15 years later, I manage an indie press publishing 3-5 books a year, a few of which I design myself.

Book design requires as much emotional intelligence as it does real design skill. You’re negotiating with the manuscript, the author, the market, and the words themselves. You hope that at the end of the negotiation, you’ve somehow improved on the book — that you’ve designed something beautiful in spite of the difficulties and that the idea of the book as an object has started to manifest in your mind, the author’s, and eventually your reader’s. Designing a book is how you literally make it real — ultimately, it’s how you prepare the text to reach your intended audience.

My north star on all of this is Debbie Berne’s The Design of Books, published by University of Chicago Press in 2024.

It’s a beautiful object in its own right: orange cover, French flaps, and editor’s notations. My husband bought the book for me at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro. I didn’t seek it out but the book found me. Berne’s book taught me to take a deeper look at what I had already been looking at. She writes:

And elsewhere:

Good book design disappears. Poor design pulls you out of the reading — the text feels hard to parse, the page feels overfilled. Overcomplicated design draws the eye away from the writing itself. Either way, the reader loses what the writer spent so long crafting.

Design is actually how we read. It tells you — before you’ve processed a single word — whether this is a book worth your time.

Kelly Riedesel’s Proud Roads (Loblolly Press, 2025) presented a meaningful challenge last year. Kelly is a dual citizen of the US and the Métis Nation of Ontario, and she writes through the lens of wahkôtôwin — the Cree concept of kinship and shared responsibility for all creation. We wanted the book’s typeface to honor that.

After a lot of research, we landed on Masinahikan, an open typeface designed by Chris Harvey to support Canadian Aboriginal syllabics alongside Latin script — including Moose Cree. The name itself means “book” in Moose Cree. We worked closely to ensure the syllabics appeared as accurately and respectfully as possible, honoring both linguistic integrity and cultural context.

The book also contains a poem — “Day of Rest” — with a structure that couldn’t be replicated on smaller page formats. The options were to change the form of the poem or have the reader flip the book. We chose to have the reader flip the book. The form of the poem dictated the design on the page.

Kristin Entler’s Of Water Never Ceasing (Loblolly Press, June 2026) presented something similar. The collection’s poem “Cemetery Walk” takes words from all around a large field of white space and disperses them — almost as if mimicking tombstones in a graveyard, or the wandering, meandering, looking-around quality of actually being in one. It’s a stark meditation on chronic illness and death and also beauty, sitting there for all time: “and don’t the evergreens / have it / easy among / these roses”.

That feeling of flipping the book (in both Entler's and Riedesel’s work) is an invitation for the reader to participate in the construction of the poem itself: “to sit / and contemplate / the wispy / passing clouds”.

Emma Ensley’s The Computer Room — our first fiction collection — asked us what nostalgia looks like on the page. The book is set in the 90s South, and a significant portion of its texture involves being online. Being online presented an interesting design decision: what would online text actually look like in a physical book, positioned against normal text?

Ultimately, our decision was to build a type system that included a monospace typeface to differentiate chat room text, URLs, text messages, and online communication from the narrative voice. We put page numbers in brackets, like you might see in code. We used the Windows XP loading symbol as section breaks. It sounds like a lot — and perhaps we flew a little close to the sun, but every choice was purposeful. It met the moment and it was fun. It’s also worth noting that Emma designed her own cover (and a few more of our titles as well including Distant Relations and A Field Guide to North American Trees), which is one of the most beautiful things about how that book came together.

The cover of a book gets you in the door. And the interior keeps you there. We’re serious about both — not because we have unlimited resources to expend in both directions but because the writers we publish deserve books that honor their work. And when you get it right (if you get it right), everyone can breathe easy knowing that their work is represented in the best light possible. Feedback delivered straight from the source ↓.

One last thing worth saying: writers are already designers, whether they know it or not. The decision to break a line here rather than there, to let a sentence run long or cut it short, to use white space or fill it — these are design decisions. Reading William Faulkner is a different physical experience than reading Flannery O'Connor, and it's not only because of subject matter. It's because of how they put words on the page. Good book design doesn't fight that. It listens to it, and then it gets out of the way.

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Coming June 4 from Loblolly Press: Of Water Never Ceasing by Kristin Entler

Learn more about the cover design of Entler’s debut poetry collection on our socials below and pre-order before June 3 with free shipping using code FREE2SHIP.

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Say licked clean at birth. Say/ weeping in the tall grass, where/ this tantalizing song begins.

So arrives the voice of one of the most insistent and prolific poets in contemporary literature. Born in 1947, Yusef Komunyakaa was raised in those tall grasses of Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he was first exposed to poetry though readings of the Old Testament. A Vietnam War veteran, Komunyakaa turned the material of combat, displacement, and memory into a sustained poetic inquiry. After studying at the University of Colorado, he refined his voice at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and emerged with Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Subsequent collections, including Neon Vernacular and The Chaos, broadened his formal range and public reach, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994. In his poetry, Komunyakaa weaves together personal experience, punctuated rhythm and meter, and history to create narratives which waltz through childhood, war, race, and the body.

“Venus’s Flytraps”

The opening poem in Komunyakaa’s 1992 collection Magic City, “Venus’s Flytraps” is told through the eyes of a five year old boy as he considers the Louisiana landscape: snakes and yellowjackets, yellow flowers and train tracks. The perspective is often used in Komunyakaa’s poetry; he uses a child’s sensory, sometimes dangerous world to explore memory, sexuality, and precarity. Motifs of yellow flowers and insects act as ambiguous metaphors for desire, nurture, and predation, while trains, boxcars, and the sight of a cow destroyed emphasize proximity to violence and poverty. Komunyakaa’s fragmented lineation and repeated refrains preserve both the jagged childlike cadence and informed, if not haunted, retrospection, making the poem about how early impressions like sexual curiosity, fear, or social stigmas shape later identity.

