Eludia Award Long List and Winner Announced

We’re excited to name the winner of the most recent round of our Eludia Award: Elisabeth Bell Carroll of Framingham, Massachusetts, for her fascinating dual-time novel, Agnès & Oscara.

The Eludia Award is a first-book award, offered to a woman writer, age forty and above, for a work of fiction, either a novel or collection of stories. We are also pleased to announce the semi-finalists and finalists below and wish to congratulate everyone. As ever, we are in awe of the enormity of talent we receive; and we are grateful to every writer who has submitted to this award.

The next round of submissions for the Eludia Award will deadline April 1, 2024. More details about The Eludia Award, and its guidelines can be read here on our blog, and here, on the Submittable page.

The semi-finalists and finalists are as follows:

Semi finalists

Adams, Kate, Mountain View, California, Scattered Pieces

Alderton, Ellen, Washington, D.C., Changing of the Guard

Alpha, Karen, Corning, New York, ZULU And Other Stories

Bryan, Cristina, Durham, North Carolina, Henricus

Carter, Thatcher, Riverside, California, Razed

Carroll, Elisabeth Bell, Framingham, Massachusetts, Agnès & Oscara

Chilton, Lora, Memphis, Tennessee, Massacre in 1666

Clayton, Julia, Southport, Merseyside, England, Tinted Venus

Colvin, Rebecca, Gastonia, North Carolina, A Beautiful Symmetry

Crawley, Kathryn, Greensboro, North Carolina, The Fetch of the Wind

Debling, Heather, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, Count Your Blessings: Stories

De Gregorio, Karen, Sherman Oaks, California, The Carnaval Kara Never Danced

Dhavan, Lucinda, Concord, Massachusetts, A Part of It All

Feighan, Philomena, Westborough, Massachusetts, Long Sleeps the Summer in the Seeds

Gorelova, Linda, Columbus, Ohio, The Romanovs Wish You Health in the New Year

Gray, Katrine, El Sobrante, California, Crescent Lane

Gurman, Diana, Los Angeles, My Ghost and Other Stories

James, Frannie, Seattle, Washington, The Sylvan Hotel, a Seattle Story

Johnson, Lulu, Dillard, Georgia, Pandora’s Portrait

Juchniewicz, Melissa, Chester, New Hampshire, Like Dust

Kirkham, Phebe, Woodside, New York, The Last of the Winters

Lawhorn, Barbara, Macomb, Illinois, Born Again

Lownds, Joan, Naugatuck, Connecticut, What’s Wrong with Your Voice?

Marin, Robin Luce, Brooklyn, New York, Old Scores

Martinez, Suzanne, Brooklyn, New York, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass

May, Amber, Sherwood, Arizona, Destiny Keeper

Moriarty, Marilyn, Roanoke, Virginia, Flight Is the Name of a Goddess

Neville, Sophie, Lymington, Hampshire, UK, Love Is For The Brave

O’Brien, Colleen, East Glacier, Montana, Baited

Oxnard, K.W., Savannah, Georgia, The Leg in Question

Palmer, Wendy, Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, Sphere of Her Own

Payne, Martha, Atlanta, Georgia, Apple Doll

Ruby, Michele, Louisville, Kentucky, Stage Presence

Smith, Jessica, Lewiston, Maine, That Kind of Trouble Isn’t This Kind of Trouble

Spasser, Connie Corzilius, Augusta, Georgia, Shimmer and Give: Stories

Taugher, Mary, San Francisco, California, What Mercy

Troisi, Gina, Eliot, Maine, After the Rush

Webb, Susan, Citrus Heights, California, Figments

Whouley, Kate, Centerville, Massachusetts, The Maestro and Her Protégé

Wood, Mary, Eugene, Oregon, The Blue Edge

Yackzan, Dawn, Davis, California, Leap Frog

Finalists

Adams, Kate, Mountain View, California, Scattered Pieces

Alderton, Ellen, Washington, D.C., Changing of the Guard

Bryan, Cristina, Durham, North Carolina, Henricus

Carroll, Elisabeth Bell, Framingham, Massachusetts, Agnès & Oscara

Chilton, Lora, Memphis, Tennessee, Massacre in 1666

Clayton, Julia, Southport, Merseyside, England, Tinted Venus

Crawley, Kathryn, Greensboro, North Carolina, The Fetch of the Wind

Debling, Heather, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, Count Your Blessings: Stories

Gorelova, Linda, Columbus, Ohio, The Romanovs Wish You Health in the New Year

Gray, Katrine, El Sobrante, California, Crescent Lane

Gurman, Diana, Los Angeles, My Ghost and Other Stories

Johnson, Lulu, Dillard, Georgia, Pandora’s Portrait

May, Amber, Sherwood, Arizona, Destiny Keeper

Moriarty, Marilyn, Roanoke, Virginia, Flight Is the Name of a Goddess

O’Brien, Colleen, East Glacier, Montana, Baited

Oxnard, K.W., Savannah, Georgia, The Leg in Question

Payne, Martha, Atlanta, Georgia, Apple Doll

Spasser, Connie Corzilius, Augusta, Georgia, Shimmer and Give: Stories

Whouley, Kate, Centerville, Massachusetts, The Maestro and Her Protégé

Winner

Carroll, Elisabeth Bell, Framingham, Massachusetts, Agnès & Oscara

Again, we would like to express our undying appreciation and respect for all who submitted to The Eludia Award. Thank you for your patience, and for entrusting your work to us. We love and honor each and every one of you!

