Since 1997, Perugia Press has been publishing first and second books of poetry by women. We publish one book a year, the winner of the Perugia Press Prize. Our mission is to help right gender inequity in publishing by launching women’s voices into the world, one excellent book at a time.

Our goal is to produce beautiful books that interest long-time readers of poetry and welcome those new to poetry. We celebrate and promote our poets, and poetry, whenever we can, through social media, and at local, regional, and national book fairs, readings, and events. All Perugia poets are available for readings. Please contact the press to schedule an event.

Perugia Press is a nonprofit organization with IRS 501(c)(3) tax exemption.

HAIL AND FAREWELL

by Abby E. Murray

At a time when lines of ideological division run particularly deep, it gives me hope to see a poet exploring the nuances of patriotism and pacifism through the voice of a speaker who embraces the duality of her identity as both a wife and also a person defined by much more than her gender or marital status. Though full of men, Hail and Farewell is a book made of everything that a woman is expected to be—beautiful, fecund, and endlessly patient—cast against the surreal landscapes of a homecoming ceremony for returning soldiers or the military family housing that turns strangers into reluctant intimates. Most of all, I’m heartened to see that what I’ve always told my students is true: If there is a story that needs to be told, there is someone who can tell it. And damn, but Abby E. Murray tells this one. – Keetje Kuipers

Cover art by Meredith Bergmann; Cover art photo by John Bigelow Taylor

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Megan Peak’s Girldom has won the Philosophical Society of Texas’s 2020 Book Prize in Poetry! Girldom also won the 2018 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Girldom was named a Finalist for the 2018 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, the 2019 Eric Hoffer Book Award, and for the 2019 daVinci Eye Award.

Abby E. Murray, author of 2019 Perugia Press Prize-winning Hail and Farewell, has been named 2019-2021 Tacoma Poet Laureate! Check out Gale Hemmann’s article about Murray and her work, “New Tacoma Poet Laureate Abby E. Murray: Standing Up, Speaking Out, Making Poetry,” in SouthSoundTalk.

Thanks to Travis Cravey for his April 2019 review of L. I. Henley’s Starshine Road for Glass: A Journal of Poetry, steeped in the desert terrain Henley writes about, and calls home. Here’s an excerpt: “The Mojave, in the end, forms this collection. It gives it blood and propulsion and meaning. The desert lays bare Henley’s life and dreams, her regrets and humanity. She has managed to open herself up for us, welcoming us into this world, to this high desert love story.”

Thanks to Seth Copeland for this stellar review of Girldom in the latest issue of petrichor: “Girldom is not the first great book of poetry about overcoming violation, but it is one of the wisest. Mark Doty once wrote of ‘how the world gives luster as it falls apart,’ but Megan Peak has shown us how it does the same while pulling itself back together again.”

Here’s a feature on Editor/Director Rebecca Hart Olander in the September 7, 2018  “Art Maker” column of the Daily Hampshire Gazette. She speaks about her own writing process and supporting her student writers and the women poets of Perugia Press.

Here’s a 2018 interview with 2015 Perugia Press Prize winner Jenifer Browne Lawrence, conducted by Jordan Hartt for Kahini. The poet has this to say about working with Perugia Press on Grayling: “I can’t praise Perugia Press highly enough … all the staff and my fellow Perugia poets feel like an extended family. They treated me and my work respectfully and intelligently—the whole process felt like the celebration of a birth—and I suppose it was.”

Here’s Emily Gwinn reading aloud 2009 Perugia Press Prize-winner Jennifer K. Sweeney’s poem “Weathering” for NPR Public Radio station Spokane Public Radio’s “Poetry Moment” on September 6, 2018. The poem comes from Sweeney’s Perugia collection How to Live on Bread and Music, which also won the 2009 James Laughlin Award for the Academy of American Poets.

Here’s a wonderful interview Mariano Zaro conducted with 2007 Perugia Press Prize winner Lynne Thompson, published on August 19, 2018 on YouTube for Poetry.LA. Thompson reads her poem “To Blackness” from Beg No Pardon, which begins at 10:45 in this terrific piece (though we suggest listening to the whole piece to hear Thompson’s thoughts on ancestors, memory, music, coming to poetry after practicing law, hearing from founding editor Susan Kan on winning post-publication awards for Beg No Pardon, breaking stereotypes of “the other” in her poetry, the new projects she has cooking, and even Beyonce’s Lemonade!).

Here’s a recent review of Diane Gilliam’s Kettle Bottom in Glass: A Journal of Poetry (March 2018, Ohio Poets Edition). Thanks to reviewer Karen J. Weyant for highlighting the timeless quality of Gilliam’s work: “For better or for worse, coal miners and the coal industry have recently been thrust into the limelight… I want to tell [readers] to forget the current politics. I want to tell them to forget what most contemporary media outlets are reporting. But what I really want to tell them is to read Kettle Bottom Diane Gilliam Fisher, perhaps one of the best poetry books ever written. Kettle Bottom, published by Perugia Press in 2004, examines the years of 1920-21 in West Virginia, a period of tension and unrest in coal country. Divided into three sections, Fisher’s collection intertwines a variety of voices, including wives, mine workers, and community children, all the while seeking to capture a time that is seemingly forgotten.”