Our Blog Has Moved!

We’ve moved blogs! For up-to-date news from the hen house, and to keep up with all things Red Hen Press, head on over to our new official blog here.

Red Hen Press at Bryant Park

Douglas Kearney reading at Bryant Park

Red Hen Press was at Bryant Park in New York City on August 21st. Featured readers included Camille T. Dungy, Douglas Kearney, Cynthia Hogue, and Sean Nevin. We had a wonderful turnout and everyone had a great time. This was our first time at Bryant Park and we look forward to returning again in the future!

Our next event in the city will be on September 12th at KGB Bar. For more information on upcoming New York events and readings, click here.

A schedule of all upcoming Red Hen events may be found here.

National Poetry Month Discount! 30% Off!

We’ll be celebrating National Poetry Month–known as “April” in some circles–by diving into our favorite books of poetry, both new and old. To help you celebrate with us, Red Hen is offering 30% off and free shipping on all poetry titles released from 2009 through 2012 when ordered through our website. Click here to shop the poetry catalog. Then, just use promotion code RHPNPM12 at checkout to receive your discount. For example, click here to visit the page for Room Service. Clicking “BUY IT NOW” will add it to your Shopping Cart. Once you’ve added everything you want to your shopping cart, enter the promo code in the text field next to the “Checkout” button, click it, and voila! A full 30% off all the poetry titles in your order, plus free shipping.

If you need a little help deciding from the selection, how about one of the following?

From the spring catalog:
Room Service by Ron Carlson
Calamity Joe by Brendan Constantine
But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
We Did Not Fear the Father by Charles Fort
Miracle Day: Midlife Songs by Sebastian Matthews
Steam Laundry by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell
The Geographer’s Wife by Bart Edelman
The Owning Stone (2nd edition) by Jim Peterson
Covet by Lynnell Edwards

And selected backlist titles:
Stickball on 88th Street by Willis Barnstone
In the ice house by Genevieve Kaplan
New and Selected Poems 1957-2011 by Robert Sward
The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems edited by Theresa Malphrus Welford
Ship of Fool by William Trowbridge
Suck on the Marrow by Camille Dungy
The Hundred Fathom Curve by John Barr
Letters to Guns by Brendan Constantine
Last Voyage: Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli translated by Deborah Brown, Richard Jackson, & Susan Thomas
The Heart’s Traffic by Ching-In Chen
Vocabulary of Silence by Veronica Golos
Swimming Swimmers Swimming by Percival Everett
The Alphabet Conspiracy by Rita Mae Reese
Gnawed Bones by Peggy Shumaker
In Confidence by Jim Tilley

Forty-Seven Red Hen Titles Now Available as E-Books

We are pleased to announce that a significant portion of the Red Hen catalog is now available digitally: 47 titles, all reasonably priced at $9.99, can now be found on the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, and iBookstore. See the full selection below, and follow the links to purchase your favorite Red Hen books for your favorite  e-reader!

Bin Laden’s Bald Spot: & Other Stories
Short Stories by Brian Doyle
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Blood Daughters
A novel by Marcos M. Villatoro
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

House Arrest
A novel by Ellen Meeropol
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Imagine No Religion
A memoir by Blase Bonpane
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Fade to Black
A novel by Josh Pryor
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

The Last Jewish Virgin: A Novel of Fate
A novel by Janice Eidus
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life
Short stories by Rob Roberge
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

My Life in Clothes
Short stories by Summer Brenner
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Ludlow (2nd edition)
A novel by David Mason
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Sony, and iBooks

Air Kissing on Mars
Poetry collection by Kim Dower
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Lift
A memoir by Rebecca K. O’Connor
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Letters to Guns
Poetry collection by Brendan Constantine
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

The Girl with Two Left Breasts
Short stories by D. V. Glenn
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

The Early Posthumous Work
Fiction collection by Steven Barthelme
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

News from the Village: Aegean Friends
A memoir by David Mason
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Year of the Rhinoceros
A novel by Michael Neff
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Love in Tennessee
A novel by John Bowers
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Sixty Sonnets
Poetry collection by Ernest Hilbert
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Far Afield
A novel by Scott Brown
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Man Receives A Letter
Short stories by Peter Gordon
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Trickle-Down Timeline
Short stories by Cris Mazza
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Illuminating Fiction
Nonfictional author interviews by Sherry Ellis
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Unending Nora
A novel by Julie Shigekuni
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Motel Girl
Short stories by Greg Sanders
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Tokyo Bay Traffic
A novel by Cecile Rossant
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Safe Suicide by Dewitt Henry
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions
An anthology by Jack Foley
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

That Was Then
A novel by Michael Quadland
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Przewalski’s Horse
A novel by Eckhard Gerdes
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Rapture of the Deep
by Doug Thorpe
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Oh, Don’t Ask Why
Short stories by Dennis Must
Now available on Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