“A World of Daughters”

This poem locates feminine lineage and myth across generations, weaving together the biblical creation story and intimate family remembrance. Komunyakaa invokes origin myths (Lucy, Dinknesh) and ritual imagery (sackcloth, red ocher, sacrifice) to reconceive women as creators and carriers of memory. The voice moves between the collective (“we rose from Lucy”) and the individual (“My own two daughters & granddaughter”), positioning maternal power as not merely biological but cultural and mythic: women “work praise & lament” and “sprout wings” of labor and flight. The poem reframes Eve’s borrowed-rib tale, reversing it, and in doing so, entangling it into a matrilineal narrative that honors ancestry as a source of questioning and resilience.

“Our Side of the Creek”

In “Our Side of the Creek,” Komunyakaa celebrates communal adolescent freedom while underscoring the racialized geography of Southern childhood. Images of the Southern landscape (water moccasins, persimmon, mayhaw) anchor the poem in Komunyakaa’s Louisiana upbringing, while the sudden intrusion of a “12-gauge shotgun” and the “Jim Crow birds” remind us that this leisure exists within the shadow of segregation and violence. Tenderness and protection (“born to hide each other’s alibis”) sit beside eroticized glimpses of girls and the urgency of outrunning sunset; the poem becomes an elegy for a fragile, self-made childhood sovereignty within a larger hostile world.

”Poetics”

“Poetics” is a terse, image-rich meditation on beauty, ugliness, moral complexity, and art’s uneasy witness to suffering. Komunyakaa juxtaposes aesthetic scenes such as chrysanthemums, stage striptease, or crystal trees, with brutal realities: a “sack of bones,” “death row,” a “legless beggar,” and the amputated human present behind “one-way glass.” The poet’s gaze is both fascinated and accusatory: beauty can press “against the windowpane,” but looking reveals “unlit eyes” and voices that “limp.” Ultimately the poem asserts poetry’s uneasy task: to see and name both beauty and horror, to hold metaphor up to concrete suffering without smoothing the latter into harmless image.

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Interested in more? Check out our Southern Poet Spotlight list on Bookshop.org. We receive 10% commission on all books purchased through that link and so does your local bookstore you choose to support.

Thanks for reading Theodora Bonis’ spotlight of Yusef Komunyakaa. Love what you read? Tip the writer. 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

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Kristin Entler’s debut collection lives inside the chronically ill, queer body not as subject matter but as sovereign territory.

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The body here isn’t a problem to be solved or a tragedy to be mourned — it’s a site of knowing. A place where experience accumulates into something that is, unmistakably, poetry.

This is exactly the work we want to put into the world at Loblolly Press.

We’ve said from the beginning that we’re trying to build a press that reflects the full range of Southern life and American experience — not just the version that’s always had shelf space. That means publishing writers who have been routinely underestimated or overlooked by traditional publishing: queer writers, disabled writers, writers whose lives and bodies don’t conform to what the literary mainstream has historically decided is worth publishing because it has “mainstream appeal.”

Kristin’s work isn’t worth publishing despite its subject matter. It’s worth publishing because of the specificity and precision they bring to that subject matter. The poem on your screen right now — “I’ll Eventually Need New Lungs” — does things with image and sound that very few poets can do. It earns every comparison.

If you’ve been on the fence, we hope you’ll consider pre-ordering before June 4th, when the book officially releases everywhere.

Until then, we still have a small number of first edition signed copies and original art prints by the author — available only through our shop, only through June 4th.

Also: if you’re experiencing financial hardship and want to support this book but funds are tight right now, please DM us. We’ll work something out. We mean it.

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If you liked what you read, please consider leaving a tip for the writers below:

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Friends —

Here’s the irony I keep sitting with: we’re publishing an anthology about Southern poverty, and to do it right — to pay the writers what they should be paid, to produce a book that holds up — we need to raise the money to make it happen.

Hand to Mouth is an anthology of new work by Southern writers whose lives have been shaped by poverty. Personal essays, lyric essays, hybrid nonfiction, some poetry and visual work. Writers from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Texas, and Tennessee, writing about what poverty does to language, family, appetite, faith, labor, shame, memory, and place. It’s the most ambitious anthology Loblolly has ever taken on, and the one I most want to get right.

Here’s what we need to do that:

$1,000 to pay contributors a small honorarium for their work. $1,000 to produce and print the book.

That’s it. $2,000. Forty paid subscribers at $50 gets us across the line.

This isn’t a donation. You’re pre-ordering the anthology and underwriting the writers in it. Every annual subscriber ($50/year) gets a copy of Hand to Mouth when it ships in fall 2027, free shipping, and your name printed in the book.

If $50 at once isn’t the right ask for you this year, $5/month works too. Monthly subscribers don’t get a free copy of the anthology, but you’ll get a discount code (TAKE5) good for $5 off any title in our catalog — so you can use it on Hand to Mouth when it releases, or on any of our 2026-27 titles, including Habitats, Slow Fire and Of Water Never Ceasing.

