Master Mvskoke Language Teacher Debuts First Novel

The book launch for Papa’s Pills by Rosemary McCombs Maxey will be held at the College of the Muscogee Nation in the STEM building on February 24, 2026, at 1:00 p.m., Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Rosemary McComby Maxey weaves a beautiful portrait of love and endurance in Papa’s Pills where she tells the story of Selo and Tefe, an elderly couple navigating the end-of-life stages on the southeastern fringe of the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation in Oklahoma. The novel takes place in the mid-1990s, a time of significant cultural and governmental change for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and its tribal town communities.

Maxey was born and raised in Dustin, Oklahoma, near the setting of this story. Her lifetime of experience as an ordained clergy and educator gives depth and life to her narrative and readers are easily drawn into this cast of strong, resilient characters.

Sterlin Harjo writes, “. . . a delicate, funny, and loving story set against the backdrop of rural Oklahoma in the Mvskoke Nation. It feels like a roadmap to aging gracefully in love—through all of love’s ups and downs, specifically as a life and love nears its sunset hour.”

Lisa Kindsvater, Meadowlark Editor, says, “This book is a must read! Maxey creates a deeply moving story where the simple tasks of everyday life are so expertly detailed readers become immersed in the narrative. Papa’s Pills speaks to readers at every stage of life’s journey.”

 Papa’s Pills is available for order through the Meadowlark website: https://www.meadowlarkbookstore.com/s/stories/papas-pills and wherever readers buy books.

 

Open Reading Period: February 1 - March 15, 2026

We are now reading for our 2027 bookshelf! If you have a completed manuscript, spend some time with our submission guidelines to decide if we might be a good fit. 

2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist Book Launch Details! The Marvelous Real by Tess Barry

2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist

Click HERE to place your order!

Book Launch Event: January 3, 4:30 p.m.
Carlow University, Gailliot Center

In The Marvelous Real, Tess Barry illuminates the ordinary to reveal the extraordinary mystery and majesty of life, love, death, family, and the ghostly world beyond. With precise, vivid language, Barry renders a reality that is always more than meets the eye, always shifting and deepening our perception of the known and unknown. Barry invites readers into a lyrical world of joy, wonder, loss, humor, and human connection. The Marvelous Real is a journey in sound, rhythm, and imagery—from a mother as Walden Pond, to déjà vu in Old San Juan, to a childhood game of old church lady bank robbers, a work from Picasso’s Blue Period, and a brother’s hands. These poems illustrate the power of language to embody and transcend human experience. Barry’s debut is indeed a marvelous real.

Tess Barry was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize. Twice a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and Aesthetica Magazine’s Poetry Award, she has also been shortlisted four times for the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her work has been widely published in the US and abroad and has appeared in journals, such as: Aesthetica, The Compass Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Cordella Magazine, Mslexia, The Louisville Review, North American Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Stinging Fly, among others. Barry holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Carlow University and an MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a Fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and the Director of Carlow University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, a low residency program in the US and Ireland.

What Readers are Saying:
The Marvelous Real is the perfect title for this inspiring collection. Real, because it graces the many seemingly ordinary moments of our lives, transfixing them into the extraordinary, and marvelous, because Barry guides us on a magical, dream-like journey through the many sublime spaces/places her poetic soul has witnessed, imagined, or desired. All this conveyed through a musicality that
soothes us into our truest selves.
—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Homeland of My Body

These poems touch on the magic and mystery of childhood mixed with the serene undercurrent of nature and observations from a growing transcendence of the very world we understand as real. In these poems you can’t get lost, only found.
—Sheila Carter-Jones, author of Every Hard Sweetness

Emptied of all but wildness, Tess Barry’s poetry lets the energy of life flood across the page: a mother as Walden Pond, a sailor on a bus to Atlantic City, the loneliness of J. D. Salinger, the edgy Irish diaspora, all her essences of being alive transform the reader, reminding us that “My whole life has been ripe with wild fruit.” The Marvelous Real is a major achievement in Irish-American poetry.
—Thomas McCarthy, Irish author of Pandemonium and Plenitude

Tess Barry celebrates being alive in The Marvelous Real. These are poems to treasure, to read and reread, a poet immersed in and enchanted by language.
—Jean O’Brien, Irish author of Stars Burn Regardless

Tess Barry’s The Marvelous Real is a paean to the small, seemingly ordinary moments of our lives—infusing these moments with magic, wonder, and a capacious gratitude in which the real is, indeed, rendered exceedingly marvelous. These are earthy poems filled with tenderness, humor, and the imagination of a glorious mind. The Marvelous Real is a sensual and stunningly beautiful debut.
—Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

You're Invited! Virtual Book Launch Event for Afloat by Catherine Anderson (2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner)!

 Please join 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner Catherine Anderson 
for a reading and discussion of Afloat!

When: December 15th, 7 p.m. CT

Where: Zoom (click link to join)

Get your copy of Afloat HERE!

In Afloat, Catherine Anderson inspects the world around her with the detail of a scientist, the imagery of a painter, and the introspection of a philosopher. Through frequently “quotidian” scenarios—learning to knit, cutting rhubarb, purchasing flowers at the grocery store—Anderson ruminates on themes of love, spirituality, and justice, celebrating the beauty and wonder around us but not shying away from the loss and pain that so often accompany them. These poems saint all they touch—feather dancers, bell ringers, rubber pastries, tardigrades—revealing the holy in the everyday and the profound ties that connect us to each other, the natural world, and all that has come before. Winner of the 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize by Meadowlark Press.

