So, AWP, Hawk & Tide, and Slash Pine Poetry Festival. I think I slept fifteen hours the entire month. But it was exciting and exhilarating, especially the festival, where we were running away from tornado warnings and having rain so hard you couldn’t see directly in front of you while driving. Instead of rewriting the whole report here, just check the events out up in our events link and read over the reports. Alexis Orgera, one of the readers and just bang-up solid human being, wrote up a nice piece for us in HTMLGIANT.

Highlights of last month included but are not limited to: hearing about U of Kansas undergrads getting lost on the backroads of Arkansas; fighting ambient noise in a Whiskey Distillery in Denver; working Danny Plunkett, intern for Slash Pine Press, to death by hauling chairs in a thunderstorm that may or may not have turned to hail; watching Abe Smith twist himself into a pretzel while reading about Hank Williams; feeling my brain completely go into lockdown as I MC’ed the entire festival, culminating in speaking in mono-syllabic grunts as a way to introduce the final festival readings; taking in handmade festival anthologies sewed link-stitch style by Patti herself; eating tons of pie from PieLab supplied for the undergrad reading; meeting dozens of new people I’ve never seen before.

But now it’s may, the grant reports are about filed, and it’s time for some downtime and quiet. But here be some exciting news for the press:

1. We welcome Melissa Hull, Brian Morrison, and Nathan Hauke on to team Slash Pine. Patti and I need some help as apparently both of us have other jobs than to make books and plan poetry readings.
2. We also welcome Heather Momyer And Nathan Hauke to the editorial staff. Heather, Nathan, Patti White, Abe Smith, and francine j. harris will be reviewing the manuscripts about done trickling in. We’ll read through May>July, get some final manuscripts on the table, and then take it from there.
3. We also, finally, will put Brent House’s new book online for sale. We sold a good deal at AWP and the poetry festival. But alas, now we need to get it online for sale.
4. Even though we sold out, we also want to put the 2010 anthology online–from Hank Lazer to Adam Clay to Jeanie Thompson to Michael Mejia to…you get the idea. These things were real beauties.

And now we get ready for the Fall. More news on undergrad exchanges, hike poetry readings, book news…next couple months, we can crawl out of our holes, see what’s going out in the world around us, and just generally write about other chap presses and reading series. Yippee.