.
Buy your copy directly from Foundlings Press, from SPD, or from your local independent bookseller.
