Autumn House Press

This is not the Antarctic of polar expeditions or scientific discovery. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves at the end of the world. Harpoons, escape plans, seal meat, and endless ice populate this world of distant Antarctic coordinates. Where pages are intentionally left blank, something new emerges: the fullness of emptiness, the frightening textures of snow on a continent that is filled to the brim with it.

O’Wain’s characters are often deeply flawed or totally lost, but in each instance, these traits reveal the characters as real, compassionate, and, ultimately, human. Sprinkled with humor and heartache, O’Wain’s stories bring us into contact with the curious, the tragic, and the authentic.

Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what’s broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we’re reminded of how many lives one woman can live.

The Animal Indoors, winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Terrance Hayes, traces the experience of a Black queer woman as she seeks refuge from an unsafe world.

Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Ada Limón’s award-winning debut poetry collection, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and how her writing practice has developed over time.<

Natalie Homer's debut poetry collection explores the wilderness in all of us to find rest and divine providence.

In the story of the prophet Elijah, he must flee his home, and, after an arduous journey, he arrives under a broom tree, where he prays for his own death. But in his sleep, he is touched by an angel who provides food and water. In this moment, the broom tree becomes a symbol of shelter in a barren landscape, a portent of hope and renewal. Drawing inspiration from this tale, Natalie Homer’s Under the Broom Tree is a trek through the wildernesses of the heart and of the natural world. 

Exploring the idea of divine providence, Homer finds seams of light opening between forlorn moments and locates, 'Something to run a finger through, / something to shine in the ocher light.' Within these narrow spaces, Homer explores themes of longing, home, family, and self-worth amidst the wondrous backdrop of the American West and the Rust Belt, while integrating a rich mythology of narrative, image, and association. The broom tree, offering the capacity for shade and respite, becomes a source of connection and an inspiration for the collection. It is an invitation to sink deep into the earth and self and feel the roots entwine.

A collection of personal essays examining relationships, whiteness, and masculinity, All Who Belong May Enter was selected by Jaquira Díaz as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize. 

Nicholas Ward’s debut essay collection centers on self-exploration and cultural critique. These deeply personal essays examine masculinity, whiteness, and gentrification through tales of a Midwest upbringing, sporting events, parties, posh (and not-so-posh) restaurant jobs, and the many relationships built and lost along the way. 

With a storyteller’s spirit, Ward recounts and evaluates the privilege of his upbringing with acumen and vulnerability. Ward’s profound affection for his friends, family, lovers, pets, and particularly for his chosen home, Chicago, shines through. This collection offers readers hope for healing that comes through greater understanding and inquiry into one’s self, relationships, and culture. Through these essays, Ward acknowledges his position within whiteness and masculinity, and he continuously holds himself and the society around him accountable. 

This young poet demonstrates an uncommon mastery of craft, writing in forms including the sonnet redoublé, sestina, canzone, and villanelle. With all her linguistic skills, Sears’s work remains approachable, offering readers a striking blend of honesty, humor, anguish, joy, and surprise. Drawing influence from contemporary poets like Mark Jarman, Erica Dawson, and Tiana Clark, Sears cuts a path of her own.

speculation, n. by Shayla Lawz won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and imagines a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death.

Shayla Lawz’s debut collection brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean—in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media—to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. 

The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real—a refracted past and present—through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities.

Molly by Kevin Honold was selected by Dan Chaon as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Fiction Prize and is a compelling story of enduring hardships in rural New Mexico.

This debut novel tells the story of nine-year-old Raymond, nicknamed “Ray Moon” by Molly, his adoptive caretaker, a waitress, and the former partner of his recently deceased uncle. These two outcasts rely on one another for survival, and their bond forms the heart of this book. Living atop a mesa in the high desert of New Mexico in 1968, Raymond ages quickly amid hostile circumstances. With the help of a keen imagination that Molly inspires, he navigates various forms of loss and exploitation amid enduring hardship.

