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.

New Poetry from Patricia Cleary Miller

wpadm — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 19:06:30 +0000

Can You Smell the Rain? Patricia Cleary Miller’s collection of poetry to be published July 7, 2020, by BkMk Press, poses the old theatrical question, Who wants what, and why can’t they have it? Her confused and deluded characters take themselves seriously as they yearn for love. With wit and gently biting satire, the poet presents their struggles. Beware: a snicker at these characters is a snicker at yourself.

Poet Mia Leonin writes, “Miller’s rapturous attention to detail and her deft sense of story conjure a poetic genealogy, swirling and swooning with ancestors, lovers, and earthly delights.” Poet H. L. Hix writes in his foreword, “This is a lyric memoir… lush with vivid and vivifying particulars…the objects of a lifetime.” Whether the scene is a French-speaking convent school in Kansas City or an Irish-American woman’s further coming of age as a Radcliffe student, wife, mother, poet, or world traveler, Miller’s true journey is an interior one marked by a radiant wit and a sensuous appreciation for life itself.

Patricia Cleary Miller is professor emerita of English at Rockhurst University, where she founded and edited the Rockhurst Review. She is the author of Starting a Swan Dive (Daniel L. Brenner Award) from BkMk Press, as well as the poetry titles Dresden and Crimson Lights, and the nonfiction title Westport: Missouri’s Port of Many Returns. Her work has appeared in Stand, Connecticut Review, New Letters, Cottonwood, I-70 Review, and elsewhere. Her secondary school was the French Convent of Notre Dame de Sion, which appears in the book. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College (where she also held a Bunting fellowship), the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Kansas. For eight years she was poet laureate of the Harvard Alumni Association. She is a past president of the Writers Place and won its annual Muse Award.

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.

Story Collection Offers Loving But Pointed School Satire

wpadm — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 17:47:00 +0000

Lorraine M. López’s Postcards from the Gerund State deals with a culturally diverse group of women faculty who struggle to get along with each other and with their less-than-elite school. López’s humorous but loving portrait of these women’s struggles brings an important perspective to our nation’s conflicting expectations of education and the faculty who deliver it.

Postcards follows these faculty members, mostly in the visual and literary arts, as they adjust to the hilarious surprises of life at Birnbrau, a fictional women’s college in Georgia with its own characteristic dysfunctions. In the culminating novella that concludes the collection, the group attend a residency at a Wyoming artist colony where for a full month, they cannot avoid or escape each other, as much as they might wish for it. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “an empathetic, often savagely comic portrait of the struggles of working women in what might be deemed an elite profession.” “Lorraine López has done it again. With singular wit and humor, she has gifted us with stories that probe the meaning of art and the realities of being an artist, a woman, and a caregiver,” writes Daisy Hernández, author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed. Kevin Wilson, author of Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, writes, “because Lopez is so masterful, she ties that humor to deeply complex characters, a unique community, their relationships so wonderfully examined.”

López teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her previous BkMk book, Homicide Survivors Picnic, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is also the author of Soy La Avon Lady and Call Me Henri from Curbstone Press, The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters and The Realm of Hungry Spirits from Grand Central, and The Darling from University of Arizona Press.

Fiction Debut Features Linked Stories of Coastal Connecticut Youth Coming of Age

wpadm — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 16:59:00 +0000

Stone Skimmers, a story collection and fiction debut by Jennifer Wisner Kelly, was chosen by Stewart O’Nan for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction and will be published Nov. 5 by BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Kelly lives in Concord, Massachusetts, and is available for bookstore and library appearances in the New England area, where many of the stories in her book take place.

Stone Skimmers opens in pristine, affluent Old Stonington, Connecticut, where a peculiar fifteen-year-old girl swims for hours each day across the town reservoir, lost to her own obsessions. The popular crowd spies from shore, mocking her strangeness, cozy in their camaraderie, until one betrays the group by befriending the outsider.

The remaining six stories follow this splintered clique into adulthoods rife with isolation and loss, exploring the lives of those who stayed in the sheltered world of their childhoods and the challenges faced by those who chose to leave.

During a cave dive in Mexico, a jealous young woman sacrifices her sister in a desperate attempt to appease the gods of fertility. An overwhelmed mother forms an intimate connection with a wild fox after her husband abandons both his family and his utopian farming fantasy.A troubled son sent to an agricultural reform school becomes captivated by a friend who purports to commune with Jesus. A young widow must institutionalize her elderly aunt, a society lady stripped of decorum and reason by dementia, perpetually reliving her life’s one great disaster.

The collection ultimately offers a profound exploration of what it means to come of age amid the astonishing joys and losses of adulthood, and amid the challenges that each of us face in shaping our own lives out of the origins into which we were born.

Jennifer Wisner Kelly grew up in Connecticut, where most of the stories in Stone Skimmers are set. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Greensboro Review, Massachusetts Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal. She is a graduate of Harvard, University of Chicago Law School, and Warren Wilson College’s MFA program. She now lives in Concord, Massachusetts and practices law at a domestic violence advocacy nonprofit. Stone Skimmers is her debut book.