View From a Burning Bridge
A novel by Sarah Goodyear
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Avocations
Poetry criticism by Sam Hamill
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Octavius the 1st
A short novel by Gaylord Brewer
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Snowed Under
An episodic novel by Zaia Alexander
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Death of a Circus
A novel by Chandra Prasad
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Necessary Deaths
Short stories by Geoffrey Clark
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Common Sense For the Twenty-First Century
Political commentary by Blase Bonpane
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Three Ships to Moji
A novel by Felix E. Goodson
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

So One Could Have
Poetry collection by Mark Salerno
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

About Face
Short stories by Cecile Rossant
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Wedding in October
A novel by Geoffrey Clark
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Heads You Lose
A novel by Edward Lewis
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

O’Cimarron!
A novel by Felix E. Goodson
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Letters from the Underground
Correspondence by Abbie and Anita Hoffman
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

Modern Love and other Tall Tales
Short stories by Greg Boyd
Now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

In the ice house
Poetry collection by Genevieve Kaplan
Now available on Kindle, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks

The Red Hen Press Fall 2012 Catalog

The Red Hen Press Fall 2012 Catalog is now available for your viewing pleasure. We’ve got a great bunch of books coming this autumn, everything from a tale of 1950s Scout Camp homophobia to a sequence of narrative poems about, and I quote, “the bad ass reptile holding back the end of time by sticking himself into the spokes of Samsara.” Not to mention An Age of Madness, the latest from acclaimed novelist David Maine. You can check it all out here. Or, just look down.

 

Happy reading!

Promoting Literature Throughout America

While Red Hen Press has worked since 2003 to help schools in the greater Los Angeles area with our Writing in the Schools program, there are many more worthwhile efforts taking place throughout the U.S. One such effort in Kansas City is happening at Turner High School.  Groups of students at the school led by teachers Marlee Stempleman and Jessica Kendall, have joined together in the Troubadour Poetry Club.

Recently, Red Hen assisted the Troubadours in designing a collection of the Club’s work. You can find more info about the project, its teachers, and the young writers either here or here.

Red Hen Press turns 17

Ron Carlson, winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, and New York Times bestselling novelist and PEN/Faulkner Prize winner T.C. Boyle will join Red Hen Press for its 17^thAnniversary Champagne Luncheon at the Westin Pasadena on Sunday, November 6 at 11:00 a.m.

Since 1994, Red Hen Press has worked to publish over 250 works of literary excellence, to foster diversity, and to promote literacy in our local schools, seeking a community of readers and writers who are actively engaged in the essential human practice known as literature. After seventeen years of being Southern California’s premier independent publisher of poetry and literary fiction, Red Hen Press will celebrate with a spectacular event featuring conversations with local literary celebrities, a deluxe luncheon, the conferring of three awards, a raffle, a silent auction, and readings by three highly esteemed authors:

Ron Carlson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently The Signal: A Novel (2009).  His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and dozens of other journals and anthologies. He is the co-director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Among his awards are the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, Ploughshares’ Cohen Prize, and a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), and Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.  Her first poetry collection won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

T.C. Boyle is the author of twenty-two books of fiction, including, most recently, Wild Child (2010) and When the Killing’s Done (2011). He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, where he is Distinguished Professor of English. His stories have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s, and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Prize for best novel of the year (World’s End, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (T.C. Boyle Stories, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (The Tortilla Curtain, 1997).

Other guests include Alice Quinn, Danzy Senna, Percival Everett, Helena Maria Viramontes, Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Harper Webb, Aimee Liu, Judith Freeman, and Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard.

Proceeds from this event will not only help Red Hen continue its tradition of literary achievement, it will also benefit Red Hen’s Writing in the Schools program, a literacy initiative for underprivileged K-12 students that has provided writing workshops throughout Los Angeles County since 2003.  The event will feature poetry readings from participating WIS students at Cleveland Elementary School in Pasadena.

Tables are available for $1,000 and up; individual tickets are $110. For more information, please contact the press at anniversary@redhen.org.

LIFT now on the Kindle

Lift is Rebecca K. O’Connor’s memoir of a career in falconry. We are pleased to announce that it is now available through the Kindle Store for a mere $9.99, here. To celebrate the release of the Kindle version, Rebecca has compiled a collection of complementary essays, short stories, and poetry: Rise, also available as an E-Book for just 99¢, here. Inspired by Lift, Rise further examines life in the shadow of a raptor’s wings.

As a special promotion, Rebecca will give a free copy of Rise to anyone who can answer the following question: “In Lift, Rebecca K. O’Connor’s fascination with falconry started when she was 8 years old and a falconer’s lost peregrine landed on her roof. Who did she later discover that falcon belonged to?” Email all answers to rebecca@blueskywriting.com.

If you’d like an old fashioned paper copy, we have those too, here.

Guidelines for the 2011 Red Hen Press Awards

Winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award.

