Snake~Nation~Press

It has been a real pleasure working with Lisa Zimmerman on this issue. She has assembled a fine group of poets and writers.

Richard Fellinger’s collection of short stories, They Hover Over Us, is the 2011 winner of the Serena McDonald Kennedy Fiction Award. The award is $1,000 plus publication by Snake~Nation~Press.
He is a writing teacher at Elizabethtown College and a former journalist. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, won the 2008 Flash Fiction Contest at Red Cedar Review, and appeared in many other journals such as Epiphany, Potomac Review, Willow Review, Westview, Forge and PANK. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, where he won the 2009 Beverly Hiscox Scholarship for Excellence in Writing. A native of Altoona, Pa., he now lives with his wife and son in Camp Hill, Pa., where he’s at work on his first novel.

And the winner is Nagueyalti Warren of Lithonia, GA, for Braided Memory selected by Judith Hemschemeyer of Winter Park, Florida, author of Certain Animals and How Lovely Lives, and translator of the complete poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Finalists for the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award

Paul Martin of Allentown, PA, for River Scar

E. K. Mortenson of Stanford, CT, for What Wakes Us

Deborah Bacharach of Seattle, WA, for Learning the Gods

M. Ayodele Heath of Atlanta, GA, for Nightfall Over the Water

Yvonne V. Sapia of Lake City, FL, for Culpa

Katie Fesuk of Kennesaw, GA, for If Men Were Angels

Robert Parham of Augusta, GA, for The Relentlessness of Salvation

Gail Rudd Entrekin of Orenida, CA, for Beyond Reason

George Young of Boulder, CO, for The Wound Dresser

Lucas Carpenter of Conyers, GA, for You Are Here

Millicent Borges Accardi of Topanga, CA, for Injuring Eternity

Sheila Sanderson of Prescott, AZ, for Sometimes the Dervish World

Michael T. Young of Jersey City, NJ, for Being Lost

Lianne Spidel of Greenville, Ohio, for What To Tell Joseme

Marguerite Scott of Charleston, SC, for Beneath the Shaking Stars

Judy Kronenfeld of Riverside, CA, for Shimmer

Alejandro Escude of Santa Monica, CA, for My Earthbound Eye

Donna Reis of Montgomery, NY, for What’s On The Walls

The model of author>reader seems to be a new trend, yet SNP has always known the true relationship in publishing is author>reader. Readers enjoy meeting an author, having a chance to talk about writing and its processes.  

When Print on Demand became available for small publishers it helped create a fairer playing field. Although POD had a certain unprofessional reputation. Thankfully the question, “What is your print run?” does not seem to apply any longer. Attitudes change quickly.

Contests are another gray area for small presses. Duotrope will not list a small press that requires an entry fee. This is not a problem for lit mags such as Georgia Review, with the financial underpinning of the University of Georgia, but SNP has not had the luxury of such a financial safety net. The volunteer staff has worked for days preparing grants for Georgia Council for the Arts only to have it rejected on a technicality. The current trend of author>reader and ebooks may mark the end of the contest era. Why enter a contest?

So, where are we today? Support for the Press has come from local sources and it is on the local level where the work must continue.

SNP has been publishing, and selling books for 23 years now and will continue to do so. It is doubtful ebooks will become our main  product, it is not a book. It may be a sideline; PDFs are already created for every book published by SNP. The writers hold all copyrights and if they want to distribute via that medium we can do that. But books will continue to be our main product.

Dr. Nagueyalti Warren of Emory University is the winner of 2011 Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. The book will be published in August.

http://vidaweb.org/

Janet Register did a wonderful job!

Lovely How Lives, Poems by Judith Hemschemeyer, is the winner of the 2010 Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry.

The original blog had a glitch so we are starting over.