Irresponsible, Unresponsive, Extortionate: The 3-Headed Dragon Destroying the Small Press Community.

“Despair” by Bertha Wegmann

The independent small press community is filled with passionate people who love great writing, dedicated people who love helping talented writers bring their work out into the world. We often work on shoestring budgets, are almost always over-extended and running behind on everything. It has never been an easy occupation. It certainly doesn’t make anyone rich. In fact, it is not at all surprising to find a balance sheet completely in the red – cash negative, in other words. But the wealth of this life is to be found in the beauty of language, the excitement of new, well-written and well-edited manuscripts, the thrill of designing a beautiful book cover, of creating a physical artifact, proof of that which remains glorious in our crumbling society, our dying empire.

As the Founding Executive Director of Hidden River Arts, and Founding Editor-in-Chief of Hidden River Publishing, I am proud to be part of this community of determined dreamers and ferocious protectors of literature. Hidden River’s publishing endeavor passed our tenth anniversary during the pandemic. COVID nearly killed us. We’re struggling on many fronts to reframe our work in this post-pandemic world. It is to be expected that when a world-wide crisis causes a global meltdown, a lot of problems will remain even after the threat of disease has, largely, passed.

What was not be expected, and what should never be accepted, are the ways in which our supposed business partners are making it even harder to restore ourselves and get back to creating and launching high quality books by talented writers, books that readers fall in love with.

Let me be more explicit, and start naming names.

For the last month, I’ve had struggles with the online booksellers – and these are the sellers who command the lion’s share of all booksales in the U.S. (if not around the world). As an independent small publisher, Hidden River uses Lightning Source/Ingram for printing and distribution. When we first launched our publishing venture, it was a pleasure to work with them.

So, first, let’s talk about a troublesome situation that now exists with Lightning Source itself. We’ve been with them since 2010. It used to be that, if a problem arose, or if there was a question of any kind, I could simply pick up the telephone and call, speak to a knowledgeable and lovely employee (often with a charming Tennessee accent) and the issue would be resolved in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately, as Lightning Source/Ingram has grown, publishers are no longer offered what I see as a right to high quality, personal customer service. Now, there is no active by-phone customer service. Now, if there is a problem, you have to fill out an email or a “ticket” describing the issue, and then…..wait. Often, you wait for little more than a canned response that does little to address the actual issue, offers nothing beyond the canned language, and if the problem persists, you are plum out of luck since your only option, it seems, is to do it all over again. I’m sure that there is some “best practices” industry manual that claims this new procedural change is “stream-lined” and “cost-reductive”. But here’s a news flash: It does not address your customers’ needs sufficiently….or, in many cases, at all. It is not, in fact, “customer service” in any traditional or satisfactory sense. This change in Lightning Source’s business practices means that a small press often has to wrestle with the same problem in a kind of limbo, often for weeks or months. Sometimes the issue is never resolved. With impossible-to-solve problems externalized onto already overworked small press owners and staff, it means that the issue becomes yet one more largely unresolvable problem in a long line of what my attorney daughter would call “unbillable hours” of miserable frustration. This new practice of Lightning Source/Ingram is uncaring to the point of being hostile to its customers and business partners. Give us back our well-trained human representatives. Show us the respect we deserve. Go back to your older, more accountable and more honorable business model. Stop treating your partners with so little regard.

Now, let’s explore the nightmare that is Amazon. By far the most dominant platform for book sales, Amazon can make life and business absolutely miserable for authors and publishers.

Let me describe to you what we and our authors have been dealing with now for a month. During the first week in April, we uploaded three new paperback titles to Lightning Source. All three were picked up by the Amazon site without their cover images – and with a message that said there WAS no cover image. Since that same image appeared on the vendor pages of Barnes and Noble and Bookshop, it is unlikely that the problem is with the files at Lightning Source. (Although it sure would be nice to have a human at Lightning Source confirm that.) The problem that exists with Amazon is doubled by the problem that IS Amazon. Are there knowledgeable, well-trained, available humans ready to deal with such problems at Amazon? Of course not. A month has gone by, and several attempts to reach out to the organization, using its “help” links and “chat” options have accomplished nothing by way of corrected sales pages. Often, if you get a response at all, it’s from someone who, most likely, is using a false name who writes to tell you that the problem must be with your account at Lightning Source. In other words, their response is “Sorry. Not our problem.”

