And the winner is Nagueyalti Warren of Lithonia, GA, for Braided Memory selected by Judith Hemschemeyer of Winter Park, Florida, author of Certain Animals and How Lovely Lives, and translator of the complete poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Finalists for the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award

Paul Martin of Allentown, PA, for River Scar

E. K. Mortenson of Stanford, CT, for What Wakes Us

Deborah Bacharach of Seattle, WA, for Learning the Gods

M. Ayodele Heath of Atlanta, GA, for Nightfall Over the Water

Yvonne V. Sapia of Lake City, FL, for Culpa

Katie Fesuk of Kennesaw, GA, for If Men Were Angels

Robert Parham of Augusta, GA, for The Relentlessness of Salvation

Gail Rudd Entrekin of Orenida, CA, for Beyond Reason

George Young of Boulder, CO, for The Wound Dresser

Lucas Carpenter of Conyers, GA, for You Are Here

Millicent Borges Accardi of Topanga, CA, for Injuring Eternity

Sheila Sanderson of Prescott, AZ, for Sometimes the Dervish World

Michael T. Young of Jersey City, NJ, for Being Lost

Lianne Spidel of Greenville, Ohio, for What To Tell Joseme

Marguerite Scott of Charleston, SC, for Beneath the Shaking Stars

Judy Kronenfeld of Riverside, CA, for Shimmer

Alejandro Escude of Santa Monica, CA, for My Earthbound Eye

Donna Reis of Montgomery, NY, for What’s On The Walls

When Print on Demand became available for small publishers it helped create a fairer playing field. Although POD had a certain unprofessional reputation. Thankfully the question, “What is your print run?” does not seem to apply any longer. Attitudes change quickly.

Contests are another gray area for small presses. Duotrope will not list a small press that requires an entry fee. This is not a problem for lit mags such as Georgia Review, with the financial underpinning of the University of Georgia, but SNP has not had the luxury of such a financial safety net. The volunteer staff has worked for days preparing grants for Georgia Council for the Arts only to have it rejected on a technicality. The current trend of author>reader and ebooks may mark the end of the contest era. Why enter a contest?

So, where are we today? Support for the Press has come from local sources and it is on the local level where the work must continue.

SNP has been publishing, and selling books for 23 years now and will continue to do so. It is doubtful ebooks will become our main  product, it is not a book. It may be a sideline; PDFs are already created for every book published by SNP. The writers hold all copyrights and if they want to distribute via that medium we can do that. But books will continue to be our main product.