Our team at Brainstorm had a brainstorm of its own: invite small presses to take center stage.
Independent publishing is where real literary work comes out to play. Writing can truly be experimental, or groundbreaking, or daring if it doesn’t have to fit into the existing catalogue of a Big 5 publishing house. Indies get to stand up for the work they believe in. No wonder many writers get their start in small presses!
Brainstorm, a reading series organized by grad students from the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation, is starting off their commitment to integrate small presses into the reading series by inviting Ghostbird Press to the stage.
On Friday, May 30th, you can catch Ghostbird authors Richard Prins (the most recent winner of the Birdhouse Prize), John Reid Currie, along with a special appearance by Ghostbird Founder, Peter Vanderberg.
Will they regale you with their ghostly birdsong? Will they talk about the ins and outs of independent publishing? Most importantly, will you be there to add your voice?
Monday, May 5, 2025 • 7 pm Rosenthal Library, Tanenbaum Room, 300i Live and in-person!
Join us for our last Writers at Queens event of the semester, as we celebrate Richard Prins on his winning the Birdhouse Prize from Ghostbird Press.
You may remember that over the past year Richard has also been included in The Best American Essays 2024 and won an NEA Fellowship, so we’re overjoyed to celebrate this great year with Richard!
Richard will read from his prize winning chapbook of poems, We May Eat Fruit, before he sits down with Ghostbird publisher, Peter Vanderberg, and Professor Roger Sedarat for a rousing discussion on going from manuscript to publication.
Ghostbird Press is a small, independent chapbook press that publishes collaborations of writing and visual art. Peter Vanderberg, also a QC MFA alum, offers the annual Birdhouse Prize to graduating QC MFA students, resulting in a gorgeous full-color chapbook for the winner, which just goes to show you the power of the QC MFA community!
Congratulations to Kathleen Ma, who has just been selected for the Hoyt Jacobs Poetry Prize by Alice Quinn, former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America!
Alice Quinn is the former Director of the Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts. She was poetry editor at The New Yorke from 1987-2007 and at Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers, from 1976-1986. She is the editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, and she is currently at work editing Bishop’s journals and notebooks.
Quinn had this to say about Ma’s prize-winning packet of poems:
The element of play and surprise is sometimes underestimated in creative work, but it is nonetheless a large part of what draws readers to reread something that has affected or moved or startled them, and I found myself rereading Kathleen Ma’s sequence of poems over and over because I was charmed by swerves and turns of phrase and by her sense of play.
It may be that she has surprised herself writing these poems because she set out to hone her skills as a translator. But whatever means to the avenue, she seems delighted to be on this path.
Why does the sentence “Breakfast will no longer be served in the bicycle factory.” delight? Why does the gleam that shows up several times in this packet gleam? Perhaps because it leads to a summary statement as memorable as this:
“A red gleam swarms the rehearsal on the street where we are enabling an afternoon to grow from its roots until the end of time!”
And the ebullience of this formulation will stay with me, too:
“Ah! the meeting of the meeting of the meeting.”
“With enormous greed I/ want it all” Ma writes in another poem.
Life and literature is ready for your appetite!
Bravo for the way you are seeing things aslant and initiating your readers.
The Hoyt Jacobs Memorial Poetry Prize is an annual poetry prize given in honor of MFA alumnae Hoyt Jacobs, who died on January 17, 2015. The prize is open to all Queens College MFA students currently enrolled in the program. A prize of $1,000 is awarded to the best poems submitted.
You can read more about the unique chances our students get access to during the program on our Opportunities page:
Alice James Books is committed to collaborating with literary artists of excellence whose voices have been historically marginalized by producing, promoting, and distributing their work, which often engages the public on important social issues. The Alice James Award builds on Alice James’s reputation for excellence through this annual contest for book manuscripts from both emerging and established poets.
zakia winning a blind submission contest (where no contact information can be listed on the manuscripts submitted) is nothing short of a coup–her forthcoming book, The Body Losing Its Borders, beat out thousands of other manuscripts to be published by one of the premiere independent publishers of poetry in the nation.