If you’ve been reading Loblolly for a while, you already know what we’re trying to build here. A press rooted in the South, paying authors equitably, publishing slowly and on purpose. Proud Roads, Kelly Riedesel’s debut poetry collection and reflection on the impacts of Hurricane Helene in our community, was a 2025 bestseller because readers showed up for it before it existed. Understory, the digital anthology we put out a few weeks after the storm (now in print), raised over $2,000 for BeLoved Asheville with 87 contributors.

The work is happening. Hand to Mouth is the next thing, and it’s the thing I’m asking you to help fund.

When Poets & Writers covered the literary response to Helene last year, I told them something I keep coming back to:

“There really is a literary community here, and we show up for each other.”

That’s what this is. Forty subscribers. $2,000. One anthology of writing the South needs.

Subscribe now

If neither $50 nor $5/month is right for you this year, that’s genuinely fine. Forwarding this email to one person who might say yes is its own kind of help.

Thank you for reading.

— Andrew M.

Loblolly Press, Managing Editor

Tomorrow is NATIONAL INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE DAY. Go support your favorite indie bookstore near you because they are PILLARS in our community. If you aren't planning to venture into a bookstore, remember you can always support your indie bookstore via Bookshop.org and Libro.fm (audiobooks are reading 😉 ).

You can find our full catalog here on Bookshop.org.

PS our books are available on Amazon because we literally have no choice but please NEVER buy a Loblolly Press book from Amazon. It's not supporting your writers and it's not supporting your presses, and not supporting your bookstores.

The 100% best way to support Loblolly Press and the work we do is to 1) buy from our site (but not tomorrow — go to a bookstore and either request us or find our work if you're in the South), and 2) subscribe to our substack (paid subscribers get 10% off every purchase from our site).

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When you buy from the links above, not only are you supporting your independent bookstore but we also earn 10% on each sale, which is a huge help to our small Press!

Situated within the greater Blue Ridge mountain range, the titular Tinker Creek is the beating heart of Pilgrim, and a emotional anchor for Dillard, who invites us on her year-long journey as a witness to the landscape and all the natural wonders that surround it. With the creek as our backdrop, we follow Dillard as she contemplates everything from beauty to creation, intricacy to fecundity, turning each over like a stone to consider from all angles.

The looking, it seems, is the key for Dillard. “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is do is try to be there.”

The book’s second chapter, aptly titled “Seeing,” expands on this. Dillard unknits that blanket of interpretation which has been cast before our eyes; she simplifies the act of seeing to its most basic experience: the perception of environment reduced to color patches. She wishes, perhaps for all of us, to be able to see like the newborn or the newly-sighted. In removing the context, Dillard encourages us to wonder anew at that which has been blunted or disenchanted by routine exposure. This world, she suggests, is “studded and strewn” with little miracles, glints of copper at the base of trees, revealed to anyone willing simply to look. “It is that simple. What you see is what you get.” Wonder is not a zero-sum game; we have everything to gain.

It is this philosophy of attention that is foundational to Dillard’s pilgrimage through the natural world, and one that is shared with poet Mary Oliver. Their dedication to attention both unites and distinguishes them as some of the best contemporary nature writers in the field (mind the pun!).

Oliver and Dillard both hail from the South (Oliver’s later collections “Swan” and “Thirst” were written from her home in Hobe Sound, Florida), and their written works serve as an act of devotion in service to their respective landscapes. If the question is “how might we best steward our land?” Oliver and Dillard tell us that the first step is to simply pay attention, to act as its witness. “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” No thing is too small to notice, no observation too small to share.

“Certain Indians,” Dillard says, “used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows,” called lightning marks. During a hunt, the lightning marks allowed a trail of blood to be left from still-living game, which the archer could follow. “I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood.”

So this, then, is the point: not the writing itself—though to be sure, Dillard’s startlingly lucid and piercing sentences are reason enough to read—no, the book is merely incidental to the life it describes. It is the ink-heavy footprint Dillard tracked home, and we, faithful readers, are the hunters on her tail.

The gift of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is that it allows us entry to Dillard’s interior pilgrimage, one that is intensely psychological and spiritual, and at the same time made universal by its roots in the natural world. We are invited to share in her discovery of not just the beauty of Tinker Creek (though beauty is there in abundance), but its many mysteries and horrors—only to find, in the end, that we have been a part of it the whole time! Nature has not forgotten us; we, too, bask and squirm and live alongside the giant water bug, the copperhead, the Polyphemus moth, the creek and the mountains. And what are we to do with it, this business of being alive in this strange and precarious world?

“Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps... This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

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Thanks for reading Theodora Bonis’ review of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek!

Make sure to check out Pilgrim at Tinker Creek via our Bookshop.org affiliate link. We earn 10% on each sale, which is a huge help to our small Press!

Become a paid yearly Substack subscriber and get a limited edition pre-order of SLOW FIRE — a signed first edition hardcover plus a typewritten poem from Spencer himself.

Spencer K.M. Brown has been writing the stories in SLOW FIRE for the better part of a decade. Before this manuscript reached me two years ago, he had already published three novels and a collection of poems. He was not a beginning writer looking for his first home. He was a seasoned one looking for the right one.

Start here, before I say anything else: “Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool You”. It’s one of the stories from this collection. Read it first, and then come back.

Technically we launch pre-order tomorrow, but since you’re some of our most loyal followers, we wanted to make sure you had a chance to reserve your copy early.

Pre-Order Now

The first story in SLOW FIRE opens at four in the morning with a boxer named Eli, still swollen from a fight the night before.

By the end of it, he’s sitting on the back porch with his dying father, watching a fox move through the yard. In between: a diseased orchard being sawed down row by row, an uncle drinking himself to pieces a few miles off, a woman he loves who has moved to Florida and isn’t coming back, and a developer who wants to buy the land.