In addition to none of the three new titles having their covers showing on Amazon, one of the titles has a message that says the book has not yet been released, and that anyone interested should “pre-order” the book. The book has been available since April 5. Again – is there a way to deal with this, human to human? Of course not.

What does this do to our credibility? To our professional profile? To our sanity and the emotional stability of our writers and poets? To our sales? Take a wild guess.

As I write this, it is May 9, 2023; the problems have existed since the first week of April and remain unresolved. These three books all sit on their Amazon site like some digital version of a remaindered book with a ripped-off cover. Our only solution, at this point, is to drive as many readers and possible book buyers away from Amazon as we can.

Now to Barnes and Noble. Their site had our books up quickly with a functioning purchase button – within about 24 hours – with the cover art, but without the necessary book information – there was no book description, no bio for the author, no reviews. So….great. Here’s a picture of a beautiful book cover and the name of a book, but we’re not going to tell you anything that would inform or interest you in actually buying and reading the book. Would you buy a book, no matter how exquisite the cover, if you have no idea what it was about? Is it a cookbook?….a travel advice book?…..a Victorian murder mystery?…..a book about Mesopotamian clothing styles?

To their credit: Barnes and Noble does have a more transparent customer service structure, with specified emails for specified needs. They appear to be more publisher-friendly and more oriented to bookselling in a way respectful of books, of publishing, of writers, of the small press community. And, with them, there is something of a happy ending – although it took nearly THREE weeks, all three of our books, as of today, now have not only the buy button, the beautiful cover art displayed but the book info, the writer’s bio….but still none of the reviews or endorsements. So, for purposes of this writing we’ll be displaying ONLY the links to the Barnes and Noble site for these three titles, despite the fact that they don’t include the endorsements. But we’ll be leaning on our relationship with Barnes and Noble now, going forward; the goal is to partner more dramatically with the online seller that offers our authors and their work the most respect.

Now, to the final issue we’ve faced over these past few weeks: Bookshop’s issues. First, they were by far the slowest to upload our titles. Second, once they uploaded them, they also posted a sale price that was significantly higher than the price we posted with Lightning Source. Our price point was $21.99. Bookshop saw fit to post $25.29 as the price. If Bookshop exists in order to help independent bookstores compete with the behemoth online sellers, isn’t overpricing our books a sure-fire way to NOT be competitive? Here is their explanation:
https://support.bookshop.org/en/support/solutions/articles/65000183623-why-is-my-book-s-price-different-on-your-site-

They say: “Bookshop.org pays our booksellers 30% of the cover price of all books sold through them. That means that we lose money on any book with less than a 30% wholesale discount. If your discount is under 20%, we will increase the sale price of the book to make up for this loss. If you do not want your book’s price increased, please offer a wholesale discount greater than 20%. …If you are an IngramSpark author, you must offer a 40% wholesale discount; Ingram’s 20% distribution fee is non-negotiable, so to give Bookshop.org a 20% wholesale discount, you need a 40% discount overall.”

Since we are working with Lightning Source/Ingram, that means that our 30% discount isn’t sufficient for Bookshop, so they are going to jack up our price and take their chunk from the customer…..A customer who will not exist, obviously, since their prices are too high. However, if Hidden River (or any small press) feels hereby coerced into raising their discount to 40% in order to help out our potential readers and the independent bookstores, then WE are earning less money for each book sale. That means that what is left over after Lightning Source, Bookshop and the indy bookstore take their chunks is about $7 to be divided between publisher and author. Even at 30%, the publisher and author are earning less than everybody else along the publishing food chain. Obviously, this is not sustainable. It’s no wonder so many small presses are throwing in the towel.

Oh…one last thing. IF we were to give in to Bookshop’s passive-aggressive extortion, that means that a 40% discount would be taken by ALL the sellers, because, with Lightning Source, you can set only one price in each market (one for the US, one for the UK, one for Europe, etc). So, then, Amazon, B&N, and all other sellers would get that extra 10% from the sales, and we would get 10% less from all those sales, across all platforms. So, think about it: with those higher discounts, Amazon and B&N and the others may well decide they can drop the price of the book, thereby remaining cheaper than Bookshop anyway. And who loses? The author and the publisher.

I’m going to end my rant here for now. I’m going to ask those among you who are struggling with similar issues to reach out to us here and leave messages and comments. We want to start a conversation. We want to start a fire. If we come together, make demands in a chorus of voices, maybe even bring in the CLMP (who are also ignoring my emails requesting assistance) and other organizations in support of the authors and publishers, do you think there is hope of addressing and fixing this mess? Otherwise, what are our options?

By the way, here are those three wonderful new books, linked to their Barnes and Noble pages WITH their beautiful book covers. I encourage you to use these Barnes and Noble links should you wish to make a purchase.

