About

Miami University Press publishes two to three books a year: poetry and poetry in translation, novellas and short fiction, and books about Miami University history and conferences.

We regret that, due to limited staff, we are unable to read or respond to unsolicited manuscripts or queries.

History

Beginning in 1992, Miami University Press brought out two books of poems each year by poets who had already had at least one full-length collection of poetry published. This first series, edited by the late James Reiss, featured poets including Ralph Angel, whose Neither World won the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. Hugh Seidman’s Selected Poems: 1965-1995 won a 1995 Critics’ Choice Award and was chosen as one of the Village Voice’s “25 Favorite Books” of 1995.

Since 2004, when Keith Tuma assumed its editorship, the press has published one book of poetry each year, often featuring poetry by British and Irish poets and poetry in translation, although it also continues to publish American poets. In 2013, Peter Manson’s Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse was a finalist for the Cornelius M Popescu Prize given biennially by the Poetry Society of London to a book of poetry translated into English from another European language. In 2014, the Lois Roth Translation Prize for literary translation from Persian to English was awarded to Geoffrey Squires for Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals. The translation list also includes Fastness, Trevor Joyce’s widely-reviewed English to English translation of the Mutability cantos from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Titles in poetry include books by Mairéad Byrne, Peter Manson, Frederick Farryl Goodwin, Fergal Gaynor, Janice Lowe, Alissa Quart, Liz Waldner, Katy Bohinc and Kathleen Peirce. The poems in composer-poet Janice Lowe’s Leaving CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal (2016) are revisited in her musical work Leaving CLE: Songs of Nomadic Dispersal.

In 2004 the press introduced a fiction series, beginning with Marianne Villanueva’s collection of short stories, Mayor of the Roses, and continuing since 2005 with novellas published as the winner of an annual novella contest. Winners of the contest have been selected by creative writing faculty at Miami and more recently by distinguished writers invited to judge the contest.

The press began its novella contest with the idea of exploring and promoting a form underrepresented in most lists, although happily there are now more small presses publishing novellas than when we started. Thanks to the different interests of our judges, and with a new judge each year, the novellas we have published are remarkably varied in style and focus.

Recent winners include Clancy McGilligan’s dystopian fable History of An Executioner (2019), described by a reviewer as “a sensitive, touching portrait of life in limbo that resonates powerfully with those of us sheltering in place from a fraught and threatening world,” and H.G. Gildfind’s Born Sleeping (2020), a novella Australian novelist Philip Salom compares to an “extraordinary CT scan of the feeling mind and especially the feeling body.” Still more recently, there is Nathanial White’s Conscious Designs (2021), our first work of speculative fiction, and Rashi Rohatgi’s Sita In Exile (2022), a novella drawing upon Hindu mythology in a lyrical exploration of migrant sisterhood and brown motherhood in today’s Europe. 

Our authors have included first-time authors as well as widely-published ones. They are independent writers and creative writing professors, literature scholars retired or working abroad, a high school English teacher, a law professor, and a nuclear physicist, to name a few of their jobs. One of them, Garth Greenwell, author of Mitko (2010), has become one of the most celebrated American writers of his generation. We have been lucky to publish all of them and have enjoyed working with them to see their books into print. Here’s the full list of winning titles.

In 2005 the press published the first of its books about conferences held at Miami, Rainbow
Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, which grew out of poems and talks presented at Marjorie Cook Conference on Diversity in African American Poetry in September 2003. In 2009, the press published Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theater, based on a 2007 conference on Native North American theater. In 2013, the press published Finding Freedom: Memorializing the Voices of Freedom Summer about the Freedom Summer Memorial on the campus of Western College at Miami University, a memorial dedicated in 2000 to commemorate Western’s role in Freedom Summer.

In 2022, Joseph Bates was named co-editor of the press, joining Keith Tuma, Managing Editor Amy Toland, and the interns and members of the extended Miami University literary community who participate in the work of the press and the events hosted by it.