Kevin Honold’s deft and trance-like prose is interspersed with sharp insights and brings attention to the hardships of capitalism, the ills of misogyny, and the raw hurt of living a displaced or marginalized life. This is a story of endurance, memory, and unceasing change.

Set in a vaguely dystopian, yet also realistic, Mexico City—endless traffic jams, relentless clouds of pollution, economic hardships, and the ever-present threat of drug cartels, Myth of Pterygium, the debut novella by Diego Gerard Morrison is the story of a struggling poet contending with vision loss, poverty, and what it means to be an arms dealer in Mexico City.

The unnamed narrator of the book, at times referred to as Arthur—in part because of the growing similarity of his life with Arthur Rimbaud’s—struggles with the dissonance of leading an artistic life while providing for his family. A failed, penniless poet with a child on the way, he is forced to take a job in his family’s weapons dealing enterprise, which he soon discovers is connected to the corrupt Mexican armed forces and drug cartels, who are responsible for the increasing death toll in the country. All the while, the narrator struggles with a growing condition in his right eye, a pterygium, that is slowly taking over his vision, blurring the events of his life, including his wife’s complicated pregnancy, extortions by the drug cartels, and his own relationship to his writing. 

The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the stunning debut by John Belk and winner of the Autumn Houe Press Rising Writer Prize, looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. 

Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. 

Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus "Buff" Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us.

The Running Body by Emily Pifer, selected by Steve Almond as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, is a memoir of addiction, body image, and healing, through the lens of a long-distance runner.

 Pifer’s debut memoir wrestles and reckons with power and agency, language and story, body dysphoria and beauty standards, desire and addiction, loss and healing. Pifer employs multiple modes of storytelling—memoir, meditation, and cultural analysis—interweaving research, argument, and experience as she describes how, during her time as a collegiate distance runner, she began to run more while eating less. Many around her, including her coaches, praised her for these practices. But as she became faster, and as her body began to resemble the bodies that she had seen across start-lines and on the covers of running magazines, her bones began to fracture. 

The Running Body interrogates the stories we tell ourselves and the faultiness of memory. Fractures, figurative and literal, run through the narrative as Pifer explores the ways bodies become entangled in stories.

Entry Level, the debut short story collection of Wendy Wimmer, selected by Deesha Philyaw as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Fiction Prize, focuses on an eclectic cast of characters trying to find, assert, or salvage their identities.

These fifteen stories center around the experience of being underemployed—whether by circumstance, class, gender, race, or other prevailing factors—and the toll this takes on an individual. Wimmer pushes the boundaries of reality, creating stories that are funny, fantastic, and at times terrifying. 

Her characters undergo feats of endurance, heartbreak, and loneliness, all while trying to succeed in a world that so often undervalues them. From a young marine biologist suffering from imposter syndrome and a haunting to a bingo caller facing another brutal snowstorm and a creature that may or not be an angel, Wimmer’s characters are all confronting an oppressive universe that seemingly operates against them or is, at best, indifferent to them. These stories reflect on the difficulties of modern-day survival and remind us that piecing together a life demands both hope and resilience.

Seed Celestial is the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by Eileen Myles; the poems in this debut collection consider societal issues, mythological origins, and the capacity for hope in the face of uncertain futures.  

 Bringing together contemporary issues of climate change, gun violence, immigration, and feminism, Sara R. Burnett writes haunting reflections on origins—of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers. While working from her own experience of raising children, she writes, 'You were inside my body / while I was outside; / outside was everything else.' Burnett vividly renders her own origin story as an immigrant’s daughter through the myth of Demeter and Persephone. 

This book is a love letter to the earth the way only a mother can write it: appreciating all its faults while seeing its beauty. Burnett offers a poetry collection that is tender and honest, akin to having an intimate conversation with a friend who tells us what we know to be true about ourselves, our twin capacities for love and violence, and what we don’t. She intertwines our violent, complicated world with the uncanny human capacity for hope and describes the awe of a world recreating itself again and again while wondering about all we lose and leave behind, especially for the next generation.