Mediterranean by João Luis Barreto Giumarães.

Travels With Ferdinand (A Centennial Journey Through Austria-Hungary) by Mark Eliot Nuckols

Remembering Water: A Memoir of Departure and Return by Tuan Phan

You can also see our entire catalogue of books on Barnes and Noble here. Check them all out. They are spectacular. Our family of writers and poets are spectacular. They are worth fighting for.

Jeffrey Voccola Receives the Inaugural Blue Mountain Novel Award

Jeffrey Voccola
winner of The Blue Mountain Award for his novel KINGS ROW

Jeffrey Voccola, of Kutztown, Pennsylvania has won the inaugural Blue Mountain Novel Award for his novel, Kings Row.** The award carries a $1,000 cash prize and publication with Hidden River Press, an imprint of Hidden River Publishing.

Jeffrey received an MFA from Emerson College. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Cabinet, Noctua Review, Cottonwood, Beacon Street Review, Folio, Whirligig. His essays have been published in Inside Sources, The Las Vegas Sun, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jeffrey is currently Associate Professor of Fiction Writing and Director of the Writing Program at Kutztown University.

Kings Row is what Jeffrey calls a “literary mystery” about the murder of a university freshman in a post-industrial college town by one of the working class men of the community. Describing his novel, Jeffrey tells us, “Kings Row explores elements of racism and class-ism as they exist today, particularly in small communities…as rapid changes in demographics and social norms threaten their way of life. Kings Row is a tragic and heartbreaking story of two Americas growing farther apart. The book contains multiple points of view, including the victim, Christopher Roche, and the murder is mentioned in the first chapter. As a result, the reader is able to follow these two young men as their lives intersect. As a professor at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, I have a deep understanding of the characters, setting, and premise of this novel. Although the book is a work of fiction, the central conflict is based on an actual event that took place in Kutztown only a few years ago.”

The manuscript captured the imagination of our staff at Hidden River for its deep understanding of a struggle taking place across the U.S. and in all areas where the shifts in economy have hollowed out formerly thriving manufacturing towns, ruining lives and families and fracturing communities. The violence that takes place in the novel is representative of the kind of rage that is boiling beneath the surface of our society, rage which is often taken out on the most vulnerable among us rather than on those truly guilty of destroying our once-thriving economy.

Exploring a heartbreaking subject with language both honest and transcendent, Kings Row carries the reader along, through its exploration of the inner lives of many characters, to create a tapestry of suffering truly illustrative of current day America.

Here is a clip of Jeffrey reading from a portion of the novel:

Submissions are currently being accepted for the next cycle of our Blue Mountain Novel Award.  Please see our blog page for The Blue Mountain Award guidelines.

** Kings Row can also be purchased at all online booksellers, including Barnes & Noble, Bookshop and others. It can also be special ordered at your local bookstore. 

THE SECRET MUSIC AT TORDESILLAS by Marjorie Sandor

The Secret Music at Tordesillas by Marjorie Sandor

We here at Hidden River are thrilled to announce the release of The Secret Music at Tordesillas, by Marjorie Sandor, which is the inaugural winner of our Tuscarora Award in Historical Fiction.

The novel is set in 16th Century Spain. It is April, 1555, and Juana I of Castile, the Spanish queen known as “la loca,” has died after forty-seven years in forced seclusion at Tordesillas. Her last musician, Juan de Granada, refuses to depart with the other servants, forcing two functionaries of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to interrogate him in the now-empty palace. But is it really empty? Or is there, as Holy Office suspects, a heretic hidden on the premises, a converso secretly practicing the forbidden rites of Judaism? Only Juan knows the answer, and his subversive tale is at once a ballad of lost love and a last gambit to save a life—and a rich cultural and spiritual tradition on the verge of erasure.

Sandor has created a story so alive, so filled with intrigue and passion, that the time of the Spanish Inquisition comes boldly to life. So often, the story is told from the perspective of those Christians. For them, the reclamation of territories from the Muslims, through the conquests of Ferdinand and Isabella, is understood as a triumph. But this was certainly not so for the practicing, pious Jews and Muslims who had thrived, co-existing peacefully, during the period of Islamic rule. For them, the time brought the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition. What was it like to be a Jew or a Muslim during such a time? Specifically, what was life like for a court musician, secretly faithful to his real religion, but forced to masquerade as a convert to Christianity?

