42 Miles Press

Submissions For The 2025 42 Miles Press Poetry Award Are Now Open! The 42 Miles Press Poetry Award was created in an effort to bring urgent and original voices to the poetry reading public. The prize is offered annually to any poet writing in English, including international poets, poets who have never published a full-length book, as well as poets who have published several. New and Selected…

We are excited to announce Steve Castro‘s poetry collection, Conejo y Gallo, has been selected as the winning manuscript for this year’s 42 Miles Press Poetry Award! Please join us in congratulating Steve on this achievement. Steve’s book will appear in the fall of 2027, along with a public reading at Indiana University South Bend. You can read a sample poem from Conejo y Gallo below. Thank you…

We’re beyond excited to announce the 2025 finalists of The 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. We’d like to extend our congratulations to our finalists and deep gratitude to everyone who shared their work with us! It was an honor to read each manuscript and we were moved, beyond expectation, by how powerful the poetry collections were this year. It’s always such an incredible and privileged challenge to…

We are very pleased to announce that the wonderfully jarring, original (what a voice!) Nova, by Dana Jaye Cadman, has been selected as the winning manuscript for this year’s 42 Miles Press Poetry Award! Please join us in congratulating Dana on this achievement. Dana’s book will appear in the fall of 2026, coupled with a public reading on the campus of Indiana University South Bend. Read a…

42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2024) Finalist List (with thanks to all our contestants and all our editors). This list is longer than it has ever been. There were simply more great mss. this year. Winner will be announced in about two weeks: 42 Miles Finalist List 2024 Aimee Noel:  Continue as Guest Judy Ireland:  How to Drag the River for Your Own Body Dana Jaye Cadman:  Nova Kai-Lilly…

Elly Bookman’s Stunning, trenchant Love Sick Century is available! It is in our bookstore and will appear on Amazon within days.

Claire Bateman writes lyric fairy tales that are experiments in traveling through wormholes, various online social media ethers, into the future, and beyond the veils of memory. In her surreal, playful, metaphysical poems of deep bafflement she speaks to the child in you, the scientist in you, the faun and the nymph and breath of a spirit on the wind in you. Wonders of the Invisible World is an…

In her daring, risky, and tender new collection, We Can’t Tell If the Constellations Love Us, Jennifer Oakes leads us beneath the layers of depression, violence, and climate despair to remind us, ever so gently, “the world is connected/by breath/and it’s bodies that do/the breathing.” Oakes’ is one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry, but with no posturing or easy…

42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2023) Finalist List (with thanks to all our contestants and all our editors). This list is longer than it has ever been. There were simply more great mss. this year. Winner will be announced in under two weeks: Rebecca Reynolds – Otherly Talia Bloch – How We Keep Each Other Company Corrie Williamson – Your Mother’s Bear Gun Angela Sorby – Reading Trouble Eric Roy…

This surreal sequence of poems has been unleashed on the world.

ELLY BOOKMAN WINS 2022 42 MILES PRESS POETRY AWARD

We are thrilled to announce that Love Sick Century, by Elly Bookman. has been selected as the winning manuscript for this year’s 42 Miles Press Poetry Award! Please join us in congratulating Elly on this achievement. Elly’s book will appear in September, 2024, with a public reading on campus in South Bend. Elly Bookman grew up in downtown Atlanta, attended Colby College, and earned an MFA from…

Finalists for the 2022 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

We would like to say Thank You! to everyone who submitted a manuscript this year. The winner will be announced soon. (So much amazing work!) The order of the poets and their manuscripts presented in this list is random. Elly Bookman / Love Sick Century Adam Day / Whip the Sea Hadley Austin / Feral Adam Lefevre / The World is Full of Gods Martha Webster / Off Gunshot Lake Will Schutt /…

Finalists for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2022) will be posted in about a week.

Check back. The announcement of the winner will follow in about three weeks.

Bermuda Ferris Wheel by Bryce Berkowitz is available on Amazon and in our bookstore.

Poem by Bryce Berkowitz

Poem from Bermuda Ferris Wheel. Apple Orchard Road ~After Edward Hirsch I remember my father sprinkling cinder on black ice, the deer eating persimmons in the valley, thousands of stars between the branches of my mother’s fingers. For years I’ve walked away, the old me on the railroad tracks, behind bars with buckling walls, where neon lights illuminate pink clouds of cigarette…

from Bryce Berkowitz’s Bermuda Ferris Wheel

WE’RE NOT THERE YET Deep in the blue-green hills, beyond the butterfly bush, hours from the heartland, worn-down by the brocades of homesickness—a ladybug walks along the slender leaf of an aloe plant. Looking back now, I can see how naïve I was in my own solitude, ankle-deep in a copper river, among rocks rusty from chemical runoff, believing wind through cheat grass couldn’t be a…