Get the Word Out 2024 poetry cohort, pictured, from top left:
Nadia Alexis, Brent Ameneyro, Lory Bedikian, Saba Keramati, Eduardo Martínez-Leyva,
Matthew Nienow, Megan Pinto, Dorsía Smith Silva, Dorinda Wegener, and Jordan Windholz.
New York, NY—April 2, 2024—Poets & Writers today announced the ten poets who have been selected to participate in Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors.
In the coming months, these ten poets will take part in a series of workshops led by Morgan LaRocca, publicist at Milkweed Editions, supplemented by seminars with other leading publishing professionals—at no cost to the authors or their publishers. The poets, who hail from California, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Virginia, Washington State, and elsewhere, each has a book forthcoming. The publicity incubator is designed to provide expert advice and peer support to help early career authors take full advantage of the opportunity presented by the publication of their first or second books and build skills to propel their literary careers.
Launched in 2022, Get the Word Out builds on Poets & Writers’ decades-long history of providing practical guidance about the business of writing. The program aims to reduce barriers to success for writers from historically marginalized communities—including BIPOC and LGBTQ writers—as well as those from outside of New York City and those whose books are published by independent presses. Poets & Writers will accept applications for the next cycle of early career fiction writers in fall 2024. For more information visit at.pw.org/GTWO.
SPRING 2024 POETRY COHORT
Nadia Alexis is a poet, writer, photographer, and educator born and raised in Harlem, New York City, to Haitian immigrants, and currently resides in Mississippi. Her debut full-length collection of poetry and photography, Watersheds, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in March 2025. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications. She received a 2024 Artist Mini-Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a 2024 Vance Fellowship from the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, and a Haitian Creatives Digital Award as the 2023 Poet of the Year. A fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Watering Hole, she holds a PhD and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi.
Brent Ameneyro is the author of the collection A Face Out of Clay, forthcoming from the Center for Literary Publishing in 2024, as well as the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023). His poetry has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, the Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. He was the 2022-2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame and he currently serves as the poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.
Lory Bedikian’s debut collection, The Book of Lamenting (Anhinga Press, 2011) won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her forthcoming book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize and is forthcoming in September 2024 from the University of Nebraska Press. Bedikian’s poems received the Nimrod Literary Awards’ 2022 Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her work is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020) and her manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.
Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. Her debut collection Self-Mythology, forthcoming this spring from the University of Arkansas Press, was selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. A winner of the Discovery Poetry Prize, Saba's work appears or is forthcoming in LitHub, Kenyon Review, Adroit Journal, the Margins, and other publications. She is the poetry editor at Sundog Lit.
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican immigrants. He’s received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lambda Literary Foundation, and was the writer-in-residence at St. Alban’s School for Boys in Washington, D.C. His debut poetry collection, Cowboy Park, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press in 2024.
Matthew Nienow is the author of two collections published by Alice James Books: House of Water (2016) and If Nothing (forthcoming in 2025). His work has appeared in such venues as Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and has been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and two sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.
Megan Pinto’s debut collection, Saints of Little Faith, is forthcoming with Four Way Books in September 2024. The winner of the 2023 Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Megan’s poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, LitHub, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.
Dorsía Smith Silva is a poetry editor of the Hopper and professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including Denver Quarterly, Shenandoah, and Waxwing, and she has received support from Bread Loaf and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her primary interests are ecopoetry, social and racial justice, mothering and motherhood, and migration. In Inheritance of Drowning, her debut poetry book, is forthcoming from CavanKerry in November 2024.
Dorinda Wegener is a Perianesthesia Certified Registered Nurse in Richmond, VA. She has recent work in Hayden's Ferry Review and Hunger Mountain, as well as poems published in many journals, including the Antioch Review, THRUSH, Min-American Review, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, and Berkley Poetry Review, as well as within Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets (Hobblebush Books, 2015) and Lingering in the Margins: A River City Poets Anthology (Chop Suey Books, 2019). Her first full length collection, Four Fields, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2024.
Jordan Windholz is the author of The Sisters, forthcoming from Black Ocean in October 2024, and Other Psalms, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry (UNT Press, 2015). He holds an MFA in literature and creative writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as a PhD in early modern British literature from Fordham University in New York. He is an associate professor of English at Shippensburg University, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare, renaissance literature, and creative writing. He lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with his partner and their two daughters.
ABOUT POETS & WRITERS
Poets & Writers is the primary source of information, support, and guidance for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers in the United States. Our mission is to foster the professional development of poets and writers, to promote communication throughout the literary community, and to help create an environment in which literature can be appreciated by the widest possible public.
We advance this mission through our flagship publication, Poets & Writers Magazine; pw.org, a website that provides trustworthy advice, information, and a lively online community for writers; the Readings & Workshops program, which pays writers fees for giving readings and leading workshops throughout New York and California, as well as in eight cities outside those states; and unique professional development opportunities, including Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for emerging writers. We offer two prestigious awards: the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award and the Jackson Poetry Prize. Our work is guided by our core values: service, inclusivity, integrity, and excellence, and our commitment to becoming an antiracist organization. Learn more at pw.org.
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