Near the end, Eli’s father says: “I’ll be glad when it don’t hurt anymore. I’ll be glad to rest soon.”

Spencer builds toward this sentence across twenty-three pages of careful accumulation — the swollen hands, the sick trees, the orchard that Eli will probably have to sell — and when you arrive there it lands like something you’ve been bracing for the whole time without knowing it.

I’ve been thinking, since this manuscript first came to me, about Larry Brown. The Mississippi writer — Joe, Dirty Work, Fay, Big Bad Love, Facing the Music. Reading Larry Brown nearly a decade ago, I could not have imagined being able to publish work that expands on his legacy. Larry Brown’s writing has the same quality as Spencer’s: writing toward hard things plainly, without sentiment, without looking away. Spencer comes out of that tradition. But the moral and spiritual territory Spencer is navigating is more layered. His people aren’t just poor and stuck. They’re trying to figure out what they owe each other — parents to children, children to parents, believers to faiths that have stopped making sense. The South in SLOW FIRE is fully itself, specific and physical, but Spencer never lets the landscape do the emotional work for you.

These are stories about people living at the edge of belief — religious, familial, and personal — where grace is rare and endurance becomes the closest thing to love that’s available. Set among frozen hollers, burning fields, decaying motels, and small towns, they follow people confronting loss, disability, violence, and the kind of moral uncertainty that doesn’t resolve cleanly. A woman watches her past disappear under a bulldozer’s blade. A self-appointed preacher nails himself to a cross, convinced the end has arrived, only to find the world continuing on without him, indifferent and unrepentant.

As a publisher, it’s important for us to share that this is Loblolly’s first hardcover.

We are a young press, and the production cost is incredibly real — not nothing for us. We went back and forth on it. And every time, we came back to the same answer: this collection deserves to exist this way. Spencer’s voice deserves the form that honors it. I want to still be handing this book to people twenty years from now.

So we’re going for it.

If you pre-order, you’ll receive:

• A signed first edition hardcover of SLOW FIRE

• A typewritten poem from Spencer, written on his typewriter specifically for this edition

The typewritten poem is only available through the pre-order. Once the window closes, it’s gone.

You can also become a paid yearly Substack subscriber ($50) and receive SLOW FIRE as part of your subscription. Just be sure to email andrew.mack@loblollypress.com with a screenshot of your subscription.

For a press our size, pre-orders aren’t just numbers. They’re what lets us print with confidence, what we show booksellers, what tells us the community is here for the work. If you’ve been following Loblolly, this is a good moment.

What Other Writers Are Saying

What stays with me about this book isn’t the hardship — and there is real hardship in it. It’s the attention.

These stories pay genuine attention to the people in them. That’s rarer than it sounds, and it’s what I believe will make SLOW FIRE last.

One more thing: SLOW FIRE is a Southern Summer Book Club pick from the Southern Review of Books. For a debut story collection from a small press, that kind of recognition matters — it means the larger literary community is already paying attention. If you’ve been on the fence, that’s the thing I’d want you to know.

Help us bring it into the world.

— Andrew Mack, Loblolly Press

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Pre-Order Now

Become a paid yearly subscriber ($50) to support Loblolly Press and receive this titles as part of your subscription.

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Following the release of his debut poetry collection, we sat down with Garrett Ashley to learn about the origin, process, and inspirations behind Habitats.

Order HABITATS Here

What was the first poem you recall writing for this collection? Did you have a collection in mind, or did it spring forth after many individual poems had been written?

I believe “Voices of the Dead” is the oldest poem in the collection. It originally began as a scene in a work of fiction where the protagonist’s dead mother calls him several times throughout the duration of the story to warn him about the trouble he’d soon be facing. It has magical origins, but I feel like it’s more autobiographical now. I’m always looking for signs and warnings and worrying over what’s coming next.

I don’t think I had a collection in mind at the moment. It took me a little while to come to that. I’m primarily a fiction writer and for a while would only write poetry when I needed a break from short fiction. Eventually I noticed that most of my poems had similar themes and vibrations, so I eventually tried to get a collection moving.

Is there any individual poem in Habitats that you could identify as a sort of axle which the rest of the collection revolves around?

Maybe the title poem, “Habitats.” I look at the collection as being one about finding your place in the world after everything else has either moved on or disappeared. I feel that everything I’ve done in the collection speaks to this in some degree.

The second section of Habitats, A Field Guide to North American Trees, was originally published as an independent chapbook. Can you talk about your decision to include—or expand—that section into the book?

My publisher at Loblolly Press, Andrew Mack, told me last year when we were talking about our vision for the Habitats that he wanted to do something different with its release—include something extra to go with Habitats. I told him to have fun with it; I wasn’t expecting a chapbook, though. He called me one day and told me he’d been in communication with Lib Ramos of South Carolina’s Good Printed Things, and they’d agreed to publish A Field Guide to North American Trees as its own work. I’m not sure what went on behind the scenes with their conversations, but I’d never heard of this happening before. I felt extremely lucky. My only reservation in the whole thing is that I’ve had to convince certain venues to let me do events/readings twice, which in itself is a good problem to have!

How does the Southern landscape inform your writing process?

I’m very close to saying that the problems Southerners have are unique to the South, but I just don’t know anymore. We felt fairly cut off from the rest of the world in the 90s, and I think that’s what a lot of my book explores—that social and technological disconnect from everything else. I grew up in Mississippi, which was behind in education and jobs and the kinds of opportunities that created a sense of ambition (I don’t like the word ambition because it’s really old school, but that’s what it was). The problem is, I’m not sure what “everything else” means anymore. Am I just talking about bigger cities or other rural areas? A lot of places lack opportunity and jobs and carry a similar mindset. Now, I’m seeing a lot of the same MAGA political craziness everywhere. Growing up, I thought I existed in a cultural bubble. But I don’t want to say much more about this for fear of talking out of my ass, which I would be.

What’s important to me now is that the physical image of Southern landscapes is always at the back of my mind. I feel like I’m writing as much about the way things looked as the way they felt, and this is the kind of thing that’s important no matter where you come from.

Are there any books or writers that feel particularly influential to your practice?

As a poet? I’ve really gotten a lot out of Anne Carson over the years. I return to her a lot. While revising Habitats, I was also rereading the collected poems of Louise Glück (10962-2012; the one with the image of Saturn on the cover). There are so many poems, and I don’t like every one of them, which makes it an extremely useful book to learn from as much as enjoy.

As a fiction writer, I’ve been influenced largely by Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Ellen Douglas, and a myriad of science fiction writers (I write science fiction, too—have even been published in a few national science fiction journals). You didn’t ask, but my dream book I’d like to write and that no one will ever publish is a sci-fi novel-in-verse that takes place in the South.

Finally, what are you reading right now?

Right now, I’m reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s a long wonderful book but I’m a slow reader, so I’ve also read a few short books in between chapters. Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung is one of them, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be in my top five at the end of the year. I try to pick books that make me want to write, and it’s definitely one of them.

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Garrett Ashley’s writing has appeared in The Journal, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Sonora Review, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Find HABITATS in the Loblolly Press Shop, and use code FREE2SHIP at checkout for free shipping.

Order HABITATS Here

Event Details:
Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville, NC
April 8
6pm to 7pm

Loblolly Press and Malaprop’s Bookstore present a reading with poet Garrett Ashley celebrating the release of HABITATS, his newest collection of poems.

Building on the ecological attentiveness and formal curiosity that shaped his earlier chapbook A Field Guide to North American Trees, this new work traces how people live within changing landscapes and how memory, desire, and environment shape one another over time.

Ashley’s writing has appeared in The Journal, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Sonora Review, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. HABITATS arrives as a strong contribution to conversations around contemporary Southern poetry, place-based writing, and the pressures of climate and cultural change. His work holds a rare balance of imaginative reach and close attention to the textures of everyday life.

He will be joined by three poets whose work reflects the range and depth of writing connected to the region.

McKenzie Teter

A poet, educator, and editor McKenzie Teter received her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she served as a poetry reader for Ecotone and coordinated the Young Writers Workshop. Her work appears in The Shore, Rejection Letters, Foothill Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2025 Pinch Literary Prize inPoetry.

NitaJade

NitaJade Brings a voice that feels both grounded and unpredictable, rooted in place while refusing to stay fixed. An Affrilachian poet from Asheville, North Carolina, their work moves with a sense of play and presence that holds your attention line by line. They earned a BA from Berea College in 2019 and an MFA in poetry from the University of Kentucky in 2022. Their poems appear in Callaloo, Poetry Northwest, Torch Literary Arts, Still: The Journal, and The Anthology of Appalachian Writers, among others, with nominations for Best of the Net.

Their debut poetry collection, Mob the Sky, is forthcoming in 2027 from Loblolly Press.

Clint Bowman

Clint Bowman writes from a deep connection to place, shaped by his life in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and his work as an outdoor recreation coordinator leading hikes, river cleanups, and trail workdays. His debut full-length collection, If Lost, was published in 2024 by Loblolly Press. His work also appears in Indianapolis Review, Mud Season Review, O. Henry Magazine, and The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies.

If you’re in Asheville, we’d love to see you tonight!

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Based in Asheville, Loblolly Press is an independent publisher dedicated to releasing a small number of carefully edited books each year, with a focus on work that reflects how writers are shaping the South in the present moment.

This week, we’re featuring an essay from Spencer K.M. Brown on 5 story collections that made him want to be a writer.

Spencer K.M. Brown is an award-winning novelist and poet. A finalist for the CMA National Book Awards, and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and the Flying South Fiction Prize, his work has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines.

He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast. He lives in the foothills of North Carolina with his wife and three sons. SLOW FIRE is his first collection of stories, available June 2026 from Loblolly Press. Pre-orders open in May.

Consider purchasing Spencer’s recommendations via the links below which are affiliate links from Bookshop.org. We receive a 10% commission for every book purchased through those links. You’ll be supporting indie bookshops and presses with every purchase.

Growing up, our house had floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books on just about any subject you could imagine.

I’m among the last generation who grew up before the internet and cell phones, and so if we ever had a question, the answer was always, “Look it up,” which meant running into the library room, finding the right books and reading until you found the answer.

My love of books, then, came before I could read a word. I fell in love with the feeling of old books, the weight and sturdy shape of them, the images on some, or the shiny golden letters on others. I’d often look for the oldest ones I could, open them, and bury my nose in the pages, breathing in that blissful bookish scent. I remember one day in particular when I was sitting and playing in front of the bookshelves. I watched my dad walk over, search among the titles, pull a book from the shelf, and sit down to read. I was suddenly overcome, thinking about all of the ideas, all of the stories, all of the lives that those books contained. What did they say? Who wrote them? Why? After that, I wanted to read everything. I wanted to hear every story, every poem. I wanted to know every little fact in those encyclopedias. And though I couldn’t read a word (I was maybe three or four years old at the time), I would pull my favorite books off the shelf and stack them in a secret place, telling myself that, when I could, these would be the ones I’d read first.

