Welcome Summer Interns, Mari Palma and Natalie Wolf!

Meadowlark is excited to share this summer with two wonderful interns, Mari Palma and Natalie Wolf! Please join us in welcoming them!

Hello, my name is Mari, and I am currently a sophomore at Emporia State University.

As a student double-majoring in Marketing and Professional and Technical Writing, I have a passion for literature and the behind-the-scenes processes that go into promoting a business. For this reason, I am drawn to the marketing internship here at Meadowlark Press!

In my free time, I enjoy reading, crafting, nature walks, and hanging out with my cat, Cookie.

Hi! My name is Natalie, and I'm an MFA student in creative writing at the University of Kansas. My emphasis is on fiction writing, but I also write poetry and nonfiction. In my free time, I enjoy reading, writing, crafting, and spending time with my friends, family, and cats.

I'm interested in pursuing a career in editorial work after I graduate, and I'm excited to build my editing skills at Meadowlark this summer. I'm also thrilled to work with all of the lovely Meadowlark staff and authors!

The Heights of Love, by Meadowlark Author Boyd Bauman, Named Co-Winner of the 2025 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People

A children’s book released by Meadowlark Press in 2024, The Heights of Love, by Boyd Bauman, was named co-winner of the 2025 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People in the category Pre-K to Grade 3. The awards program is organized by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College of Paterson, New Jersey. The judges select “the most outstanding book for young people” in each category, published in the previous year.

The Heights of Love is a poem by Boyd Bauman about the lengths a father will go to for a daughter. A little girl’s request for a bunkbed, so that her daddy doesn’t have to lean down so far to kiss her goodnight, leads to lofty dreams. When “she longed for a bunk bed tall enough she could nest in that tree,” her father’s love compels him to comply. Soon, the girl is sleeping among the clouds and stars. But is she satisfied? The book is 32 illustrated pages, a bedtime story for daddies and dreamers.

Bauman grew up on a small ranch south of Bern, Kansas, his dad the storyteller and his mom the family scribe. He has published two books of poetry: Cleave and Scheherazade Plays the Chestnut Tree Café. After stints in New York, Colorado, Alaska, Japan, and Vietnam, Boyd now is a librarian and writer in Kansas City, inspired by his three lovely muses. “I'm humbled and honored and want to thank the team at Meadowlark Press and urge you to support them as they work to publish Midwest regional authors,” Bauman said about being a recipient of the award.

The book is illustrated by Onalee Nicklin, with graphite
pencils and colored pencils. Onalee Nicklin is the illustrator of the Kansas Notable Book (2022), Ava: A Year of Adventure in the Life of an American Avocet, story by Mandy Kern, and the author/illustrator of To Hide a Hazelnut.

The Heights of Love is available through www.meadowlarkbookstore.com and wherever readers buy books. Meadowlark encourages readers to support their nearest independent bookseller.

“The Poetry Center, founded in 1980 by award-winning poet, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, its executive director, has hosted thousands of poets over the years at its readings, workshops and conferences. These include Poet Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, inaugural poets and others of national and international reputation. Readings at the Center have included Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Stanley Kunitz, Ruth Stone, Marge Piercy, Billy Collins, Richard Blanco, Patricia Smith and many others. 

“The Poetry Center has been awarded several Citations of Excellence and is funded in part by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.”

Congratulations, Catherine Anderson, 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner!

We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 
2025 Birdy Poetry Prize
Afloat by Catherine Anderson

Congratulations, Catherine!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Catherine Anderson has published four collections of poetry, including, Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press); Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press); The Work of Hands (Perugia Press) and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books). In 2022, a memoir about her dear, late brother who had nonverbal autism, My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty & Belonging, was published by Wising Up Press. She has been recognized for her poetry by the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, the Southern Humanities Review, the I-70 Review and the Crab Orchard Review. Over the years, her poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Harvard Review, and the Dunes Review, among many others. She lives in Kansas City, where she has worked for over twenty years assisting new immigrants and refugees to become skilled interpreters.

We would also like to extend a hearty congratulations to our Birdy finalists and semi-finalists!

Meadowlark would like to thank Jose Faus for serving as this year's judge.

Here, you can watch the recording of the announcement event, including readings from 2024 and 2025 winners, Alicia Rebecca Myers (Warble) and Catherine Anderson (Afloat), as well as readings from 2024 and 2025 finalists, Ruth Bardon (Witness) and Huascar Medina (Protest as Love Poem). Thank you to all who attended the event and made it a special, celebratory evening!