Bittering the Wound by Jacqui Germain, selected by Douglas Kearney as the winner of the 2021 CAAP Book Prize is a firsthand account of the 2014 Ferguson uprising that challenges how we document and report on political unrest.

Part documentation, part conjuring, this debut collection works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Throughout the book, Germain also grapples with navigating the impacts of sustained protest-related trauma on mental health as it relates to activism and organizing. The book also takes occasional aim at the media that sensationalized these scenes into a spectacle and at the faceless public that witnessed them.

 Bittering the Wound challenges the way we discuss, write about, and document political unrest. It offers fresh language and perspective on a historic period that reverberated around the world. Germain takes the reader through poems that depict a range of scenes—from mid-protest to post-protest—and personifies St. Louis with a keen and loving eye.

Noley Reid’s fourth book, Origami Dogs, is a testament to her mastery of the form in a collection of short stories where a diverse cast of characters face tragedies alongside their canine companions.

Dogs rove the grounds of their companions’ emotions in this collection, serving as witnesses without language, exacerbating tension and providing relief to the human characters. Sometimes they are central to the stories’ plots, such as in the lead story, “Origami Dogs,” which focuses on Iris Garr, a dog breeder’s teenage daughter, as she begins noticing odd birth defects in new litters and realizes she must confront her mother, whom she loves yet cannot help but resent. In some stories, teens struggle toward womanhood or wrestle with sexuality and queerness, confronting parents who are unable to provide the care or support they need. In other stories, Reid’s characters are adults striving to be better spouses, parents, or both, and are often grappling with life-changing events—like a new disability or the loss of a child. Despite the gravitas of these tragedies, with Reid’s touch, they feel alive, present, and painfully close. Reid brings us to her characters in the fierce damp aftermath of calamity and asks us to dwell with them until new possibilities arrive.

At these tipping points, the characters of Origami Dogs stand ready with their dogs (or memories of them), to take the next step. By turns tender, moving, and devastating, this story collection is a celebration of the bond of devotion possible between humans and dogs, and it presents an intimate rendering of the lives we share.

The Scorpion’s Question Mark, a formally inventive debut collection of poetry driven by narrative and character, was the winner of the 2022 Donald Justice Poetry Prize.

In this stunning debut, JD Debris writes about characters who live on society’s outskirts and demand greater visibility in the face of marginalization. At the book’s heart are extended narrative elegies for two musicians. First, the poet follows Mexican singer and songwriter Chalino Sánchez as he avenges his sister’s sexual assault, and then he turns to Gato Barbieri, an influential Argentine tenor saxophonist who is haunted by a shadowy “man in dusk-colored glasses.” As these musicians question their purpose, we as readers are invited to reflect on our lives, our legacies, and ourselves.

The Scorpion’s Question Mark is personal and mythological, representational and abstract. These formally inventive and metrically attuned poems compose a range of contrasts—boxers Manny Pacquiao and Marvelous Marvin Hagler appear alongside Tupac and Herman Melville, and apparitions of the Virgin Mary manifest in both human and mirage-like forms on public beachfronts. Looking to the scorpion’s tail that forms the shape of a question mark, Debris seeks to occupy uncertain space within the poems, bending forms to find both expansiveness and tension.

Charles Kell's second collection of poems considers the instability of identity through fictional and religious characters while tackling issues of addiction, incarceration, and loss.

In Ishmael Mask, Charles Kell reminds us that identity is precarious. Kell’s collection is a collage of the journeys and interior lives of various wanderers—from Ishmael, the son of Hagar, to Melville’s Ishmael, and from Pierre of The Ambiguities to Pierre Guyotat. Each poem strips back the mask and beckons us to witness humanity in its barest forms. Captain Ahab’s leg, Ishmael’s arm, and Pierre’s severed head serve as invitations to consider hunger and hope. The inspirations behind these poems—the Bible, Heraclitus, Melville, Guyotat, Tomaž Šalamun—are transformed by Kell, conjuring dreamscapes both dazzling and haunting.