Like any little boy, as soon as sports and friends and life began bringing new wonders, I was a little too distracted to read and loathed the idea of having to sit and read aloud to my mom instead of going to the woods to explore or track animals.

That changed toward the end of high school when became obsessed with classic poetry, especially Keats, Shelley, Yeats, Blake, Donne, and Dante. I started reading the gothic tales of Poe, Lovecraft, and Stoker (to this day, I still read Dracula at least once a year). I soaked up all the strange stories I could, slowly learning what my favorite authors read, then reading everything that influenced them. I would take books with me into the woods on walks and hikes, my head swimming with stories and myths and poems.

Of course, as an introvert, I kept all of this private. Those hours I spent alone reading in the woods and fields where I grew up were something of a crucible for me. Little did I know that all of those stories and myths and poems were crawling their way into the fabric of my imagination, and deeper into the very folds of my being. I had to capture the characters coming to life in my head. I had to write and tell stories.

Books and the stories they contain are often our signposts in a strange land, reminding us that this life, this world, does not center or revolve around us. Reminding us there is something more. They are timeless conversations of the human spirit rallying to survive and preparing to witness true wonder. They are what connect mankind’s unique disposition and struggle through all time. They remind us that we are dust, that we are but strangers and sojourners passing through. They remind us of the horrors of broken spirits and the sublime graces of hope that rain down each day.

But more beautiful than all of it is the fact that books are nothing more than bound paper with black marks on them. Yet what they contain—those ideas of truth, beauty, goodness; those comforts of fellow pilgrims come and gone before us, reminding us we are not alone—they are why we read. They are what make the heart move and tear back the veil of ennui and disillusioned slumber and call us to rise again, to become reborn in the grace of this life, to rise and open our eyes to new wonder each day.

The following list of books are five short story collections that changed my life in some way, and, more specifically, made me want to become a writer.

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake

My good friend, mentor Kevin Watson first introduced me to Breece D’J Pancake shortly after I graduated high school. I was just beginning to take writing seriously and had brought a manuscript of my crappy stories and poems into the Press 53 publishing office. I’d never met Kevin before, but full of hubris and determination, I walked into his office and introduced myself. He read my stories, and we talked for a long time about writing. He invited me to work for him, helping to read manuscripts and edit, but really, he was teaching me.

Never did we sit down and go through a story line-by-line, but he taught me how to think and how to see like a writer, or more specifically, like a poet. One day, he told me to go out and find a copy of The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. I thought it was a joke at first. Whose name was “Pancake”? I found a copy and went home that afternoon and read the first story, “Trilobites.” The raw, powerful voice of the writing took hold of me. Pancake was the first writer I’d come across who I felt was writing about me, about my home, and where I lived.

Even though he was a native West Virginian, he wrote about the South and rural life with such clarity and purity. There were no frills, no need for a thesaurus, no need to reread pretentious paragraphs. Pancake wrote from a vantage of raw humanity, of desperation, of unfiltered grace and wonder. His stories combine a stark realism with an almost biblical sense of weight and silence. His prose is stripped down but razor-sharp, carving out living people and showing them to me, but without sentimentality or tricks. He made the rugged ordinariness of life seem beautiful and worth lingering upon.

The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones

This was one of the books I coveted as a little boy, hiding it away on my parents’ bookshelf for later. I was first and foremost drawn to the image on the cover—an image of the famous “Boxer at Rest” statue. There was something about that boxer’s swollen, tired face that I had to know more about. There was some longing I noticed in that statue that I was certain the book would reveal to me.

I first read these stories in high school. The title story blew me away with its brutal portrayal of the protagonist and humanity in general. Thom Jones’ voice is so distinctive, not only perfection on a sentence level, but the way in which he builds a story and narrative feels completely novel while at once timeless. At once, he is able to create sentences and scenes that are both visceral and philosophically complex. For me, he brought the ideas and truths of Aristotelian thought and crushed them into the skulls and mouths of morally broken characters. Add on top of that, Jones has perhaps the deftest descriptions of boxing and fighting I’ve ever read (so good in fact that I went out that day and bought a jump rope and heavy bag to start my own training).

The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor

What could I possibly say about Flannery O’Connor, other than, for me, her stories caused a fault line in my writing/reading life. Suddenly, there was only a time before I’d read her stories, and then after.

O’Connor’s ability to write about the bizarre, the absurd, and the outcast, and gild them all with a golden brush stroke of the divine deeply changed how I viewed the world and stories altogether. Her work showed me that the grotesque, the dark shadow lurking behind us madmen, is nothing to shy away from or to avoid due to fear of offending readers; rather, she taught me not only to embrace the strangeness of this world, but to follow those characters fearlessly as far as they would allow. Because, when you do that, you end up uncovering whole caverns of grace and truth you never imagined were possible.

In much the same way as we ourselves can only come to know who we are when we’re put to the test, O’Connor showed me that it is only when you can push your characters to the very brink of madness and destruction that you finally find out who they are and what they’re made of. O’Connor’s ability to seamlessly weave philosophy and theology (she was aptly nicknamed the “Hillbilly Thomist” due to her love and admiration for St. Thomas Aquinas) was unlike anything I’d ever read before. Growing up homeschooled with a classical education, I’d never known what use there was for reading Herodotus or Aquinas or Livy or any of these ancient thinkers.

