Preorder Corrie Williamson's Your Mother's Bear Gun and Joe Wilkins' Pastoral, 1994

River River Bookswas founded by Amorak Huey and Han VanderHart in March 2022. Inspired by the idea that you cannot step in the same river twice, at River River Books, two poetry editors join together to publish (at least) two exceptional poetry titles a year. By limiting our press catalog, we commit to supporting our authors and their books with focused attention and joy. Submissions (fee optional) open to full-length poetry manuscripts May 1-June 30.

Amorak Huey (uh-MOR-ack) is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2024) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and many other print and online journals.

Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, North Carolina. Their second poetry collection Larks, winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, is forthcoming in April 2025 from Ohio University Press. Han is also the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and has work published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and alongside Amorak Huey co-edits the poetry press River River Books.

Read: "Midwinter" in The Dodge

Purchase: Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road Press, 2024)

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban wildlife photographer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, and in 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops at Carlow University. Violeta lives with her husband, children, and pack of rescue dogs on a small certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania. Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road Press, 2024) is her debut collection.

Recommended Reading

"In the Bleak Midwinter" by Christina Rossetti

June Road Press

Madwomen in the Attic
Episode 57: Sebastián H. Páramo (Of Apocalypse Literature, Writing Semi-Autobiography, and Hunting Pixelated Ducks)

Purchase: Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila (Monkfish Book Publishing, 2024) trans. Dana Delibovi and The Widow's Crayon Box (Penguin, 2024) by Molly Peacock

Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. She began translating the poetry of St. Teresa of Ávila in 2019, after retiring from a hybrid career as an advertising copywriter and adjunct instructor of philosophy. Her translations of Teresa's poetry and her essays on Teresa’s legacy have appeared in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, The Catholic Poetry Review, U.S. Catholic, After the Art, and Confluence, with a translation forthcoming in a new anthology from Word on Fire. Delibovi's writing has also appeared in Apple Valley Review, Bluestem, Ezra Translations, Moria, Noon, Psaltery & Lyre, Salamander, Slippery Elm and many other journals. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, and 2023 co-winner of the Hueston Woods Poetry Contest. Delibovi is Consulting Poetry Editor at the literary e-zine Cable Street. She received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and holds MA degrees from New York University (philosophy) and Bank Street College of Education (early childhood education). She lives in Lake Saint Louis, Missouri.

Molly Peacock is a poet and a biographer whose multi-genre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose, from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others. Her latest poetry collection is The Widow’s Crayon Box (W.W. Norton), a A book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and rejuvenation. Peacock is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, as well as A Friend Sails in on a Poem, about a 47-year friendship in poetry. Peacock is the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series and, most recently, creator of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University. Awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Canada Council, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Peacock is also a memoirist and biographer, author of two books about creativity in the lives of women artists Flower Diary and The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, named a Book of the Year by Booklist, The Economist, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times, The Kansas City Star, The London Evening Standard, MacLean’s, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and The Sunday Telegraph. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, she lives in Toronto and teaches at 92NY.