Howdy Pilgrims. It’s been a few months since we announced the winners of the 2010 Awards, which means deadlines for the 2011 season are coming up soon. You can find all the information you need to submit on our website, or you can find it right here in this post. Details on the individual awards are first, followed by general information on guidelines and procedures. The first deadline is a little more than a month away: entries for the Short Story Award must be postmarked by June 30th. We look forward to seeing everyone’s work!

Red Hen Press Short Story Award

For publication in the Los Angeles Review
$1000 Award
Deadline: June 30, 2011
Final Judge: Rob Roberge

Established in 2001, in celebration of the new century and a new tradition of literature, this award is for an original short story with a maximum of 25 pages. Submission is open to all writers and themes. This year’s judge is Rob Roberge.

Award is $1000 and publication of the awarded story by Red Hen Press in the Los Angeles Review. Entry fee is $20 for two stories, 25 page limit per story. Please include your name on the cover sheet only. Send SASE for notification. Entries must be postmarked by June 30.

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Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award

Book Award
$3000 Award
Deadline: August 31, 2011
Final Judge: David Mason

Established in 1998, in honor of the poet Benjamin Saltman (1927-1999), this award is for a previously unpublished original collection of poetry. Awarded collection is selected through an annual competition which is open to all poets. This year’s final judge will be David Mason.

Award is $3000 and publication of the awarded collection by Red Hen Press. Entry fee is $25.00. Name on cover sheet only, 48 page minimum. Send SASE for notification. Entries must be postmarked by August 31.

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Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award

For publication in the Los Angeles Review
$1000 Award
Deadline: September 30, 2011
Final Judge: Elena Karina Byrne

Established in 2003, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award is for an unpublished poem. Awarded poem is selected through an annual submission process which is open to all poets. This year’s final judge is Elena Karina Byrne .

Award is $1000 and publication of the awarded poem in the Los Angeles Review published by Red Hen Press. Entry fee $20 for up to 3 poems, maximum 120 lines each. Name on cover sheet only. Send SASE for notification. Entries must be postmarked by September 30.

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Guidelines

Eligibility: The award is open to all writers with the following exceptions:

A) Authors who have had a full length work published by Red Hen Press, or a full length work currently under consideration by Red Hen Press;
B) Employees, interns, or contractors of Red Hen Press;
C) Relatives of employees or members of the executive board of directors;
D) Relatives or individuals having a personal or professional relationship with any of the final judges where they have taken any part whatsoever in shaping the manuscript, or where, for whatever reason, selecting a particular manuscript might have the appearance of impropriety.

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Procedures and Ethical Considerations

To be certain that every manuscript finalist receives the fairest evaluation, all manuscripts shall be submitted to the judges without any identifying material.

Bios, acknowledgments, and other identifying material shall be removed from judged manuscripts until the conclusion of the competition.

Red Hen Press shall not use students or interns as readers at any stage of its competitions.

Red Hen Press is committed to maintaining the utmost integrity of our awards. Judges shall recuse themselves from considering any manuscript where they recognize the work. In the event of recusal, a manuscript score previously assigned by the managing editor of the press will be substituted.

Please submit materials to:

Attn: _________Award
Red Hen Press
P.O. Box 40820
Pasadena, CA 91114
http://www.redhen.org

Red Hen Press will only accept submissions that have been mailed to the above address; please no email attachments or faxes.

National Short Story Month: The Discount

National Poetry Month has come and gone, as it does every year. It’s a fairly new phenomenon, the National [Art Form] Month; National Poetry Month only dates from the mid 90s. National Short Story Month is even newer—it turns five years old next year. It doesn’t really feel like a thing yet, the way National Poetry Month does. Still, the kids like it, and so to celebrate, we’re offering 25% off on nearly all of our short story collections, for the rest of the month, when ordered through the Red Hen website. Just use promo code RHPSSM11 at the checkout screen. For example, click here to visit the page for Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life. Clicking “BUY IT NOW” will add it to your Shopping Cart. Once you’ve added everything you want to your shopping cart, enter the promo code in the text field next to the “Checkout” button, click it, and voila! A full 25% off all the short story titles in your order.

Here are just a few of the books this discount applies to:

The Girl with Two Left Breasts, by D.V. Glenn
My Life in Clothes, by Summer Brenner
Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life, by Rob Roberge
Sacred Misfits, by Mark Blickley
Necessary Deaths, by Geoffrey Clark
Anyone is Possible, edited by Mark E. Cull and Kate Gale
Blue Cathedral, edited by Mark E. Cull and Kate Gale
Man Receives a Letter, by Peter Gordon
Silicon Valley Diet and Other Stories, by Richard Grayson
A Patrimony of Fishes, by Doug Lawson
Oh, Don’t Ask Why, by Dennis Must
About Face, by Cecile Rossant
Motel Girl, by Greg Sanders

…in fact, that’s all the books this discount applies to. Happy reading!