 

Poet Laureate of Kansas, Traci Brimhall, Serves Up a Book of Kansas Chefs and Kansas Poetry

Eat Your Words: A Kansas Poetry Cookbook

Meadowlark Press, Emporia, KS, August 2025

ISBN: 978-1-956578-73-7

EMPORIA, KANSAS: Meadowlark Press is delighted to announce an upcoming book with Poet Laureate of Kansas, Traci Brimhall, titled Eat Your Words: A Kansas Poetry Cookbook. As one of her focuses during her time as laureate, Brimhall’s aim is to connect the state’s agricultural roots to the arts. She gathered 20 chefs representing restaurants from all four corners of Kansas (and between) and paired them with 20 Kansas poets “in order to bring together rich poems that engage the senses; recipes that represent Kansas’s rich culinary offerings; and ‘ingredients’ for readers to write their own poems.”

The cookbooks will be available to purchase online and at select bookstores. The first run of 800 copies will be an entirely Kansas product—compiled, edited, designed, and printed in Kansas with 10% of the profit from sales going to the Kansas Food Bank. Brimhall looks forward to celebrating the book with chefs and poets at the Kansas State Fair, September 5-14.

Eat Your Words is available for preorder through www.meadowlarkbookstore.com with an expected ship date of August 2025.

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Traci Brimhall serves as the current Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2023-2026. She began Poetry Harvest: Poems for the State Fair, in 2024. Her most recent collection of poetry is Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). She is the author of four other collections of poetry. https://tracibrimhallpoet.com/

Meadowlark Press was established in Emporia, Kansas, in 2014 and publishes novels, memoirs, and children’s books with a Midwest regional focus. Meadowlark also supports a poetry press celebrating poets from coast to coast. https://www.meadowlarkbookstore.com/

You're Invited! 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Announcement Event

 

OUT NOW! Warble by Alicia Rebecca Myers - 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner

We are overjoyed to announce the release of the 
2024 Birdy Poetry Prize winner, 
Warble by Alicia Rebecca Myers

OUT NOW!
ORDER HERE!

About the Book:

The poems in Alicia Rebecca Myers’s debut collection explore a fascination with the phenomena within and beyond a person—whether becoming a mother or observing a sea turtle migration. The language is rich with metaphor but conversational and direct, with a compelling balance between prose and lineated poems. Myers finds in the everyday, in oxidized pesto and a crepe paper streamer, new ways of expressing shared experiences. She captures the full range of human emotion—sadness, grief, humor, and overarching love—as the poems process taking care of one aging parent in the wake of losing the other. Warble also contextualizes what it means to be a daughter and a mother in modern-day America by offering snapshots of pop culture and the wider American experience, from Love Is Blind to gun violence. This is a book that asks of us, “In a lifetime, what do we keep, and what do we release? What sings on beyond our time, and how are we immortalized by that music?” 

About the Author:

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Best New Poets, Creative Nonfiction, FIELD, River Styx, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, december, Rattle, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2016), was selected as a winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series, and she has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson residency for poetry and a Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference nonfiction scholarship. Warble is her first full-length book.

 

A Comment from Our 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Judge:

Warble encompasses the poetry of connection to the life force, weaving and unraveling immersions into grief and birth, presence and yearning, mother love and father loss, blossom and flight. These poems are compelling, brave, intimate, and, most of all, unafraid of telling the truth. I found that once I started reading them, I couldn’t stop, and I was called back to re-read many stunning dives into the tender and fierce edges of life, such as the complex compassion in “Addling,” the daring energy in “Open Water,” and the breathless love of “You Ask Me to Tell You the Story.” The title itself—Warble—speaks to that in-between state (as well as a bird) of being alive, trilling through each poem. 

I picked this collection because of how deeply the poet wrote from what Edward Hirsch calls “the poetry of affection,” the poetry that connect us to our innate and vulnerable humanness. This quality is so vital when it comes to working with the fragments of brokenness, despair, and horror around us to craft a life, sustain a community, and behold the living earth with wonder and courage.

—Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Judge, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2009-2013), author of How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems

Our Next Open Reading Period: February 1 - March 15, 2025

 

Next Open Reading Period: February 1 – March 15, 2025  What are we looking for? Fiction: We are open to full-length novels or collections of short stories. While we will consider manuscripts of any length, a minimum of 50,000 words is recommended for fiction submissions. Any genre will be considered, but we are especially interested in stories that take place in the Midwest and/or follow themes or characters that have a strong Midwest connection. Nonfiction: We are most interested in publishing full-length memoirs, true stories of growing up, lives lived, in the Midwest. While we will consider manuscripts of any length, a minimum of 50,000 words is recommended for memoir submissions. We are looking for memoir writers who draw us in with story, who can make us feel the experience of living in a particular time or place. Other types of nonfiction with a strong Midwestern appeal will also be considered. If you have a complete manuscript that you feel is a fit for Meadowlark, send it along! Poetry: Full-length poetry manuscripts (55 page minimum) will be considered. Poems may be previously published in journals and/or anthologies, but not in full-length, single-author volumes. For our Open Reading poetry collecions, we welcome manuscripts with a mix of poetry and prose. Read the Guidelines Before Submitting