Ishmael Mask masterfully allows a glimpse into the human experience of feeling lost—even when right at home, even in our own bodies.

Discordant by Richard Hamilton, winner of the 2022 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Evie Shockley, is a collection of lyrical poetry offering multilayered examinations of injustices—from mass incarceration to failing schools and right-wing fascism.

Hamilton’s second poetry collection is a searing examination of injustice both within the United States and abroad, from criticisms of the US military-industrial complex and failing healthcare system to nuanced observations of marginalization through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Their poems look closely at increased austerity measures, commitment to mass incarceration and private prisons, disdain for workers and labor resistance, the expansion of the US military budget, the disappearance of federal subsidies for the working poor, failing schools and teacher shortages, market inflation and price gouging, and the rising tide of right-wing fascism.

Hamilton’s lyrical writing brings together free-form essays and personal narratives full of keen-eyed and urgent observations. Told from the perspective of a speaker who is unemployed and pensive, Hamilton shows how history haunts us while keeping the present in the foreground, constantly challenging oppression that has long been commonplace.

Given, the debut poetry collection of Liza Katz Duncan, was the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry. A tender collection that considers the idea of home and family, and untangles the deep personal and ecological loss as a result of Superstorm Sandy's destruction of the New Jersey Shore.

Given is a poignant exploration of the unpredictable shifts that shape our lives. Duncan conjures her home, the New Jersey Shore, in clear and unsentimental lines: 'Call of the grackle, / whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams, // raw and red in their half-shells.' Duncan’s poems also explore the devastation brought to this place and its community by Superstorm Sandy and the continued impacts of climate change.

Interwoven into this thread is the narrator’s miscarriage; the parallels between the desecrated landscape and the personal catastrophe further contribute to the layers of tenderness in this collection, as Duncan urges us to remember and to witness. Despite tragedy and loss, Given is imbued with persistent, dogged hope, showing how survival persists amongst the wreckage, and from this debris is a path towards healing our grief.

Otherwise, the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, is a personal lyrical essay collection by Lambda Literary Award Winner, Julie Marie Wade.

In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism:  “I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet." As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author’s self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life.

Murmur, the second poetry collection by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, explores the complexity of race and the body of a Black man in contemporary America.

Barnett's sophomore collection considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. 

A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”

Taking to Water, the debut poetry collection by Jennifer Conlon, selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Poetry Prize, questions gender and embraces queerness through the lens of the natural world of North Carolina.

A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon’s poetry collection of gender questioning, is concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town. Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable. 

In their poems, Conlon comes to reject oppressive patriarchal figures, turning their gaze toward the natural world that catalyzes dreams of possibility, transformation, and safety—wasps protect them, an oak tree contains a new god, and flathead catfish guide them to a newly imagined body. Through thick North Carolina woods, Conlon searches for a language to celebrate queerness, finding it in ponds, hillsides, and within themselves.

In Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches, the poems that bask in the beauty of nature, queerness, and love while exploring how dichotomies form identity

This collection is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore’s third book of poetry explores the complexities of love—romantic, familial, and love for place—and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: “Every habit / even love—strangest / of them all—offers exhaustion / and renewal.” 

Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon’s phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore’s work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies—grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity—and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche.

Winner of the 2023 Rising Writer Prize, Half-Lives is a playful debut short story collection imagining women’s lives in a world free of social limitations.

Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler’s collection is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women’s bodies and psyches. Lively and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply. 

The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives: A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother’s studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide

The Neorealist in Winter: Stories by Salvatore Pane, selected by Venita Blackburn as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Fiction Prize, is a collection of eleven short stories following Italian characters exploring life in an era of media oversaturation.

