Announcing the Results of Our Open Reading Period

This past June we held a month-long open submission period for full-length books in hybrid genres. We received 397 manuscripts—a strong and inspiring group that showcased the impressive variety and creativity of cross-genre work currently being produced both nationally and internationally.

We are thrilled to announce that we have selected the following four books for publication:

THE HURRICANE BOOK by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones
This book-length lyric essay about Puerto Rico explores both the author’s personal history and the island’s close—and often toxic—120-year-old relationship with the mainland, with the book’s sections framed by hurricanes that have passed through the island from San Felipe Segundo in 1928 to Maria in 2017.

CLOSE READING by Aaron Angello
These 114 ruminative and retrospective prose poems, flash fictions, and mini-essays are the result of a self-imposed practice in which Angello woke early every morning, meditated on one word from Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet, and then wrote.

THE BRAILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA by Naomi Cohn
Through definitions, historical research, medical terms, and reflective vignettes, this abecedarian collection of linked prose poems examines and illuminates the author’s experience of progressive vision loss and learning to read and write in braille as an adult.

THE WEIGHT OF THE MOON AND OTHER MEASUREMENTS by Jasmine Sawers
Drawing on both Western fairy tales and Thai legends, these flash fictions combine the myth and the modern, the realist and the fabulist to build the legend of the author’s own hybridity: Thai and white, Muslim and Catholic, Buddhist and atheist, second-generation immigrant and umpteenth-generation American, male, female, both and neither.

We look forward to sharing these books with you in the coming years.

We also want to recognize the work of eight finalists:

A GHOST HAS NO FANTASIES by Christian Bancroft

MY LEMON TREE by Samantha Barendson, translated by Christine H. Chen and Jaime Zuckerman

MARIANNE BREAKS ALL HER BABIES by Tasha Coryell

AFRICANAMERICAN’T by Ayokunle Falomo

CHINA MARY by Teow Lim Goh

THE BASKETBALL ARTICLE by Jason Novak

CAUTIONARY by Colleen O’Connor

ENOLA SPELLED BACKWARDS by Rachel Slotnick

Congratulations to our four new RMP authors and the eight finalists, and thank you to everyone who submitted to our open reading period!