The Body Losing Its Borders won’t be available until January 2027, but you can congratulate zakia (and preorder) today!
Take a look at this picture and tell me what you see:
That’s (from left) Katie Machen, Francesca Hyatt, Rebecca Suzuki, Marine Cornuet, Ammiel Alcalay, Radhika Singh, David Iaconangelo, Leo Grossman, Briallen Hopper, who all met up at Ammiel Alcalay and Mosab Abu Toha’s sold-out Poetry Project reading at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, February 12, 2025.
For other programs, having this many alums in a room is a rarity, happening only through universities trying to fleece donations or when someone is trying to start up a new reading series and needs to fill space in their lineup. That’s not us.
So much of what you achieve during an MFA is based on community, whether that’s the notes you get in workshop or the network you lean on when you’re looking for a job or to publish something. Why would you want that to stop after you graduate? What’s great about the Queens College MFA Program is that you become part of it for life. QC folks seek each other out, driven by that same hunger to build and grow as writers. We will show up at your reading! We’ll even buy the book!
Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
Take a look at some of our other alumni and see if you’d maybe what to become part of the QC MFA Program:
February 18 at 7 pm Barrow’s Intense Tasting Room 86 34th Street, Brooklyn, NY
MFA faculty member Alaya Dawn Johnson will be taking part in one of the city’s most fun reading series, Brooklyn Books & Booze. The series takes place in the tasting room of Barrow’s Intense ginger liqueur distillery on the third Tuesday of each month.
For more information, and to see the full lineup for February 18th, please visit the Brooklyn Books & Booze website:
Mosab Abu Toha and Ammiel Alcalay‘s poetry bring new meaning to the act of witnessing, writing with and for the dead, summoning the living in a call to imagine anew—form an image of another world lying below the rubble of this world’s unending devastation.
Since 1966, The Poetry Project has expanded access to literature, education, and opportunities for sharing one’s creative work in a counter-hierarchical, radically open space and community. Premised on the vision that cultural action at the local level can inspire broader shifts in public consciousness, The Project is committed to developing and collaborating on replicable program models that challenge persistent social narratives, especially through the verbal reframing made possible in poetry.
Penguin Classics presents ABORTION STORIES, a one-of-a-kind, intersectional volume of abortion representation in American literature before Roe v. Wade that compellingly proclaims: when abortion is illegal, people’s lives are always more precarious and limited.
Head to the CUNY Grad Center for a conversation with Karen Weingarten (Editor), Rebecca Traister (Foreword), and Renee Bracy Sherman (Afterword) who will discuss these stories, poems, essays, and memoirs that reflect a range of representations and responses to abortion. The conversation will be moderated by Professor Vanessa Pérez-Rosario (Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center).
This event is free and open to all, please register to attend. Copies of the book will be available at the event.
Tonight kicks off two nights of Nicole Cooley readings–a double feature, if you will!
The first is tonight at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Writer’s House, to celebrate the launch of Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, a superb anthology celebrating the legacy of Yusef Komunyakaa. You can catch Nicole along with Anne Marie Macari, Jeffrey McDaniel, Yesenia Montilla, John Murillo, and Nicole Sealey tonight at 7 pm if you’re in the city.
Tomorrow, you can also hear Nicole read from her latest book, Mother Water Ash, as part of the Brainstorm Reading Series, which is organized by alumni and students from the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation out of the delightful Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn.
Located in the most culturally and linguistically diverse county in the nation, the Queens College MFA program attracts students dedicated to crossing boundaries in genre, craft, and language. Classes are small, mostly in the evening, and students work closely with faculty mentors. Join an exciting creative community with affordable public university tuition in an urban environment with a verdant 80-acre campus.
Unraveling the application process can feel like this sometimes!
Now you have two ways to find out whether the Queens College MFA Program is the right choice for you: Our Open House on February 19 at 5 pm.
Our MFA teaching faculty will be on hand to answer questions about the program, so come prepared to ask us anything about how classes are structured to what opportunities MFA students get to publish and work in their field!
Sign up via the Zoom link below, or just click on the image above!
Email us at [email protected] so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:
