Tupelo Press Proudly Announces the Results of the 2025 Summer Open Reading Period
Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that we have selected for publication five (!) manuscripts out of the nearly 1,400 submissions received during this year’s Summer Open Reading Period.
Manuscripts came to us, not only in record numbers, but in record quality— arriving on our digital doorstep from throughout the United States, and from every continent save the Arctic.
We also wish to recognize several manuscripts of extraordinary merit, which we found so very deserving, and have designated Honorable Mentions. Please read on for those names. But first, we’d like to extend our sincerest thanks to an accomplished team of preliminary readers. Their feedback was invaluable as we reviewed this year’s stunning set of submissions. Final selections were made by Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Cassandra Cleghorn, Poetry Editor, and Jeffrey Levine, Artistic Director & Publisher. Each of the selected poets will receive a $1,000 advance, as well as publication, publicity and distribution through the combined efforts of The University of Chicago Press, our distributor, and Tupelo Press.
We are proud and honored to select for publication the following five manuscripts:
Separation is what Binds Us Here, by Alison Granucci of Millbrook, New York
Alison Granucci's Separation Is What Binds Us Here shows us--eloquently and virtuosically--the ways beauty and violence exist side by side in the contemporary sociocultural landscape. Granucci's masterpiece ultimately argues for the persistence of ethics, hope, and transcendence in what might be seen as the narrator's darkest hours. Bravisimma!
Alison Granucci, a Pushcart-nominated poet and naturalist, is founder and president emeritus of Blue Flower Arts, a literary speaker’s agency. Alison began to write poetry when she retired at the age of 62. Her work is found in RHINO (2nd Place, Editor’s Prize), Tupelo Quarterly (Poetry Prize finalist), Subnivean (Poetry Prize finalist), Pangyrus, American Poetry Journal, Terrain.org, Plant-Human Quarterly, EcoTheo Review, and Humana Obscura, among others, as well in the anthology, Little by Little, the Bird Builds Its Nest. Alison received the first annual Vicious Circle Award from The Poetry Society of New York for her contributions to the world of poetry and was an Artist-in-residence at Trail Wood, homestead of naturalist Edwin Way Teale. She serves on the boards of the EcoTheo Collective and the Hellbender Gathering of Poets and is co-editing an anthology of new bird writing with J. Drew Lanham.
In a Thunder of Fur and Winter, by Valerie Martínez of Albuquerque, New Mexico
Valerie Martínez is the author of five books of poetry including Absence, Luminescent (Four Way Books) and two book-length works, Each and Her and Count (University of Arizona Press). Her poems have been published widely in anthologies, journals, and magazines, including The Best American Poetry, Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance, Ley Lines, New American Poetry: A Breadloaf Anthology, Puerto del Sol, American Poetry Review, AGNI, SWWIM, and Poetry. Valerie has a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona, where she studied with Jane Miller, Jon Andersen, and Joy Harjo. She lives in Albuquerque.
Valerie Martínez writes poems that reveal their most intimate, most private interiors like “a ribcage stuffed with a wreck of magnificent blossoms.” Such a skillful braiding of the quotidian with the sublime into something fierce, brave, vivid and visionary. Every intimacy is earned with a fine, almost microscopic, attentiveness to the art of telling. This is a book of gorgeously fraught visions that read like an extended ode to the muse of tactility.
deś, by Sati Mookherjee of Bellingham, Washington
Sati Mookherjee is a rising star in the literary landscape, and her collection, Deš, is as inspiring as it is visionary. By using the page as a canvas, Mookherjee creates a powerful visual and textural experience for the reader, prompting readers to ask new and daring questions about language. This book is truly a tour de force.
Sati Mookherjee is the author of the collections Eye (Ravenna Press, 2022) and Ways of Being (Albiso Award, MoonPath Press, 2023). Her collaborations with contemporary classical composers have been performed or recorded by ensemble and solo musicians (The Esoterics, Contemporary Chambers and Players, and violinist / soprano Hope Wechkin). Her work appears in literary magazines and anthologies; recent work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast Journal, Quarterly West and Michigan Quarterly Review. A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, she is past recipient of an Artist Trust / Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship Award. She is Vice President of the Board of Directors of the CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival.
Michael Snediker of Houston, Texas for Reciprocity
Reciprocity inhabits micro-scenes adapted from the films of Agnes Varda and Eric Rohmer. These brilliant and haunting images measure intimacy and landscape, limning the inner sanctum of loved ones and the broader word, employing a skillful parataxis – a poetic brevity – and “swipe” (the gesture of a bright lipstick between the air and a mouth). Not a scintilla of urgency is lost within the aesthetic pressures of these gorgeously-made poems.
Michael D. Snediker is the author of three books of poetry, including Jones Very (Ornithopter Press) and The New York Editions (Fordham University Press), as well as a chapbook, In the Swan Drawing, forthcoming with Antiphony Press. He’s also the author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment (U.Minnesota Press) and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (U.Minnesota Press). His recent poems have appeared in journals including The Atlantic, Brooklyn Rail, The Drift, Lana Turner, and VOLT. The recipient of multiple residencies at the James Merrill House and Yaddo, he’s Professor of American Literature & Poetics at the University of Houston, where he's presently writing about landscape as ascesis in Thoreau, Lauren Berlant, and Leslie Scalapino, among others.
The Campus Novel: Poems, by Mathew Weitman of Houston, Texas
Striding through the campus of endangered earthscapes, twisted dreams and poetic canons, Weitman does nothing less than reimagine the shopworn framework of ecopoetics. This whip smart, capacious debut, "mackled by cigarette /ashes, burgundy and ink," exudes at once extraordinary discernment and abounding freshness, "worldstung /in the enchanted company /of peafowl /& dogwoods."
Mathew Weitman’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Award, the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and has received residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, UCROSS, and Millay Arts. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston, where he is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. With July Westhale and Felipe Acevedo Rilquelme, he is coediting an anthology on the life and work of the Chilean poet Rolando Cárdenas (Pleiades Press, 2026).
Honorable Mentions:
Shou Jie Eng of Hartford, Connecticut for an earth of wants: poems
Meredith Higgins of Boise, Idaho for Mad with Heaven
Lauren Myers-Hinkle of Evanston, Illinois for Phantom Ride
Eva Hooker of Notre Dame, Indiana for Portion
Rachel Kaufman of Los Angeles, California for and after the fire, and In the desert the rain
Suji Kwock Kim of Princeton, New Jersey for And the Pursuit Of
Tim Peterson of Santa Monica, California for Mementos Mori
Kristin Sanders of Richmond, Virginia for Reviews of Rooms and Lovers
Michael Simms of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for Cities I Can Never Return To
Emma Trelles of Santa Barbara, California for Courage and the Clock
Marc-Anthony Valle of St. Louis, Missouri for Desire and Other Flightless Birds
Congratulations to every poet who submitted. Whether you are one of those very few chosen for publication, or as an honorable mention, there was far more exciting work for us to read than we could possibly, appropriately honor. Please keep your work in front of us!
Keep in mind that our Helena Whitehill Award for a book of poetry (Jane Wong, final judge) is currently open to submissions until October 31st, 2025 at 11:59 PM ET. We encourage you all to let us see your work again.
Respectfully, The Editors