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September 3, 2019

2019 Nightboat Poetry Prize!

Starting on September 1st, Nightboat Books invites submissions to the 2019 Nightboat Poetry Prize. The winning poet receives $1,000, a standard royalty contract, and 25 free copies of the published book. Finalists are considered for future publication. Judges:…

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Prose Reading PeriodContests | Uncategorized |
July 10, 2019

Prose Reading Period

PROSE READING PERIOD  We're thrilled to announce that Nightboat Books is considering prose manuscripts from July 1-Aug 15 2019. Please familiarize yourself with Nightboat Books’s editorial affinities by checking out our titles. Buy our books! Read them! We're looking for innovative prose projects, including inter-genres/hybrid works, book-length essays, and/or manuscripts of experimental fiction or nonfiction. No strict forms. No limits. Your manuscript might include poetry and poetic sections, but we're not considering full length poetry collections at this time. There is a $15 fee to cover administrative costs. Please include the following with your manuscript through Submittable: (a) your name and contact information (b) a short…

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Blog |
September 19, 2019

SLINGSHOT: An Interview With Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

At times serrated, at others textured like a bruise, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson's debut collection SLINGSHOT is resolute in its driving heat while still maintaining Johnson's sense of humor. The latter of which was so brightly embodied at Johnson's recent book launch event at the legendarily radical and queer Bluestockings Bookstore on the Lower East Side, adding dimension where dimension already abounded. (Which is to say: go see Cyrée read from his work whenever you can!) This collection constellates black queer trauma, sex work, radical social movements, revenge-heresy, and grief all within 80 pages—it emanates its own literary energetic field. In…

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News | Awards |
September 5, 2019

Aditi Machado’s book Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020) has won the JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD, which is given to recognize and support a second book of poetry forthcoming in the next calendar year. Offered since 1954 and endowed in…

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Blog |
August 5, 2019

Summer Reading List: Borders

  With mass ICE raids of major U.S. cities promised by an ever-intensifying racist administration, major protests at the nations detention centers after reports of astonishingly inhumane conditions and newly devised asylum restrictions, along with the recent election of Brexit-champion Boris Johnson of the British Conservative party to prime minister of the U.K., this summer has been one fraught with tension along global borders. While we should always be reading up on these particular issues, informing ourselves and each other of their components and consequences, poetry (and literature writ large) maintains its socio-political relevance in doing that very work. What's…

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Blog |
July 11, 2019

Sarah Riggs: Five Questions on Etel Adnan’s TIME

This month here at Nightboat we have the pleasure of releasing a new English translation of the beloved and inimitable painter-poet-philosopher Etel Adnan's "TIME," orginally written in the French. Born of a series of postcard correspondences between Adnan and her friend, Tunisian artist Khaled Najar, "TIME" enfolds forms both familiar and new as Adnan poetically navigates the pain, disorientation, and sublime awareness of being in time—a thing illegible without place and body—with "exuberance and clarity." I quote the latter from translator Sarah Riggs, who I was lucky enough to ask a few questions of regarding her translative process, her…

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Uncategorized |
June 25, 2019

Stephen Motika in Conversation with Andy Fitch for BLARB!

Stephen Motika, our wonderful publisher, recently spoke with Andy Fitch for BLARB! Here's an excerpt: How might a sustainable small press balance promoting fugitive individual projects and cultivating a long-lasting catalogue? How might a publisher’s personal attraction to what “breaks” within genre-defying manuscripts fit amid a broader cultural moment in which “the most interesting books now are almost exclusively in poetry, experimental fiction, and experimental prose”? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them toStephen Motika, publisher of Nightboat Books. Over the past couple years, following Motika’s departure from his Artistic Director position at Poets House to take up…

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