Hi writers.
The Booker Prize has announced their “Booker’s Dozen” longlist for the 2026 award, and as you know if you’ve been with Sapling for a while, I’m always heartened to see small / independent press titles recognized for major awards. This year’s crop includes titles from Fitzcarraldo Edition, Serpent’s Tail, and Granta Books, among those from the major players. Congrats to all the finalists.
Now, here’s what’s happening in the small press world this week.
—Kit
Managing Editor / Sapling editor
Black Lawrence Press
Contest: RHINO Poetry 2027 Founders’ Prize
Genre(s): poetry
Award: First prize of $500 and two runners-up prizes of $100 each
Entry Fee: $15 per submission of up to 5 poems
Deadline: September 30, 2026
Guidelines: rhinopoetry.org/general-submissions and rhinopoetry.org/prizes#founders-prize
Open August 1, 2026 - September 30, 2026, with monthly caps
Journal: Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine
Genre(s): poetry, short fiction, traditional non-fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, and images (photography and art)
Website: sblaam.com
Guidelines: sblaam.com/guidelines/literary
Open August 1–December 15, 2026 for the Spring/Summer issue
Small Press: Conduit Books & Ephemera
Genre(s): poetry
Website: www.conduit.org
Guidelines: www.conduit.org/submit
Submissions to the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize are open August 1-November 3, 2026
Feature: Sapling’s Five Burning Questions for Emerging Writers: Jill Michelle
This week, Sapling spoke with Jill Michelle, author of the debut full-length poetry collection Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, June 1, 2025).
SAPLING: Tell us about the process of getting your debut collection, Underwater, out in the world. Did you enter contests? Open reading periods? What transpired between sending the manuscript out initially and its acceptance at Riot in Your Throat?
JILL MICHELLE: The publication process for Underwater began in 2023, after I’d received a sabbatical in the fall of 2022 from my teaching gig at Valencia College, allowing me to put together and complete a first revision pass on the collection in a Brooklyn Poets workshop with the wonderful poet and teacher, Eugenia Leigh. Throughout 2023 and into January of 2024, I kept revising the collection and sending it out to contests and open reading periods (24 places in total), garnering 15 rejections over the roughly-year period before Riot in Your Throat accepted the manuscript in February of 2024, at which point I withdrew the manuscript from 8 other outlets. A shortlisting and encouraging words from Bad Betty Press in the UK, along with being a semi-finalist in contests for Mason Jar Press and The Wisconsin Poetry Series, were highlights of the submission process before that magical final acceptance.
SAPLING: What was your experience with the editing of your manuscript after its acceptance? Did you have an opportunity to make revisions, either at your own suggestion or at the suggestion of your editor? How involved were you in the design aspects of the book’s production (cover image, interior design, and so on)?
J. M.: The editing and production processes with Riot in Your Throat were a joy, and I was given great editorial advice from Courtney LeBlanc, the editor and founder of the press. I sent Courtney my latest version of the manuscript in late October of 2024, and over winter break that year, I got to review a copy with her suggestions. There weren’t a lot to be honest, and I accepted most of them, as Courtney has a keen eye and ear and is such a fabulous poet herself that the advice was spot-on. The last thing I remember asking her was if there were any unpublished poems in the collection that she thought the book would be stronger without, and we ended up cutting an abecedarian, which was the right call (and something I wouldn’t have done alone).
In terms of the book design, I got to approve everything but had to do none of the work and knew that female and female-identifying artists were being employed by Riot in Your Throat for all aspects of the process—what a dream! I’m a visual artist too but had no trouble letting go of control of finding art for the cover; the line-up of previous collections at the press gave me complete trust in Courtney’s taste. The cover art by Klara Kulikova was actually the first piece Courtney proposed. It stole my breath. After, I was sent a selection of font choices and colors for the title/author text. It was just a bunch of fun, honestly. I’m ridiculously grateful to cover designer, Kirsten Birst, and book designer, Shanna Compton, for their gorgeous work. Another awesome aspect of the design process was my grown kid, Megan Markham, an amazing artist with both words and images, flying to Florida for a visit to take author photos for me.
