Friday, November 20, 2015

Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominees


NightBallet Press is pleased once again to participate in the nominations process for the 40th Annual Pushcart Prize:  Best of the Small Presses XL, which will be published both in hardcover and paperback in late fall 2016.  As editor of a small press, I was invited to make up to six nominations from work published by my press since December of last year (2014), or from a manuscript about to be published in the coming month.  If selected, both the press and the author will receive a copy of the Pushcart Prize book.  The deadline to nominate is December 1st.  Notification of selection for Pushcart Prize inclusion will be in April of 2016.  

It was extremely difficult for me to choose among the numerous excellent, unique, exciting and delectable poems that NBP has had the pleasure and honor of publishing this past year.  I truly struggled with the final decisions.  After all, I'm the one who accepted the works to publish in the first place because I loved them.  But to waffle and decline to nominate because I don't want to make hard and fast choices would be unfair to all those whom I've published.  I feel I have an editor's responsibility to participate.  After all, I've promised you respect, readings, reviews, and recognition wherever and whenever possible.  

Please know that if your work was not nominated, it had nothing to do with merit.  Your work deserved nomination, no doubt.  Your work is truly excellent, or it would never have appeared as a NBP publication.  As far as I'm concerned, you're all winners! 

But there were certain pieces that glistened, reverberated, ensnared, transcended, or just plain persisted in the editor's mind/heart/soul/body.  These are the six pieces that are this year's nominees:

"Forsythia" by Kathleen Cerveny, from her book
Coming to Terms

"
The Maples Hang On" by Lyn Lifshin, from her book
Moving Thru Stained Glass

"Imbued, Resonance, Rendering" by Geoff Landis, from this year's Lipsmack! anthology

"Half-Moon Bay, Jamaica" by Connie Willett Everett, from her book
What Keeps Me Awake

"Rhyme and Rituals (Part 1)" by Margie Shaheed, from her book Onomatopoeia


"In Due Season" by John Burroughs, his ekphrastic poem from his book Beat Attitude.


I hope you will join with me in heartily and joyfully congratulating these six who are nominated by NBP this year!

For more information on the Pushcart Prize, please visit
www.pushcartprize.com
; for more information on Pushcart Press visit www.pushcartpress.org.   For this year's Pushcart Prize collection, or for past years' collections, go to www.amazon.com.

Stay tuned for the Ohioana Book Award nominations, and for the two new titles coming out before the New Year!  December is going to rock you, I promise!