Announcing: Summer 2025 Open Reading Period Selections

We are so excited to announce the four (!!!) titles we selected from the 425 manuscripts submitted this summer. Some of these manuscripts are by new-to-us poets, some of them by dear-to-us poets, all of them are absolute wonders (power ballads, we are crowing, each of them!), and we can’t wait for you to read them. Without further ado, here they are! The poets’ bios follow below.

Mirande Bissell lives in the Patapsco River Valley, west of Baltimore, and teaches writing to high-school students with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences. Her first book, Stalin at the Opera (Ghost Peach Press 2021), selected by Diane Seuss as the 2020 winner of the Ghost Peach Press Prize, examines what comes after abuse and tyranny. Her honors include the Spoon River Poetry Prize, the Yellowwood Prize, and the Dogwood Prize, and her poems were shortlisted for the Sappho Prize and Montreal International Poetry Prize.

Janet McAdams is a writer, editor, and translator. Her poetry collections include Buffalo in Six Directions, Feral (Salt, 2007), and The Island of Lost Luggage (University of Arizona Press, 2000), which won an American Book Award, and the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After. The recipient of a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation, her translations of Bolivian poetry have appeared in Poetry, Poesía en Acción, Anomaly, and other journals. McAdams divides her time between San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and a village in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre, 2024); Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry; and three chapbooks, including Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023), which was selected for the Ran Arroyo Series. Her poems appear in Poetry Daily, TriQuarterly, Ecotone, Image, Consequence, and elsewhere. Her honors include the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review and the NEPC’s E. E. Cummings Prize, and her work has been supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and by Mount Auburn Cemetery’s artist-in-residence program. Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, Carolyn now lives in Massachusetts.

Martha Zweig’s four full-length poetry collections include Get Lost (Dream Horse Press, 2016), Monkey Lightning (Tupelo Press, 2010), and What Kind (2003) and Vinegar Bone (1999), both from Wesleyan University Press. Zweig’s recognitions include Hopwood Awards, a Whiting Award, Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, and a Warren Wilson MFA. She lives in Vermont where she worked ten years as an advocate for seniors, after ten years handling garments in a pajama factory where she served a term as ILGWU shop chair. 

With the exception of Martha Zweig’s Snails of the Apocalypse, expected in Fall 2026, the other three titles are slated for publication in Spring 2027! We think these titles are so badass, we are considering making gothic metal tshirts, like for bands. We’re not joking. Maybe a little. But not really. Congratulations to our new River River poets, and thanks so all who shared beautiful manuscripts with us. (We read them all. We chatted with our kids about interesting forms. We made clever and hilarious notes to each other. We read A LOT OF POEMS! Next year, we are thinking we will cap our submissions at 500, and reduce our submission window to the month of May, to protect our time a little. You’re hearing it here first, because what is a newsletter without a little news, eh? Both editors are from the South, after all…we love us some news).

In more great news: our Fall 2025 titles Field Notes and Encounters for the Living and the Dead have gone to print this week, and you can still preorder them on our website at a discount, and listen to Of Poetry Podcast episodes with E.G. Cunningham and Jameela F. Dallis, and we are SOO excited to hold these books soon!

Thank you for your continued support of River River Books.

Han & Amorak,

The Editors