The Secret Music at Tordesillas has received much well-deserved praise:

“Radiant, passionate, deeply intelligent and intensely moving, this brilliant novel brings alive a place and time surprisingly resonant with our own. Love and music burn like a laser through these glorious pages.”
–Andrea Barrett

“In The Secret Music of Tordesillas, the fabulously gifted Marjorie Sandor tells the absorbing story of a Jewish musician and his queen, both living precarious lives in the tumultuous world of the Spanish Inquisition. Sandor’s lustrous prose resonates like the music she so eloquently describes and her characters are exquisitely complicated. Reading these gorgeous pages, I felt that I too had taken up residence in some castle full of dark corners.”
–Margot Livesey

“An historical novel of striking imagination and lyricism, this sly tale of sixteenth-century Spain, with its secrets and masks involving the interrelationships of Catholics, Muslims and Jews, has an uncanny bearing on our own country’s diversity tensions. It is a pleasure to have another of Marjorie Sandor’s delicious fictions: she is writing at the top of her form.”
–Phillip Lopate

“I found Marjorie Sandor’s The Secret Music at Tordesillas irresistible, as appealing for its grand romantic adventure as it is for its clear-eyed exploration of culture, tradition, and identity. Its narrative–replete with hidden Jews, palace intrigue, a captive queen, a hopeless love–is rendered in a prose as intoxicating as the ancient music that informs it. This is history in the form of a haunting song.”
–Steve Stern

The novel is available at:
Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Powell’s

BookShop.org

Marjorie Sandor is the author of four books of fiction and non-fiction, including the memoir, The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction, (2011) and the 2004 Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, Portrait of my Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories. Her earlier book of personal essays, The Night Gardener: A Search for Home, won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. In February 2015, St. Martins Press published her anthology, The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows. She teaches creative writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Her debut novel, The Secret Music at Tordesillas, is the inaugural winner of the Tuscarora Award for Historical Fiction, and is forthcoming from Hidden River Press in 2020.
Marjorie’s work has appeared in such magazines as The Georgia Review, AGNI, and TriQuarterly, as well as in Best American Short Stories 1985 and 1988, The Pushcart Prize XIII, Twenty Under Thirty, and The Best American Spiritual Writing 2000. Sandor’s characters—real and imagined–inhabit urban gardens and old houses. They linger on the ever-shifting threshold between home and wilderness, between youth and old age, and most of all between the human quest for adventure, and the desire for refuge. In her stories and essays, she explores family, community life, and the pull of art to expose our darkest and best-kept secrets, our restlessness and comical mistakes and deep regrets; our desire to create a domestic paradise against all odds.

Praise for Marjorie:

“Whether she is writing essays, as in the splendid The Night Gardener (1999), or fiction, Sandor’s prose is as tangy and luscious as just-plucked fruit.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“Marjorie Sandor has all the skills of a masterful writer of stories, but her compassion and beguiling tone are all her own. Her distinctive style and rich understanding of people raise our hopes.”
—Guy Davenport

Marjorie is available for interviews, readings and other events. Please contact us for further information.

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The Story of the Heel String Incident of Angola Prison is Told Through Poetry in Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History by Carol Tyx, Willow Run Poetry Book Award Winner

Carol Tyx
Winner of Willow Run
Poetry Book Award

We are pleased to introduce you to Carol Tyx, of Iowa City, Iowa, who is the inaugural winner of our Willow Run Poetry Book Award for her stunning collection, Remaking Achilles: Slicing Into Angola’s History. Tyx received the cash award of $1,000 and her manuscript has just been published on the Hidden River Press imprint of Hidden River Publishing.

Inspiration for Tyx’s work came from a gruesome historical event in 1951, when 37 inmates of Angola Prison in Louisiana slashed their own Achilles tendons in order to make public the brutal conditions at the prison. Interest in this event led Tyx to the prison itself, where she did extensive research and, with what began as a plan for one or two poems, found herself writing an entire book of poetry based on this incident. More information about Carol’s experience with this horrifying history can be read here.

Carol teaches writing and American literature at Mt. Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her teaching interests include African American literature, U.S. Latino literature, creative writing, and service learning. Along with a colleague and many students, she facilitates a prison book club. Her poetry has most recently been published in Minerva Rising, Hunger Mountain, Big Muddy, Iowa City’s Poetry in Public, and Rising to the Rim, published by Brick Road Poetry Press.

Some early praise for Remaking Achilles:

“Remaking Achilles brings alive the vivid realities of Angola’s history. I study Angola, …this collection paints the horrors and injustices of time past in a way that the simple facts never do. Carol Tyx has done a remarkable job of reminding us all of where we came from and why we do not want to return.” (Marianne Fisher-Giorlando, retired criminal justice professor and Angola historian)

“These sterling voices pretending to be persona poems are so well researched and authentically rendered that the painful and traumatic memories of Angola will continue to haunt readers long after the last pages are sliced open and left bleeding.” (Frank X Walker, author of The Unghosting of Medgar Evers)

“A compassionate and imaginative retelling of a harrowing period in American penal history. With each vivid and lyrical insight, Carol Tyx weaves a compelling poetic tale depicting the effects of institutional racism and cruelty, of unimaginable hardship, but also of the human impulse to resist and seek dignity. In the darkest hours, there are sparks of light.” (Andy Douglas, author of Redemption Songs: A Year in the Life of a Community Prison Choir)

Like the ghostly inmate who takes his place in the long line of U.S. prison atrocities, Carol Tyx claims her place in a long tradition of poets like Muriel Rukeyser (The Book of the Dead, 1938) and Carolyn Forché (The Angel of History, 1994), incorporating individual impersonations and historical documents into lines that incriminate us all. (Cecile Goding, The Iowa Summer Writing Festival)

Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History is available at online bookstores, and can be ordered at your local brick and mortar store.