O’Connor was the first writer who made me realize that even those ancient histories are timeless, as they document and reveal the human condition. It is the same forces that drove people mad in 400 BC that drove them mad in O’Connor’s 1950s Georgia that drives them mad to this very day. But sometimes it requires stories and myths for us to be able to peel the mud from our eyes and see those lurking shadows so that they do not overcome us.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson

When I was in college, I was working three jobs and going to classes in between and not sleeping all that much. One of my jobs was as a lifeguard, working the opening shift at the YMCA. I would go in at 4 a.m. to unlock the doors so a few fitness obsessed professionals could get some laps in before they went to work. But from about 4:30 a.m. until nearly 6:30 a.m., the place was empty. To pass the time, I would bring books with me or take a few magazines from the lobby area. One morning, I picked up a copy of The New Yorker and flipped it open to the fiction section. The story was titled “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson. My mind was in a strange state back then, always drowsy from the lack of sleep, yet pulsing madly from drinking way too much coffee. Wired and drifting in constant waves. But when I began reading this story, something seemed to almost breathe into me from the page. It was as if something cosmic had shifted into place, and I was in a perfect state to receive a perfect transmission.

Johnson’s writing was utterly powerful in its form of luminous simplicity. Much like Thom Jones, there was a raw brutality to Johnson’s language, and at the same time, he was able to force the reader to join him in staring into the abyss, in holding the grotesque in his hand and considering it from all angles like O’Connor. That story meanders and moves like a drowsy conversation, yet every sentence — hell, every word — forces you to listen a little closer. When the whole collection was published a few years later, I devoured those five stories, and have probably read them all at least fifty times since. Johnson’s writing is layered, and each time you read anything of his, you see something new. His voice on the page is so perfectly realized and his use of language flows as naturally as if he were simply exhaling. The stories in the collection move effortlessly between moments of banality, shock, poetry, mystery, absurdity, and sublimity. But what they all have and what they achieve are moments of pure redemption, grace, and epiphany. Nothing is ever perfectly resolved, but it doesn’t have to be.

Johnson showed me how to trust in my own authentic voice as a writer. He showed me that plot is rarely what makes a story memorable or lasting or powerful. It’s about authenticity; it’s about trusting yourself entirely and allowing yourself to become raw and vulnerable on the page, because that’s where all the good stuff is.

I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay

While the razor-sharp clarity of Pancake and Jones changed how I approached writing and stories, it was William Gay who somewhat gave me permission to tap into my love of poetry and myth again. His brilliant collection contains thirteen stories, and I dare say that each one is as near a perfect story as a mere human is capable of. Gay writes of landscape and place with a mythic excellence that elevates what seems banal, calling it toward transcendence.

Gay’s prose is lush and lyrical and elevates the music in your head, but at once he can turn on a dime and break into scenes of such bleak, brutal humanity without ever losing the poetry of language. Gay’s stories are complex, not in plot, but on a sentence level. He builds character and story as if carving them from wood. You read his words, as if watching him pare away the wood one knife stroke at a time, until you are suddenly able to see.

While the title story and “Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway” plunge into the depths of the human condition, other stories, such as “The Paperhanger” and “A Death in the Woods” are pitch-perfect stories of the Southern Gothic lineage, so utterly disturbing and brutal, yet told with a language that rivals the divine beauty of a Caravaggio painting. William Gay never shies away from the darker side of humanity; rather, he walks coolly into it, at times looking for the faintest glimmer of light, and at other times simply observing, as if to give name to that darkness which every soul should all be vigilant of and fight at all costs. Gay showed me that the great spectrum of life, from the bleakest sorrows to the most divine theophanies, all make us who we are, they make us beautifully human and fragile.

Gay’s stories remind us to hold tight to what is good and beautiful, to keep quietly trudging along that narrow path, lest we crack our hearts open to the darkness, and find ourselves upon that other wide path to despair.

⁂

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It’s here. Garrett Ashley’s debut full-length poetry collection, HABITATS, is out today — and we are so glad to finally put it in your hands.

There's something poetry does that nothing else can. It slows you down inside a place. It makes you feel the weight of a riverbank, a trailer, a grandmother's bedside — not as scenery, but as the very material of a life. Ashley's poems do this with rare precision.

This is a book for readers who believe that paying close attention — to a stand of pines, to a fence line, to the way a family handles grief — is one of the most radical things we can do. We think you're one of those readers.

There’s something poetry does that nothing else can. It slows you down inside a place. It makes you feel the weight of a riverbank, a trailer, a grandmother’s bedside — not as scenery, but as the very material of a life. Ashley’s poems do this with rare precision. They move through Southern ecosystems and domestic spaces, asking what it costs to call somewhere home, and what we carry when we leave.

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It’s 1973, and all across America, women are disappearing from their homes.

It begins with an itch, unreachable, that burns from within the bone. Restlessness and insomnia follow. Then, finally, an insuperable urge to travel westward, always westward.

Infected with a purportedly fungal disease that propels them to the Pacific coast, three young women hailing from North Carolina find themselves amongst these Westward Women. Aimee searches for her best friend, Ginny. Eve, a disgraced journalist, is on the hunt for her next big story. Teenie, haunted by her sister’s disappearance, boards a bus of infected women driven by a mysterious figure known as the Piper. In the subsequent 300 pages, Alice Martin knits a tightly woven cultural landscape our heroines must traverse: the cult craze, the burgeoning women’s rights movement, protests, psychedelics, and hippies, all set to the rhythm of Janis Joplin.

