The Results of Our 2023 Open Reading Period

This past June we held a month-long open submission period for full-length books in hybrid genres. We received 601 manuscripts—a record number! We love seeing the hybrid genre field continue to grow and innovate: the submitted projects were a strong and inspiring group that showcased the impressive variety and creativity of cross-genre work being produced both nationally and internationally.

We are thrilled to announce that we have selected the following 4 books for publication:

FIT INTO ME: A NOVEL: A MEMOIR by Molly Gaudry
Part memoir, part fiction, part found-language collage, Fit Into Me, the memoir, and Fit Into Me, the novel within the memoir, are the result of Gaudry’s decade-long journey of recovery from traumatic brain injury—a written record of reaching for the seemingly impossible, and, along the way, rediscovering her love of reading and the power of story to help us to rewrite our lives, ourselves, and our futures.

BAUDELAIRE STREET: SELECTED LYRIC ESSAYS by Chen Li,
translated by Ting Wang
Regarded as one of the most innovative and exciting poets writing in Chinese today, Taiwanese author Chen Li is a prolific essayist and translator as well. Now, for the first time, thanks to translator Ting Wang, Chen Li’s lyric essays will be available in English. Magical, meandering, in love with walking through cities and walking through the mind, this essay collection leads the reader on an idiosyncratic and personal tour.

IT ALL FELT IMPOSSIBLE by Tom McAllister
A testament to the power of self-imposed restraint, the essays in It All Felt Impossible provide an insightful look at a life lived for 41 years and counting. Structured chronologically around one flash essay of no more than 1500 words for every year that he has been alive, McAllister broadens each brief piece out to something bigger than just a single incident, moving associatively between lines and ideas.

DUST AND IONS by Yara Zgheib and Alex Wakim
In a true story that beautifully combines flash pieces, poetry, and music, writer Yara Zgheib and composer Alex Wakim grapple with two coinciding events that occurred in Beirut on August 4, 2020: the largest non-nuclear blast in modern history when 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in a port warehouse and Comet C/2020 F3, or NEOWISE, one of the brightest comets to ever approach Earth, appearing in the sky shortly after nightfall.

We look forward to sharing these books with you over the next few years.

We also want to recognize the work of 6 finalists:

HE SAID / HE SAID by S. Erin Batiste

LET THE HOUNDS GIVE TONGUE by Virginia Bell

BITTER OVER SWEET by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

MORE CLAY FOR ABSENCE by Jai Dulani

AMNH: AN EXHIBIT by Anthony Michael Morena

MYTH FEST by Crystal Odelle

Congratulations to our 4 new RMP authors and the 6 finalists, and thank you to everyone who submitted to our open reading period!