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Powell’s

BookShop.org

The Willow Run Poetry Book Award is offered yearly for a book-length collection of original poetry. The next submission deadline for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award is February 20, 2021. For more information, please see our guidelines.

Carol is available for readings, interviews and other activities. Please contact for further information.

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IN PROGRESS by Catharine Leggett

 

We here at Hidden River Arts are thrilled to celebrate the year anniversary of the publication of IN PROGRESS by Catharine Leggett, which won our fifth annual Eludia Award.

Catharine’s short stories have appeared in the anthologies The Reading Place, Slow the Pace, Lose Yourself, The Empty Nest, Law & Disorder, Best New Writing 2014, as well as in the journals Room, Event, The New Quarterly, Canadian Author, and The Antigonish Review. Other stories have appeared online in paperbytes, Per Contra, and Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, as well as on CBC Radio. The Eludia Award brings with it a $1,000 cash prize and publication on our Sowilo Press imprint.  Shortly after winning our award, Catharine learned that her novel, The Way to Go Home, was accepted for publication with Urban Farmhouse Press. This wonderful novel is also now out in the world. She lives in London, Ontario, Canada and taught creative writing in the continuing studies program for Western University.

The Emigrant and Other Stories, our sixth Eludia Award winner, by Justine Dymond, is scheduled for publication in late 2020/early 2021, having been delayed a bit due to COVID-19.

The Eludia Award is given yearly as a first-book award, for a book-length work of fiction (either a short story collection or a novel) by a woman writer, age 40 or above. It carries a cash award of $1,000 and publication by Sowilo Press, an imprint of Hidden River Publishing. The next cycle of submissions opens August 15, 2020 and closes March 15, 2021.

In Progress is available at

AbeBooks, Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, BookShop.org

Book clubs, reviewers and requests for interviews with Catharine?  Please contact us below:

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You Are Invited to a Virtual Book Launch for REMAKING ACHILLES by Carol Tyx, Winner of our Willow Run Poetry Book Award

Remaking Achilles: Slicing in Angola’s History

ZOOM BOOK RELEASE
REMAKING ACHILLES:
SLICING INTO ANGOLA’S HISTORY

Carol Tyx announces the release of her new book Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History.

She will read from the book in a zoom book launch Wednesday May 13 7-8 PM CST. Use the link at the end of this article to register for the event.

Inspiration for Tyx’s work came from a painful historical event in 1951, when 37 inmates of Angola Prison in Louisiana slashed their own Achilles tendons in order to make public the brutal conditions at the prison. Interest in this event led Tyx to the prison itself, where she did extensive research and, with what began as a plan for one or two poems, found herself writing an entire book of poetry based on this incident. Remaking Achilles received the Willow Run Poetry Book Award from Hidden River Press.

At its heart, Remaking Achilles is about resisting injustice and how inmates, with the support of a larger community, pushed for prison reform. “With each vivid and lyrical insight, Carol Tyx weaves a compelling poetic tale depicting the effects of institutional racism and cruelty, of unimaginable hardship, but also of the human impulse to resist and seek dignity,” writes Andy Douglas, author of Redemption Songs: A Year in the Life of a Community Prison Choir.

Tyx’s involvement with prisons emerges from a book club she co-founded at the Anamosa State Penitentiary ten years ago. Getting to know the men in the book club challenged her stereotypes about people who are incarcerated and whetted her desire for criminal justice reforms. Tyx is part of a state-wide coalition, spear-headed by the ACLU, to restore voting rights to felons in Iowa.

Carol Tyx earned her PhD in English at the University of Iowa. A professor emeritus at Mt. Mercy University, Tyx is currently the artist-in-residence at Prairiewoods, an eco-spirituality center in Hiawatha. Her previous books include Rising to the Rim, published by Brick Road Poetry Press (2013), and The Fifty Poems, published by Raven Rocks Press (2003). She is available for readings, and review copies are available upon request.

TO ORDER: Signed copies are available from our wonderful local bookstore, Prairie Lights. At present Prairie Lights is closed to shoppers, but will deliver without charge in the Iowa City/Coralville area and will ship to further locations. To order a copy from Prairie Lights call 319-337-2681. You can also order the book directly from the author at caroltyx@gmail.com. Two dollars from every sale will be donated to Inside Out Reentry Community, a local returning citizens support organization. Carol’s book is also available at online booksellers, such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon — but we encourage our readers to make their purchases through BookShop.org, which is the platform for online booksales from independent bookstores. That link can be found here.

