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| Founded | 1973 |
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| Founder | Patricia Cumming, Marjorie Fletcher, Lee Rudolph, Ron Schreiber, Betsy Sholl, Cornelia Veenendaal, and Jean Pedrick |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New Gloucester, Maine |
| Distribution | Consortium Book Sales & Distribution |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | alicejamesbooks |
Alice James Books is an American non-profit poetry press located in New Gloucester, Maine.
"Alice James Books was founded as a co-operative press in Cambridge, MA in 1973 by five women and two men: Patricia Cumming, Marjorie Fletcher, Lee Rudolph, Ron Schreiber, Betsy Sholl, Cornelia Veenendaal, and Jean Pedrick. The intent of this company was to provide women with a greater representation in literature and involve the writer in the publishing process. In the 1970s women writers had a very difficult time being published. Recognizing this dire need, Alice James Books was established." [1] Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl shared her memory of being a founding member of the press in an interview: "The experience of starting the press from the ground up, she says, was a heady one, not least because the organization put a special emphasis on publishing poetry written by women. 'There really were attitudes that made it hard for women to publish,' Sholl says. 'There weren't a lot of women being published, and male editors tended to be pretty disdainful.' " [2] The press is named for Alice James (sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher William James), whose fine journal and gift for writing were unrecognized within her lifetime. The mission of Alice James Books, a cooperative poetry press, is to seek out and publish the best contemporary poetry by both established and beginning poets, with particular emphasis on involving poets in the publishing process.
Notable poets published by Alice James Books include Franny Choi, Taylor Johnson, Sumita Chakraborty, Kevin Goodan, Alessandra Lynch, Andres Cerpa, Cynthia Cruz, Jane Kenyon, Donald Revell, Jean Valentine, David Kirby, Cole Swensen, Brian Turner, Kaveh Akbar, Robin Becker, Frank X. Gaspar, Mary Szybist, Forrest Hamer, Sarah Manguso, Kazim Ali, Ellen Doré Watson, Fanny Howe, B.H. Fairchild and Matthea Harvey.
Authors have been recipients of Lannan Literary Awards, [3] the Witter Bynner Award, [4] Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, [5] American Book Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Norma Farber First Book Award, the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, The Nation/Discovery Prize, The Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, Whiting Writer's Award, Guggenheim Fellowships, NEA fellowships, and many other honors. B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe (1998) [6] and Cole Swensen's Goest (2004) [7] were National Book Award finalists.
Alice James Books authors have been interviewed on PBS NewsHour, [8] National Public Radio, [9] BBC Radio, [10] and profiled in print media including The New York Times, [11] The Paris Review, [12] and many other publications.
Alice James Books titles have been reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, [13] [14] [15] The New Yorker, [16] ALA Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Alice James Books itself has been featured in such magazines as Ms, Poets & Writers,Publishers Weekly, [17] Slate, and Poetry Daily.
The press received the 2021 Golden Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. [18]
"The cooperative selects manuscripts for publication through its national, annual award, the Alice James Award , previously known as the Beatrice Hawley Award . The press previously offered the Kinereth Gensler Awards, a regional, annual competition open to residents of New England, New York and New Jersey. Winners of the Kinereth Gensler Awards became active cooperative members, judging future contests and participating in editorial and executive decisions. The Alice James Award does not carry a cooperative work commitment." [19] The Kundiman Poetry Prize was previously offered through Alice James Books for a first or second book by an Asian American poet. The prize was co-sponsored by Kundiman (nonprofit organization). [20] [21]
Alice James Books also has selected manuscripts for publication through the AJB Translation Series, which accepts queries of poetry manuscripts translated into English.
From 1994 to 2022, the press was affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington, [22] and offered a publishing internship program for UMF students which offers the students work experience and education. [23] [24] Since 2022, Alice James Books has its headquarters in Pineland Farms in New Gloucester, Maine, where they host an independent publishing internship. [25] The press has received funding from the Maine Arts Commission, as well as receiving funding from UMF and the National Endowment for the Arts, [26] private foundations, and individuals. [27]
Brian Turner is an American poet, essayist, and professor. He won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize is Phantom Noise.
Mary Szybist is an American poet. She won the National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Incarnadine.
B.H. Fairchild is an American poet and former college professor. His most recent book is An Ordinary Life, and his poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Hudson Review, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review. His third poetry collection, The Art of the Lathe, winner of the 1997 Beatrice Hawley Award, brought Fairchild's work to national prominence, garnering him a large number of awards and fellowships including the William Carlos Williams Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, California Book Award, Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, National Book Award (finalist), Capricorn Poetry Award, and Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships. The book ultimately gave him international prominence, as The Waywiser Press in England published the U.K. edition of the book. The Los Angeles Times wrote that "The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched...workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music."
Elizabeth "Betsy" Sholl is an American poet who was poet laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011 and has authored nine collections of poetry. Sholl has received several poetry awards, including the 1991 AWP Award, and the 2015 Maine Literary Award, as well as receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission.
Cole Swensen is an American poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown University's Literary Arts Program.
The Alice James Award, formerly the Beatrice Hawley Award, is given annually by Alice James Books. The award includes publication of a book-length poetry manuscript and a cash prize.
April Ossmann is an American poet, teacher, and editor. She is author of Event Boundaries and Anxious Music, and has had her poems published in many literary journals including Harvard Review,Hayden’s Ferry Review,Puerto del Sol,Seneca Review,Passages North,Mid-American Review, and Colorado Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse, and Contemporary Poetry of New England. Her awards include a 2000 Prairie Schooner Reader's Choice Award. Her essays have been published in Poets & Writers, and by the Poetry Foundation.
Kundiman is a nonprofit organization for writers and readers of Asian American literature. The organization offers an annual writing retreat, readings, workshops, a mentorship program, and a poetry prize. Kundiman was co-founded in 2004 by Asian American poets Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi, and has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Poetry Foundation, the New York Community Trust, Philippine American Writers, PAWA, and individuals.
Shara McCallum is an American poet. She was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. McCallum is the author of four collections of poems, including Madwoman, which won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.
Ann Killough is an American poet. She is author of Beloved Idea which won the 2008 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and Sinners in the Hands: Selections from the Catalog, which received the 2003 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press. She has had her poems published in literary journals and magazines including Fence, Field, Mudfish, Salamander, and Poet Lore. She grew up in North Carolina and makes her home in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she is one of the coordinators of the Brookline Poetry Series and of the Mouthful Reading Series in Cambridge. She is also a member of the Alice James Books Cooperative Board.
Atsuro Riley is an American writer.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Angelo Nikolopoulos is an American poet.
Jennifer Chang is an Asian American poet and scholar.
Janine Joseph is a Filipino-American poet and author.
Jean Pedrick Kefferstan was an American author, poet, editor and publisher.
Sally Wen Mao is an American poet. She won a 2017 Pushcart Prize.
Matthew Olzmann is a poet, author, and essayist.
Aria Aber is an American poet and writer based in Los Angeles, California.
Richard "Richie" Joseph Hofmann, is an American poet, winner of the Alice James Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He is regularly published in The New Yorker, and has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Hofmann was the Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University, where he taught poetry and creative writing courses.
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