Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce the results of the 2023 Poetry Open Reading Period. Out of over 600 manuscripts, this year’s selections are Julia Bouwsma’s Death Fluorescence, Nora Hikari’s Still My Father’s Son, and Tiffany Hsieh’s Pork Fluff, which are set for release in 2025.
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. Bouwsma is Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate, serving a term from 2021 to 2026, and is the author of two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), both of which received Maine Literary Awards for Poetry Book. Her poems and book reviews can be found in publications such as Green Mountains Review, Plume, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, and What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People.
Nora Hikari (she/her) is a disabled Chinese and Japanese transgender poet and artist based in NYC. She was a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has been published in Ploughshares, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, The Washington Square Review, and others. Her hybrid fiction, KISS ME FAST, was featured in the Wigleaf Top 50 for 2023. She was a reader at the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival. STILL MY FATHER’S SON is her first book. Nora Hikari can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @system_wires.
Tiffany Hsieh was born in Taiwan and moved to Canada at the age of fourteen. She is the author of the micro chapbook Little Red (Quarter Press) and her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Malahat Review, Passages North, The Penn Review, Quarter After Eight, and the Best Microfiction anthology among other places. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.
Finalists
- Rasha Abdulhadi, Baba al bab, or My Father the door
- Kay E Bancroft, Bloodroom
- Aida Bardissi, a nation without an anthem is just a body
- Oisín Breen, i am only the song of owls
- Rowan Quince Buckton, A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BODY
- Grant Chemidlin, Man Marries Man
- Stephanie McCarley Dugger, The Lightning Line
- Jen Gayda Gupta, EVERYWHERE IS HOME IF YOU SQUINT A LITTLE
- Jacob Hall, The Conditions
- Nora Hikari, THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR
- May Lee-Yang, How I Lost My Name
- Arden Levine, Spoke
- Parker Logan, Watching the Lily Bloom
- Stacy Boe Miller, Answer with Hunger
- Elaine Mintzer, From the Bitter Tree
- Kanyinsola Olorunnisola, ARA’LUEBO: The Immigrant Monologues
- Rachel Zavecz, Six
Semi-Finalists
- Jacquelyn Bengfort, Model Boat
- Lisa Compo, Locket House
- Charlie Dale, Unbecoming Blue
- Aidan Daniel, Wonder Room
- Jesse DeLong, The Bird Triolets
- Rebekah Denison Hewitt, Karyotype
- Aerik Francis, BODYPOLITIC
- Josh Gaydos, The City of Southern Hospitality
- Laura-Gray Street, Labor
- Kathleen Hellen, HAMMER
- Dani Janae, Express Desire
- Mubanga Kalimamukwento, ANOTHER MOTHER DOES NOT COME
- Mara Lee Grayson, After the Coma, We Both Relearn to Speak
- Erika Luckert, The Forgetting Curve
- Celina Mcmanus, saltmouth
- Megan Merchant, Hortensia, in winter
- Linda Michel-Cassidy, What It Takes to Float
- Bianca Alyssa Pérez, BLESSED BE THE ONE WHO CRIES WAX
- nat raum, hometown gay
- Linda Ravenswood, girls in the desert
- Rod Carlos Rodriguez, ROOTING FOR SPICES
- Judith Sanders, The Universe with Borscht
- Sher Ting Chim, The Miracle of The Setting Sun
- Michael Van Calbergh, New Ways to Strip Wire
- Anne Yarbrough, Scrap, Feather, Bone
