Welcoming Two New Authors! January Preorders! Podcast episode with the editors! (psst and a river anthol project...)

Midwinter announcement day, to cheer us all up and bring us more poetry, right when we need it most: We are so pleased to welcome Elizabeth Sylvia and Zoë Ryder White to River River Books, and look forward to publishing Sylvia’s manuscript Scythe and White’s manuscript The Visible Field in spring 2026! 🎉🎉🎉

Elizabeth Sylvia’s first book, None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has been a semifinalist or finalist in competitions sponsored by the Burnside Review, C&R Press, DIAGRAM, Thirty West, Rare Swan and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. She has received fellowships from the West Chester University Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize. Her chapbook My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties is forthcoming from Ballerini Press.

Zoë Ryder White (she/her) has had poems appearing in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. Her chapbook, HYPERSPACE, was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring, with Nicole Callihan. Another collaboration with Nicole, Elsewhere, won the Sixth Finch chapbook competition in 2019. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.

In fact, we’re so excited, we got together and recorded a special podcast episode for y’all over at Of Poetry Podcast:

Episode 63: River River Books (Of Writing the Rural, New Book News, and the CAHABA River)

Together, we (editors Han and Amorak) read some poems by our January 2025 poets Joe Wilkins and Corrie Williamson (preorder their books here), celebrate their beautiful, rural, Western poems, and then segue into celebrating our newest River River Books poets, Elizabeth Sylvia and Zoë Ryder White! We also spill the deets on a river and forms anthology project we've been dreaming up for some time…tune in!

Thanks always, dear readers, for supporting small presses. It really does mean the world.

Han & Amorak