Guidelines: The Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series

Submissions for the 2017 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series are currently closed. Thank you to everyone who sent in manuscripts. Dan and Ron will be reading them with great care and attention.

The next reading period for this series will be October 1 until November 15, 2018. We will keep the 2017 guidelines posted below until this year’s selections are complete.

2017 Guidelines:

Seven Kitchens Press is proud to sponsor the annual Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series for an original, unpublished poetry manuscript. This series honors the vision of poet & teacher Rane Arroyo and is open to all poets. Though Seven Kitchens publishes almost exclusively in English, we welcome manuscripts for this series that mix English and Spanish; there are no restrictions on content or form. Authors selected will receive 25 free copies of their chapbook; all Seven Kitchens authors receive a 50% discount on additional copies.

There is no reading fee, though we encourage readers to purchase copies of our chapbooks and we gratefully accept donations large or small. Seven Kitchens survives solely on your donations and on the sale of our chapbooks. If you are a fan of our project and of the poets we publish, please show us a little love and help us keep doing what we do!
Submit a paginated manuscript of 16-24 pages of poems, plus front matter such as table of contents, acknowledgments, or notes. Do not include illustrations of any kind. Please don’t use fancy fonts.
Include two cover pages: one with the manuscript title, author name, address, e-mail and phone number; the second cover page should have the manuscript title only.
Include a table of contents page, if appropriate.
Include, if applicable, an acknowledgments page for work previously published.
Please include a brief (100-150 words) biographical note, including a statement of any previous book or chapbook publication. Our goal is to publish at least two manuscripts each year: one by an author with, and one by an author without, previous book or chapbook publication.
The collection may contain a series of poems or one single chapbook-length poem.
The author’s name must not appear in the manuscript.
Collaborative works are welcome. Should a winning manuscript be collaboratively written, author copies will be distributed equally (for example, two authors writing collaboratively would receive 20 copies apiece).
The editors reserve the right to not declare a winner in either category should the quality of manuscripts be deemed insufficient, so send your best work.
All manuscripts will be blind reviewed, meaning all identifying material will be separated from the manuscripts as they are logged in.
Manuscript titles and their log numbers will be posted on the Seven Kitchens website [http://sevenkitchenspress dot com] as they are processed.
Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us promptly by email if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.
Submissions must be emailed or posted between October 1 – November 15, 2017.
We hope to announce the winning manuscript(s) on or before March 15, 2018; manuscripts will be published in summer of 2018.
Authors will receive updates throughout the process: once finalists have been selected, they will be notified by group email, and all other entrants will be individually notified via email. (At this point, we will not know which author belongs to which finalist manuscript. Identities of the winning authors will only be revealed after final selections are determined.)
Manuscripts will not be returned. E-mailed submission is preferred, but you may send via regular mail.
If sending by mail, do not staple or bind your manuscript; please use a binder clip and mail flat in an 8.5 x 11 envelope. Please do not use expedited delivery services; your postmark date is sufficient to ensure your entry qualification, and we will allow 7-10 days for receipt of all entries mailed after November 15. Use First-Class Mail and consider spending the money you’ve saved on a chapbook from a small, independent press! Mail your manuscript to: Seven Kitchens Press, Rane Arroyo Chapbook Prize, PO Box 492, Loveland OH 45140.
If sending by e-mail, please send TWO documents in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx file); please include the words “Rane Arroyo Chapbook” in the subject line of your e-mail.
- One document should be the complete, paginated manuscript with title page and table of contents, and should be titled ARROYO_YOUR TITLE.
- The second document should consist of all front matter (title page with author information, acknowledgments page, bio, and statement of previous book or chapbook publication), and should be titled ARROYO_YOUR TITLE_FRONT MATTER. Please email your manuscript to: sevenkitchenspress at gmail dot com. Please do not send images.
There is no reading fee, but please consider making a donation to support this series: checks should be made payable to Ron Mohring, not Seven Kitchens. Online donations may be made via PayPal to sevenkitchenspress at gmail dot com.
The publisher will distribute ten review copies and will solicit online reviews.

The Series:

This chapbook series honors the vision of Rane Arroyo, a deeply talented and much-beloved poet, playwright, and professor. Arroyo received his PhD in English and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and taught most recently at the University of Toledo. His poetry collections include The Singing Shark, Home Movies of Narcissus, The Portable Famine, Same-Sex Seances, The Buried Sea: New & Selected Poems, and The Sky’s Weight. He also published a book of stories, How to Name a Hurricane, and several plays. He died suddenly and unexpectedly in May of 2010.

The Series Editors:

Ron Mohring (2012 – ) holds degrees from the University of Houston and Vermont College of Norwich University. His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Assaracus, Bloom, diode, Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, and many other journals. He has served as the Stadler Fellow and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. His chapbooks are Amateur Grief (Frank O’Hara Prize), The David Museum (New Michigan Press Prize), Beneficence (Pecan Grove Press), and Touch Me Not (Two Rivers Review Prize); his full-length collection, Survivable World, won the Washington Prize. In 2007 he founded Seven Kitchens Press.

Dan Vera (2016 – ) is a poet, editor, and watercolorist living in Washington, DC. His most recent book, Speaking Wiri Wiri (Red Hen Press, 2013), won the 2012 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Cutthroat, Naugatuck River Review, Notre Dame Review, White Crane, and many other journals, and in the anthologies D.C. Poets Against the War, Divining Divas, Gratitude Prayers, and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South. His poem, “Lingering Fraction” recently won the 2017 Oscar Wilde Award from Gival Press.

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Eduardo C Corral (2012 – 2015) won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his debut collection of poetry, Slow Lightning; he is the first Latino recipient of this award. A CantoMundo Fellow, his numerous honors include the Discovery/The Nation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing at Bucknell University, and the Olive B O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing at Colgate University.

Titles in the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series: