It’s our pleasure to announce the three titles selected from our January reading period to be published in our limited-edition Summer Kitchen Series: Vivian Kao’s Daughters of the Republic, James Lee’s Bee Suit, and Ben Sloan’s Two Loose Wires. Look for these chapbooks this summer, and please join us in congratulating the poets!

Vivian Kao lives in Flint, Michigan, and teaches English at Mott Community College. She is the author of a book of poems, Dear Mrs. River-Dragon (Another New Calligraphy, 2024), which was a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. She was the 2024-25 Writer-in-Residence at the Buckham Fine Arts Project, and her volume of poems written in response to Buckham Art Gallery’s 2024-25 season will be published in March 2026.

James Lee received an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine, where he studied under poets Gabrielle Calvocoressi, James McMichael and Michael Ryan. His poems have appeared in the minnesota review, Juked, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He is currently at work on a manuscript of poems tentatively titled, “Cheating the House.” He teaches writing and lives in upstate South Carolina with his wife and two children.

Ben Sloan grew up on a farm in southeast Missouri and currently lives in Charlottesville VA. He holds an MFA from Brooklyn College where he studied with John Ashbery. He has two poetry chapbooks, The Road Home (Thirty West Publishing House 2017) and Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky (Seven Kitchens Press 2023).