TO REGISTER FOR THE ZOOM LAUNCH: https://us02web.zoom.us/w/87267201305?tk=men1nhxj_kgqeZ5bsfMdJZls0PnrSLINwe_8qhTJ4qo.DQEAAAAUUYfRGRZSMFFJOFZCVlMzRzRNU3lNZkwwUG5BAA

Tuan Phan Receives The Panther Creek Award in Non-fiction From Hidden River Arts

Tuan Phan, Winner of
The Panther Creek Award

Hidden River Arts, the inter-disciplinary independent arts organization located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is pleased to announce Tuan Phan of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam as the inaugural winner of The Panther Creek Award from Hidden River Arts, for his memoir, Remembering Water.

Phan speaks of his memoir, “Remembering Water is a memoir of my escape from Vietnam in 1986 and my return to live there thirty years later. It delves into my memories of the past Saigon my family left, my return, the family members with whom I’ve reunited and the locals I’ve met. It encompasses the Vietnam of my childhood memories as well as the present-day version of Vietnam, from Saigon’s booming development and its high rises, to the countryside and Mekong Delta. In 1986, I escaped from Vietnam, a member of a mass exodus of refugees that have been named the “boat people”. I was only eight years old at the time. 21 years later, I returned to visit Saigon as a foreigner in the birth city. This new Saigon is now a humming modern metropolis, a complete remake of the quiet, poverty stricken city that I left. Remembering Water is a memoir and reflection of my departure and return. It encompasses the Vietnam of my childhood memories as well as its present-day form, from Saigon’s booming development and its high rises, to the countryside and Mekong Delta. I’ve lived in Vietnam for nearly two years, the book is an account of that return and stay.”

Tuan Phan is a Vietnamese American who arrived in the United States in 1986, when he was eight, where he and his family have lived and where he was educated. After a childhood learning English and forgetting his mother tongue, he is now back in his birth country, teaching English and relearning his first language, while re-immersing himself in Vietnamese culture and life.

The Panther Creek Award is offered yearly for an unpublished book-length work of non-fiction. The winner receives a $1,000 cash award and publication with Hidden River Publishing. Submissions for the next cycle of the award will be accepted beginning on January 1 and deadlining April 15, 2019. For more information about The Panther Creed Award, please see our guidelines.

For a list of the semi-finalists and finalists of this first cycle of The Panther Creek Award, please see our News and Awards announcement page.

Hidden River Arts was established over twenty years ago in Philadelphia, PA as an organization focused on “serving the unserved artist”, looking to provide supports in the form of awards, live arts events, workshops, and publication to bring attention to artists working in under-recognized areas, or in under-recognized forms. More on Hidden River Arts can be found at our website http://www.hiddenriverarts.com as well as here on our blog. We encourage you to follow us here to be sure you are updated with our news, events and activities.

Justine Dymond Is Winner of the 2018 Eludia Award

Justine Dymond has won the 2018 Eludia Award for her story collection, THE EMIGRANT AND OTHER STORIES

Hidden River Arts, the inter-disciplinary independent arts organization located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is pleased to announce Justine Dymond of Belchertown, Massachusetts, as the 2018 winner of The Eludia Award, for her collections of stories, The Emigrant and Other Stories.

In describing her award-winning manuscript, Ms. Dymond says, “The stories in my collection range widely in setting and era, including France during World War II, Maine in the early eighteenth century, and Tennessee in the twenty-first century. What the stories all have in common, however, are characters who experience life as foreigners, whether in their own countries or not, and who long for a real or imaginary elsewhere. Each character has a different impulse that propels their longing. For one couple, it is discomfort with their identity as Americans as they spend time in another country. In the title story, a young teacher discovers freedom and desire inside the walls of a prison. In another story, a teenager in Washington, D.C. yearns to be included in the lives of strangers. In the story titled “Intruder,” a woman in colonial New England gradually realizes that her neighbors want her to be elsewhere. Each story represents a border experience, imposed from the outside or inside, that paradoxically confines and propogates the human desire to be somewhere else.”

Given that we live in a time so filled with xenophobia and nationalism, so filled with out-of-control hatred of the “other,” The Emigrant and Other Stories speaks to our lives in a very timely and powerful way.

Justine Dymond is Associate Professor of English at Springfield College in Massachusetts, where she teaches literature and writing. Her short story “Cherubs” was selected for a 2007 O. Henry Prize and was listed as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories 2006. Her stories have appeared in Pleiades, The Massachusetts Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Meat for Tea, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Cargo Literary, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and The Best American Travel Writing. Her fiction has been honored with grants and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, Writers OMI at Ledig House, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Demeter Press issued her co-edited collection Motherhood Memoirs: Mothers Creating/Writing Lives in 2013. She is currently writing a novel based on the life of a woman who was tried for infanticide in Boston in 1733.

