Thanks to generous funding from the Open Meadows Foundation,
Switchback launches our first ever contest for a full-length poetry manuscript
by a queer-identified woman writer on January 1, 2014.
Over the past seven years, Switchback Books has published nine (soon
to be ten!) books by women poets, many of whom are winners of our annual
Gatewood Prize.
While we are proud of the gaps Switchback Books fills in the broader
landscape of the publishing industry, we’ve noticed different gaps appearing.
As a result, we feel compelled to more broadly reflect the diverse range of
women’s experiences.
Switchback Books developed out of a disappointment in the way
publishers failed to address inequity in their own catalogs. We’ve developed
our 2014 Queer Voices Contest to avoid that same misstep within the world of
women’s poetry, and to solidify our feminist mission. In a landscape where a
transgender woman can still be denied entrance to a women’s college, it’s
increasingly important that feminists actively pursue inclusivity for the good
of all women.
The Open Meadows Foundation agrees, and with their generous support,
we launch the 2014 Queer Voices Contest on New Year’s Day 2014!
Groundbreaking poet, performer, and scholar
Dawn Lundy Martin will select the winning manuscript.
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Dawn Lundy Martin,
a writer, professor, and social justice researcher, is the author of A
Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia
Press 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat
Books, 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Poetry
Prize and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda
Literary Award; Candy, a limited edition letterpress chapbook
(Albion Books 2011); and The Morning Hour, selected by C.D. Wright
for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. Her
forthcoming book, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, will be published
by Nightboat Books in 2014. Martin has given lectures on race, gender, and
poetics at universities across the country, including most recently the Naropa
University Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the University of
California at Berkeley. She is a member the experimental black poetry and
performance group, the Black Took Collective, and a co-founder of the Third
Wave Foundation in New York, a national young feminist organization. She is
Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and also works
as a research consultant for foundations and organizations on gender and other
social justice issues. 
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