Jona Colson’s debut poetry collection asks the reader to reconsider ordinary life as something curious, even fantastic. A poet of astonishing and apparently limitless range, he is sometimes whimsical, sometimes terrifying, but always contemplative, tender and wise.

Drawing heat and music (and luscious food) from a New Orleans and Houston childhood, Steven Leyva’s poetry reveals a sensibility forged by a growing awareness of race and class: child’s joy and bafflement, a black Baltimore father’s worry. These gorgeous poems sweep the reader as into a parade, of memory, sensation, rhythm, protest.

Winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, You Cannot Save Here is a collection of poems about how we live when each day feels like the world is ending. The poems ask what we do with the small moments that matter when so much around us—climate disaster, gun violence, […]

We meet a Mayan cowboy, Archimedes, a diamond smuggler and a nightclubbing saint in this collection of poems bound together by the themes of place and origin. In Provenance, Brandel France de Bravo explores not only her own roots, but the roots of words. Taking her cue from Ralph Walso Emerson who said, “Every word […]

The collection Into the Wilderness explores the theme of parenthood from many angles: an eager-to-connect divorced father takes his kids to a Jewish-themed baseball game; a lesbian couple tries to decide whether their toddler son needs a man in his life; one young couple debates the idea of parenthood while another struggles with infertility; a […]

David A. Taylor’s collection, Success: Stories, is the 2008 Fiction Award winner from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. His work has appeared in many magazines, reviews, and anthologies, and his most recent nonfiction book was Ginseng, the Divine Root.

St. Bart’s Way is a fictional street developed after the First World War when streetcar lines were extended to Baltimore’s leafy outer reaches. From its founding, the community surrounding St. Bart’s Way accommodated doctors, lawyers, and bankers who wanted homes conveying a sense of comfort and refinement. But, above all, these people wanted homes standing […]

Adam Schwartz’s debut collection The Rest Of the World introduces a writer whose ear is so pitch-perfectly trained to his characters it seems as if he’s an angel eavesdropping from their rooftops. His cast heralds from every walk of life, from street corners and housing projects from dive bars and fishing boats we might otherwise […]