The process of screening manuscripts and selecting a winner for poetry in the Many Voices Project is an annual highlight for the New Rivers Press family. Each year finds us yet again amazed and grateful to receive manuscripts from poets practicing their craft in every corner of the world, and it is with a sense of humility and reverence that we approach our task of winnowing down our submissions to a handful of worthy finalists. After considerable deliberation, we have limited our final list to six manuscripts. As is always the case, we would be proud to publish any of these manuscripts, unfortunately we can only select one winner. Stay tuned for that announcement in the upcoming weeks.
Millicent Borges Accardi (Through a Grainy Landscape), a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of two poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon 2016). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She lives in Topanga, CA.
Sara Biggs Chaney (Hagia Animalia) is a writer and collage artist from Vermont. She teaches writing and serves as the Associate Coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship at Dartmouth College. In addition to two chapbooks, she has previously published poems in Sixth Finch, Blackbird, Rhino, Sugar House Review, Juked, Columbia Poetry Review, Pank, Gargoyle, Thrush, and more.With her co-author, Michael Chaney, she has recently published visual poetry in Redivider, Puerto Del Sol, and New Delta Review, and prose in Spirituality and Health, Games and Puzzles Magazines, Sycamore Review and Hotel Amerika.
Helena Lipstadt (Our Dark and Radiant Land) was born in Berlin and lives in Los Angeles and Blue Hill, Maine. Lipstadt’s poems have been featured in Rattling Wall, Lilith, Bridges, Sinister Wisdom, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Medium and Common Lives, Lesbian Lives. Her writing has also appeared in the following anthologies: The Challenge of Shalom, From Memory to Transformation, and Every Woman I’ve Ever Loved: Lesbian Writers on Their Mothers, Lipstadt is the author of two chapbooks, Leave Me Signs and If My Heart Were A Desert. Her prose-poem Do Widzenia won silver in the Travelers Tales’ Solas Awards. Lipstadt has also been a writer-in-residence at the WUJS Institute’s Arad Arts Program in Arad, Israel, and at The Borderland Foundation in Sejny, Poland.
Erin Malone (Site of Disappearance) is the author of Hover (Tebot Bach), and a chapbook, What Sound Does It Make (Concrete Wolf). Recent honors include the Robert Creeley Memorial Prize from Marsh Hawk Press, Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize, and fellowship support from Kimmel-Harding Nelson, The Anderson Center, Ucross, and Jentel. Her poems appear in FIELD, New Ohio Review, Ruminate, and Cimarron Review, among others. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2016 to 2020, she teaches poetry in Seattle. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @erinmalonepoet.
Samuel Ugbechie (Monologue of Fire) is a writer who builds apps and plays basketball. He has works published or forthcoming in Ruminate Magazine, Palette Poetry, Aurora Poetry, Nottingham Review. He recently won the 2020 Aurora Poetry Winter Contest, and his works have been recognized in awards like the Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, Frederick Holland Poetry Collection Award, Into the Void Poetry Prize, and others. He tweets @sugbechie.
Shannon K. Winston (The Girl Who Talked to Paintings) holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. She has previously published Threads Give Way (Cold Press Publishing 2010). Her poems have appeared in RHINO, Crab Creek Review, The Citron Review, The Los Angeles Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and several times for the Best of the Net. She currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she teaches in the Princeton Writing Program. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com/