2023 Fall Book Preview
Introducing our newest authors and their poetry collections launching this fall—our third publication season.
Maps You Can’t Make
Mariella Saavedra Carquin
Mariella was the winner of the 2020 and 2022 Robert Haiduke Poetry Prize from Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English, where she recently completed an MA in English literature. She’s also a graduate of Middlebury College and has an EdM and an MA in psychological counseling from Columbia University. After practicing for years as a licensed mental health counselor in New York City in clinical, higher education, and middle school settings, she now works at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in the Division of Child and Adolescent Mental Health. She has published in various academic journals on the psychological impact of microaggressions that undocumented immigrant youth experience. Born in Peru and raised in Miami, she currently lives in Denver.
Her first collection of poetry, Maps You Can’t Make, is a timely meditation on trauma, the disorientation of it, and how we carry it. This vivid exploration of grief and loss focuses on the immigrant experience, relationships, memory and identity, and the power of dreams. It’s both deeply personal and broadly relevant—a powerful debut from an emerging poet to watch. It’ll be out in early September.
In the meantime, you can hear Mariella read a poem from the collection below. Be sure to check out the book’s main page for more audio, blurbs, and details, now and leading up to the launch.
Dark Beds
Diana Whitney
Diana writes across genres with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (2021), winner of the Claudia Lewis Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, Glamour, Crab Orchard Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Her first book, Wanting It, won the Rubery Book Award in poetry. Diana has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council and is completing her MFA in poetry at New England College. A feminist activist in her hometown and beyond, she lives in Vermont with her family and works as an editor and writing coach.
In her second collection, Dark Beds, domestic challenges—daughters approaching adolescence, a parent succumbing to Alzheimer’s, the demands of marriage and motherhood—are illuminated and transformed against the haunted backdrop of rural Vermont across the seasons. This work is sensual and intricate, intimate and achingly relatable, the kind of poetry that infuses everyday life, in all its complexity and hardship, with renewed desire, magic, and beauty. Look for it in early October.
Want a preview? Scroll down and listen to the author read one great poem. You can find others and learn more at the full book page linked below, which we’ll be updating along the way to publication day.