The Eludia Award is a first-book award, offered yearly for an unpublished book-length work of fiction written by a woman writer, age 40 or older. The winner receives a $1,000 cash award and publication with Hidden River Publishing. The next submission cycle for the award deadlines March 15, 2019. Please see our guidelines for additional information.

Hidden River Arts was established over twenty years ago in Philadelphia, PA as an organization focused on “serving the unserved artist”, looking to provide supports in the form of awards, live arts events, workshops, and publication to bring attention to artists working in under-recognized areas, or in under-recognized forms. More on Hidden River Arts can be found at our website. And the names of our semi-finalists and finalists of the 2018 Eludia Award cycle can be found here.

Live Arts: A Combined Effort and Commitment to Community and Creativity

One of the most important things for a vital community is a live arts network where musicians, writers, poets, playwrights and their audiences can meet, share some food and drink and enjoy a night of creative exchange. Hidden River Arts is located in Philadelphia, where we are fortunate to have such vitality. We are blessed with arts organizations of all sizes, and with venues that range from those of the most expensive theatres to small pubs and community spaces where art can be made and shared. Our intern, Nancy Allen, writes of her experience at one such event. Nancy is a student in the Creative Writing program at Temple University here in Philadelphia, and is just beginning to explore such opportunities. I’m grateful that she was willing to share this information with us. I hope that, as you read through, you will be thinking about the possibilities and opportunities that might exist in your own part of the world. We here at Hidden River would love to hear about them. One of our goals in 2019 is to begin building networks for artists – live arts venues, venues for book and poetry readings, spaces for gallery shows and other mixed-art activities. If we all share our knowledge of our own communities, towns and cities, we will be able to build such a network from our combined information. Then, with that network in place, we can begin to create “tours” of indy artists who can work cooperatively to support each other’s work, to invite each other to different parts of the U.S. and to other countries, other parts of the world…making it possible to create some really wonderful fellowship among artists and audiences. Boy, do we ever need it!

Debra Leigh Scott
Founding Director

Nancy Allen is an intern here at Hidden River Arts as well as a Creative Writing major at Temple University

On September 26, Moonstone Arts held a poetry reading at Fergie’s Pub hosted by Alina Macneal and Jennifer Hook, where Catherine Bancroft and Lisa Grunberger performed, and the reading was followed by an open mic. Moonstone Arts Center, for more than 35 years, has held events for poetry all across Philadelphia. It is a Philadelphia institution, the likes of which every city and town deserves. Moonstone Arts began in 1981, in a second floor space above Robin’s bookstore. Both the bookstore and the programs were run by Sandy and Larry Robin, and both quickly became Philadelphia institutions. The Moonstone fundraiser, “Sounds and Words,” will be held this year on November 10.

An institution for over 20 years in Philadelphia, Fergie’s Pub is a popular spot for live arts and social gathering

Fergie’s Pub, over twenty years old, has opened its doors to a variety of arts programs, live music, theatre readings, and literary activities for years, believing that a traditional “publick house” was meant to be a center for all sorts of creative and social activities.

Catherine Bancroft is an artist and writer who has performed her poetry at the Philadelphia Poetry Festival, Green Line Cafe, as well as other venues. Catherine has had her work shown at Muse Gallery, Off the Wall Gallery, The Sketch Club, The Main Line Arts Center, FireWorks Gallery, and many other places. She works mainly in collage, acrylic, mixed medias, and altered books. Her current Ellis Island Series was inspired by photographs of early 20th century immigrants. Catherine has also co-written two children’s books, Felix’s Hat and That’s Philomenia. She has also written book reviews for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lisa Grunberger is a professor in Temple University’s English department. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Religions from the University of Chicago. Grunberger is an award winning poet, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, and she is the author of Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss and the Lotus Position (Harper Collins Press), and has recently staged her new play, Almost Pregnant, at The PlayGround at the Adrienne during the Fringe Arts Festival this past September.

As we mentioned, Moonstone Arts Center is having their 1st Annual Fundraiser on November 10th at 7pm. Eleven poets and two bands will be playing that evening. You can find more information and purchase tickets through their website, moonstonearts.org. If you are interested in discovering more about the poetry scene in Philadelphia, check out Phillypoetry.org, which serves as a great resource for events and places to go in the city for poets and poetry lovers.

It’s important for writers to stay connected and attend readings and live arts events throughout their city. This is great for the community and offers wonderful opportunities for the artists. We would welcome hearing from you in our comment section about the sorts of live arts events that help to create community and support local artists in your town or city! It would be a wonderful thing to begin building a national network of community arts venues and organizations to help artists move beyond their own local territory, grow their audience and develop relationships with colleagues across the country.