News – BkMk Press

BkMk Press Celebrates 50 Years

wpadm — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 17:44:48 +0000

BkMk Press Celebrates 50 Years

BkMk Press was founded in 1971 at the Johnson County Library in Kansas. It officially became part of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1983 under the leadership of founder Dan Jaffe. In 2021, BkMk is planning several events in celebration of this milestone anniversary.

The first of these celebration events include the following:

A Tale of Two Patricias: Making a Literary Life in Kansas City, featuring Patricia Cleary Miller and Patricia Lawson. Miller’s new BkMk Press book is Can You Smell the Rain?: Poems, and Lawson’s is Odd Ducks: Stories. This online event is cosponsored by the UMKC Alumni Association. Angela Elam, producer of New Letters on the Air, will moderate. Date and time TBA.

Writing Historical Fiction: The Holocaust and Other Challenges. This panel discussion will feature three winners of BkMk’s Chandra Prize for Short Fiction: Scott Nadelson, author of One of Us, Rachel Hall, author of Heirlooms, and Naomi Benaron, author of Love Letters from a Fat Man. Angela Elam, producer of New Letters on the Air, will moderate. This online event is cosponsored by National Archives Kansas City and the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. Date and time TBA.

Other events will feature Roderick Townley, author of Mozart’s Pigtail, Deborah Miranda, author of Altar for Broken Things, and Dara Yen Elerath, author of Dark Braid.

2020 Contest Winners

wpadm — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 15:34:02 +0000

Below are the winners and finalists of the 2020 contests, which closed January 15, 2020.

John Ciardi Prize for Poetry

We are pleased now to announce the winning manuscript, Flowers as Mind Control by Laura Minor of Jacksonville, Florida. The final judge was John Hodgen.

BkMk Press congratulates the finalists:

Paul David Adkins

Regina DiPerna

Sonia Greenfield

Peter Krumbach

David Moolten

Virginia Sutton

Cheryl Clark Vermeulen

Michele Wolf

Cecilia Woloch

Laura Minor will receive a $1,000 prize plus book publication by BkMk Press in 2021. Laura Minor won the 2019 International Literary Awards, Rita Dove Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series. Her poems have recently appeared in The Missouri Review, Arc Magazine Canada, and Quiddity. New poems are forthcoming in North American Review, Barnhouse Journal, South Carolina Review, and the 2020 New Rivers Press anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose.

G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction

We are pleased now to announce the winning manuscript, This Is Not My Country by Amin Ahmad of Durham, North Carolina. The final judge was Stephanie Powell Watts.

BkMk Press congratulates the finalists:

Carrie Grinstead

David Hopes

Wayne Karlin

Buku Sarkar

Amin Ahmad will receive a $1,000 prize plus book publication by BkMk Press in 2021. Amin Ahmad grew up in India, came to America as a teenager, and worked as a banker and an architect before giving up on the American dream, and becoming a full-time writer. After living in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington DC, he now resides in Durham, NC. His work has appeared in Missouri Review, Harvard Review, Slice, and elsewhere. He currently teaches at Duke University.

We stand in solidarity

wpadm — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 16:30:50 +0000

BkMk Press and our affiliates New Letters and New Letters on the Air stand in solidarity with our black writers, readers, listeners, friends, and community.

We have long made it our mission “to discover, publish, and promote the best and most exciting literary writing, wherever it might be found.” Implicit in this statement is our commitment to inclusion—to searching far and wide for a diversity of voices. But following the national unrest after the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and many others, we must now be more explicit in our mission. We wish to state unequivocally our commitment to amplifying the voices of those who have long been marginalized, ignored, and silenced as a result of systemic racism in our country.

At a time when many of us are asking ourselves what we can do—from protesting, to voting, to supporting black businesses and organizations—our staff is mindful of the ways in which literature can aid in this movement for justice and equity. We find ourselves turning to our New Letters on the Air audio archives to hear the voices of Gwendolyn Brooks, Glenn North, Terrance Hayes, Etheridge Knight, Marcus Jackson, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, DaMaris Hill, Anthony Grooms, Isabel Wilkerson, Anna Deavere Smith, Marcus Wicker, Nikky Finney, Jericho Brown, Mbembe Milton Smith (Selected Poems, BkMk), Stanley Banks (Blue Beat Syncopation, BkMk), Stephanie Powell Watts (We Are Taking Only What We Need, originally from BkMk), Claudia Rankine, and so many more who comment on race, activism, and the power of art. These programs are free to the public and available to stream on: newletters.org. It is our hope that the voices of these poets, novelists, essayists, and artists will inspire, educate, and ignite a passion for change and equality within our community and around the world.