About the Author:
Catherine Anderson has published five collections of poetry, including Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press, 2019), Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press, 2014), The Work of Hands (Perugia Press, 2000), In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books, 1983), and Afloat (Meadowlark Press, 2025). In 2022, a memoir about her late brother who had nonspeaking 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. Learn more about Catherine at www.catherineanderson.uno


A Word from the 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Judge, Jose Faus, author of The Life and Times of José Calderon:
The punch of certain lines concusses long after you’ve closed Afloat— “From a darkness known only to her / into a light both of us could see”—the author explores the many facets, triumphs, illusions, delusions, highs and lows of being mother, daughter, sister, lover, teacher, creator, nurturer, icon, and rebel. In forceful narrative poems part memoir, lyric, ode, elegy, manifesto, a vibrant musicality, urgent in its revelations, carries from gasp to gasp. These are challenging and captivating cadences. Worth every round.

You're Invited! Open House at the Meadowlark Headquarters!

Come see where the book magic takes place!

Doors open at 3:00 o'clock at the Meadowlark Office, up the stairs at 701 Commercial St (we are above the music store). We are inviting you to a come-and-go open house from 3 to 5, then the festivities will move to ground level where we will have a table set up for Emporia First Friday from 5 to 8.

We will have books for sale, snacks & giveaways, and Meadowlark authors and book editors to meet and greet!

You're invited! Traces of the Holy Book Launch Event with Arlice W. Davenport!

We invite you to join Meadowlark poet Arlice W. Davenport for a reading and author talk on Zoom to celebrate his fifth poetry collection, Traces of the Holy!

WHEN: December 4th, 7 p.m. CT

WHERE: Click the Zoom link here!

ORDER TRACES OF THE HOLY HERE!

Arlice W. Davenport is the author of five full-length books of poetry and three chapbooks. All have been published by Meadowlark Press or Meadowlark Poetry Press in Emporia, Kansas. His academic background includes degrees in philosophy, literature, French, and religious studies, along with a concentration of work in art history. He and Norman Carr—whose abstract paintings have adorned the covers of Davenport’s most recent books—have been friends for more than forty years, traveling together internationally, along with Davenport’s wife, Laura. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.

"In his fifth book of poetry, Traces of the Holy, Arlice W. Davenport once again puts forward his thoughts and ruminations about life as poems, this time set against his lifelong readings and study in philosophy, literature, and theology; poems that sometimes sing, sometimes bellow, that seek, that find, that allude to, that delineate nuggets of truth or wisdom or hints at how to find them."
—Roy Beckemeyer, The Currency of His Light

"The best thing to do, I think, to get a feel for the power of this book is to take it into nature. There, with your self fully immersed in the world, you will become aware of the now, the only time you have at your disposal, the moments that Davenport so often invokes. Another thing you will learn with Traces of the Holy in hand is that we are all made for love, both eros and agape. And this book unobtrusively leads you to the Source of those loves."
—Emília Katriňáková, award-winning poet from Bratislava, Slovakia

New Titles on the Meadowlark Bookshelf!

 

We have new titles on the Meadowlark bookshelf!

Living Fire, by Lois Ruby $20.00 Shipping Soon! … a rollicking novel with humor and heart, in harmony with the Kansas motto, “To the stars through difficulties.” View Provocative Lines, The Art of Breaking and Arranging Lines Into Poetry , by Kristine A. Polansky $30.00 More than just a book about writing poetry, this is a history lesson on language and poetic form. View When I Go West: New and Selected Poems, by Bill Sheldon $20.00 In When I Go West, William Sheldon compiles nearly twenty-five years of poetic reflection into one august volume. View Cravings, by Linzi Garcia $16.99 Pay attention: Linzi Garcia knows the recipe for a good poem—honesty, longing, and a bit of blood. In Cravings, Garcia boldly embraces the messiness of life, love, and growing older, day by day. The characters in Garcia’s poems are all flawed, and the better for it. They swallow their sins, break bread together, and toast to creation. Some of these poems are as sweet and warm as fresh-baked cookies at 2 a.m., while others turn up the heat. But never enough to burn you. Just enough to leave you hungry for more. View The Crow Lady: Barbara Waterman-Peters, by Cathy Callen $25.00 This book contains more than 27 full-color images of Barbara’s work, including watercolor, oil on canvas, and sketches. View Saltwood, by Leon Unruh $25.00 A former Russian assassin using the alias Nick Deveraux has become a mysterious American hero but is kept under wraps following his spectacular capture. The FBI releases him after two years, right into the hands of the Russian mob. View Salt, by Kerry Moyer $16.99 Through thrown baseballs and travels down gravel roads, through days of coffee and nights of beer, music and memories, Moyer also examines his dual role of son and father. View The Immigrant Next Door, by James Kenyon $25.00 31 interviews of U.S. immigrants—the historical and cultural contributions of this book are a celebration of the perseverance and industry of the American spirit. View Hearst's Other Castle (2nd Edition), by Enfys McMurry $20.00 Hearst’s Other Castle provides a fascinating insight into the lifestyle of a man whose desires knew no barriers and relates an extraordinary chapter in the story of a historic castle.  A Cottonwood Book, by Meadowlark Press View

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