SAPLING: Did you publish a number of poems in literary journals or other periodicals before the publication of the finished book? Did this seem like a necessary part of the process for this particular project?
J. M.: Over half of the poems in the collections were published in literary journals when the manuscript first started making the rounds in early 2023, and throughout that year, more poems were accepted and published, including the opening piece, “On Our Way Home,” which won New Ohio Review’s 2023 Norward Prize. Underwater was also the last in the Riot in Your Throat publication cycle of 6 books, so by the time the book was released on June 1st of 2025 over 90% of the poems had appeared previously.
I did feel like having work placed in magazines and anthologies was a key part of getting a collection picked up by a publisher (and making sure each poem was its strongest, as sometimes journal editors make insightful revision suggestions). The origin of that idea is unclear, but I remember reading that Marge Piercy recommended that at least 40% of a collection’s poems be published in literary magazines beforehand, so that became my goal.
SAPLING: In what ways have you been involved in the publicity and promotion for Underwater? In what ways has the publisher contributed to marketing and publicity efforts?
J. M.: Riot in Your Throat press actually feels more like family, and we work together to promote and publicize our books, current projects and publisher sales. If time allows during the semester, I love making sharable graphics for everyone’s social media, collaging all of our current covers for things like the recent April poetry-month sale. I’ve also sent Underwater out to post-publication contests and have enjoyed doing readings to share and promote the book. Another really awesome opportunity happened in December of last year, when I was honored to be a part of DMQ Review’s Virtual Salon project, where three poets are highlighted monthly, reading from their new collections—definitely recommend.
SAPLING: What surprised you about the process of having your book published? Is there anything you wish you’d known beforehand about putting a first book out into the world and/or publishing with a small press?
J. M.: The most wonderful surprise of book publishing was the joy of having pressmates. Our chosen art form involves a good deal of solitude, and the process of trying to get that glittering yes from a publisher on a manuscript can feel demoralizing at times and a lot of times, lonely—no one in our non-art circle wants to hear about the stream of rejections, see us sad again. To get to the other side of that process, meet amazing poets whose work I’ve loved for years, get to read with them, rally behind their new projects and hear their feedback on my work is the stuff of dreams. While I didn’t necessarily need to know this beforehand, I’m extremely pleased with the decision to go with a small press like Riot in Your Throat, a family full of badass artists, for this reason.
SAPLING: Bonus number six — You are also the author of the choose-your-own poem chapbook Shuffle Play (2024), from Bottlecap Press. Did you find the experience of submitting and publishing a chapbook prepared you in any way for the publication journey for your full-length?
J. M.: Funnily enough, the Shuffle Play chapbook got picked up by Craig Mullins at Bottlecap Press three months after Courtney LeBlanc took the full collection, Underwater, though the chapbook was published first. The very first thing I did was ask Courtney’s advice about the press and whether or not I should accept the offer, so it was inverted in my case—having been welcomed into the press family at Riot in Your Throat earlier in 2024 actually helped me with the publication process of the shorter, song-based collection, which does share 8 poems with Underwater.
Having Shuffle Play in print before the full collection did assist in working out any performance nerves before readings for Underwater began, however. At events for the chapbook, when time allowed, I would share some of the songs that inspired the pieces before reading the poems, singing and playing tenor ukulele, most times without backup musicians for support, so only needing to share poems at Underwater readings felt cakewalk-ish by comparison.
SAPLING: Jill, thank you so much for taking us along on your publishing journey!
Jill Michelle is the author of Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, 2025) and Shuffle Play (Bottlecap, 2024) and winner of New Ohio Review’s 2023 NORward Poetry Prize. Her newest work is forthcoming in Poetry Online, RHINO Poetry, Tampa Review and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more at byjillmichelle.com.
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