Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Deanna Roy makes the USA Today Bestseller List

We wanted to congratulate Deanna Roy, author of Forever Innocent, Forever Loved, and Baby Dust for making the USA Today Bestseller List in January.

Deanna published her first novel with Casey Shay Press in 2011.

 Her next novel, Forever Sheltered, will come out in August 2014. She will be attending the Romantic Times Convention in New Orleans in May and the Romance Writers of America Convention in San Antonio in August.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Announcing the winner of the 2014 Mary Ballard Poetry Chapbook Prize!

We are pleased to announce the winner of our annual poetry contest: Elaine Mott's Splitting the Velvet Dark.

Elaine Mott left behind a completed, book-length manuscript of poems at her death in 2009. Although she published poems in magazines and anthologies over the years and had won several poetry competitions and been named a poetry fellow at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, her collection was never published. Her son Aaron submitted her work on her behalf.


Our finalist judge was Dorothea Lasky, a professor of poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and the author of three full-length collections of poems including Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE. She is the 2013 Bagley Wright Fellow in Poetry.

Lasky called Mott's work "a gift" and a guide to help us through our days. "I love this book and I love this poet. She is brave and strong and clear-headed."

Lasky said the book is one to carry through life, if one is like Mott's:

heavy and darkly mysterious
fed by the secret river of her dreaming

Splitting the Velvet Dark will be released in print and as a digital edition in April 2014.