 Utilizing methods of speculative, historical, and postmodern storytelling, Pane grapples with legacies of immigration, poverty, toxic masculinity, and moral failures, while focusing on working-class issues, family drama, and PTSD. Following eleven Italian narrators, Pane builds a cast of cinematic characters across disparate times and places—a struggling director attends a house party in the la dolce vita of 1960s Rome, gangsters chase a low-level lottery runner in coal valley Scranton, a woman contemplates experimental surgery to purge memories of her childhood trauma in Minnesota, and a pro wrestling promoter descends into self-denial through his autobiography.

Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut poetry collection explores a son’s relationship with his mother through her battle with cancer and his move from his homeland of Nigeria to the United States.

Nebeolisa's poems highlight how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical, and at times, emotional, distance between them. He wonders: “I don’t understand / her smile or why she would be submerged / in pain and wouldn’t want to admit it. / Who did this to our mothers?” The book questions his Nigerian mother’s need to act brave and a son’s need to protect.

Terminal Maladies reminds us that grief is inevitable, yet unique to each of us, and serves as a tribute to Nebeolisa’s mother and is a necessary read for anyone who has faced the challenges of caring for a loved one.

Winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman, Ghost Man on Second centers on strained family relationships and the search for new homes.

Erica Reid’s debut collection traces a daughter’s search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, “It’s hard to feel at home unless I’m aching.” Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid’s poems create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms—including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels—containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. 

Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid’s active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.

Winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith, this collection of formalist poetry is part ode, part elegy, and serves as a heartfelt journey in overcoming grief and falling back in love with the world.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s second full-length collection, Rodeo, is personal yet expansive, as Wilkinson carries her readers through sorrow and confusion, reckoning with seismic losses such as a stillborn son and strained relationships, alongside more abstract and existential pains. In the rural and wild western mountains of northern Utah and throughout the American West, Wilkinson finds solace, uncovering startling moments of hope and healing in the aftermath of suffering.

Throughout Rodeo, Wilkinson masterfully employs forms like the sonnet, sestina, abecedarian, and epistle to bring wholeness in the midst of fracture. Even while staring clear-eyed at its wounds, the collection resists being swallowed by grief, instead celebrating and meditating on the natural world and its vibrancy, including skunks and owls, horses and cows, wildflowers and grasses. The collection presents a full cycle of mourning and healing, beginning “Sometimes you hold your own hand. / That’s all there is to take” and concludes by reaching out from isolation toward connection with “a hand / for one moment holding / another hand.

Drawing from the traditions of poets like Theodore Roethke and Mary Oliver and embodying the interconnectedness between land and spirit, individual and community, Rodeo is a powerful rekindling of hope.

The Worried Well, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is a tragicomic collection that explores the intersection of anxiety and safety in a chaotic world.

Anthony Immergluck balances the thin lines between healing and ailing, between humor and tragedy throughout this exceptional debut poetry collection. Reveling at precipices of imminent disaster while grieving at thresholds of relief, The Worried Well asks, how do we live loving and full lives while being confronted with our mortality? How does language carry us between liminal spaces?

The “worried well” is a term often used pejoratively by medical professionals to describe a group of patients who may be lacking visible symptoms but opt for testing and preventative interventions, who seek treatments for ailments that don’t manifest readily in medical diagnostics. Immergluck unpacks the term by writing in the spaces where worry and wellness meet.

Despite the profound subjects explored, the collection carries us with a keen sense of humor, grounds us in the everyday, and rises to meet us with unexpected ruptures or sutures of language on each page. Summoning the restless dybbuk of Jewish mythology as well as David and Goliath, navigating hospital rooms, and surviving economic precarity, Immergluck creates a voice that is utterly new and needed in the literary landscape, a voice that reflects, “I don’t / know why I told a worry / child not to worry when / surely the trick is to give / the worry a name and then / to call it again and again.”