Atmospherically, the novel bears a striking resemblance to Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, a photography collection depicting leagues of teenage runaways, fearless and tender girls finding community in one another on the fringes of society.

Martin cultivates an atmosphere of tangible restlessness, embodied and acutely animal-like: the illness presented in striking descriptions of gangly, bare legs, boney elbows finding ribs, tangles of limbs, and the ever-present itch, which ultimately ascends beyond the physical, becoming representative of the women’s emotional landscapes.

The infection reveals itself then to be symptomatic of a deeper desire for liberation and agency. As the young women grow sicker, they become less bound to traditional expectations of femininity and domesticity, finally enabled to act simply in service of themselves. Paradoxically, though, the illness robs them of identity: the further west they travel, the weaker the women become, and the less they can remember of themselves.

As our characters inch closer to the coast, their lives become increasingly intertwined with one another, and also with the Piper, a figure emblematic of the very kind of man our women seek to escape: manipulative, exploitative, and violent.

In spite of the mystery and tension this presence offers the plot, the central draw of Westward Women is the girls themselves: their rage, resentments, and regrets, their complicated and sincere relationships. Martin interrogates not only solidarity and liberation amongst women, but also stereotypes of being an Appalachian girl. Growing up here in the South, I recall my own itch as a young girl for freedom, both a physical removal from my small Florida town and an emotional freedom from cultural conventions and expectations.

Martin’s work in Westward Women is an invitation to this restlessness, an imagining of a world in which women’s longing for freedom becomes visible, contagious, and impossible to contain. Westward Women understands this urge without reducing the places its characters come from, and the result is a haunting novel about liberation and the uneasy, necessary work of becoming.

⁂

Thanks for reading Theodora Bonis’s review of Alice Martin’s Westward Women. If you liked what you read, please consider leaving a tip for Theodora below:

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Alice Martin is a fiction writer, born and raised in North Carolina, and the author of Westward Women (St. Martin's Press 2026). Her creative work has appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, Triangle House Review, and elsewhere. She received her PhD in literature from Rutgers University, where she studied nineteenth-century American women's manuscript culture, focusing on everyday and anonymous women's writing in letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and meeting minutes.

Before returning to academia, she worked for years in commercial book publishing at Algonquin Books, Folio Literary, and Writers House, LLC. Now, she lives in Waynesville with her husband, son, attention-seeking cat, and too many typewriters.

Westward Women: A Novel. By Alice Martin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026. 304pp. $29.00.

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Become a paid yearly Substack subscriber and get a limited edition pre-order edition of OF WATER NEVER CEASING free, plus Understory Vol. 2 when it publishes this fall.

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Some books arrive with a kind of immediate clarity.

Not because they are easy to read, and not because they make sense immediately for the Press, but because they know exactly what they are doing and why they matter. OF WATER NEVER CEASING is a book that knows itself.

Entler’s work landed in my life first as a few poems for an anthology that was coming out of one of the most disruptive times of my life. Hurricane Helene was not only physically devastating to my city, but also unsettling for Loblolly, happening less than a month after we’d launched our first title, Clint Bowman’s If Lost. For me and for the writers I had agreed to work with, I was trying to make sense of what would be possible moving forward. One option would have been to shutter the Press and move on.

UNDERSTORY, an anthology for hurricane relief, breathed life back into the Press as we rallied to raise money and share art with each other. I read every submission for anthology on my own and discovered Entler’s two poems in the pile. Immediately, I knew I was in the hands of a writer who understood that poetry is complex meaning made from simple ingredients.

“Forest Bathing” was one of those poems:

At Loblolly, I can only publish work I believe in — it’s simply too much work and too few resources to dedicate to work that doesn’t give out to the world what we put into it. That belief has to happen at the writing level with poems like this one, but also with the people behind the work. Entler has been both a partner and visionary in this publishing process, and I’m so proud of the book we are releasing for pre-order today.

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What struck me first about OF WATER NEVER CEASING was its atmosphere. Reading it felt like looking up at the world from underwater: lungs tight, vision warped, everything around you altered by the pressure of being underwater. You know your time here is limited, that soon your oxygen will be depleted and urgently, you’ll need to decide what to do next.

The feeling mirrors the world Entler builds where disability, queerness, and nature exist not as separate subjects but as interwoven realities of lived experience, the kinds of truths we are often taught to deny, soften, or ignore. But this book does not look away. It understands that to acknowledge these realities is also to acknowledge how vulnerable we are within them, how often we are underwater, under threat, under assault.

In one poem, Entler writes, “you will not die because you are sick but because you are alive,” and that line stopped me cold because it names the central tension of the collection with such precision: mortality and danger, yes, but also the refusal to surrender one’s life to that knowledge.

Again and again, Entler’s work returns to the question of how to remain open to the world when the world has given you every reason to close. There is real authority in that. Real beauty. And most of all, real art.

Entler joins Loblolly Press as our Poetry Editor.

I’m especially glad to share that our relationship with Entler does not end with this book. Alongside the publication of OF WATER NEVER CEASING this June, Entler is joining Loblolly Press as our Poetry Editor. After reading this collection, I think you’ll understand exactly why we wanted them here.

As their first major project with us, Entler will serve as Managing Editor of Understory Vol. 2, which is coming your way this fall. We’ll open submissions for the anthology this summer, and I could not be more thrilled about what their presence will mean for the future of the Press.

For now, though, I hope you’ll help us welcome this book into the world.

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In Tore All to Pieces, forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky, Willie Carver Jr. conducts a chorus of third-person voices bound (and bound together) by geography, kinship, and memory. The deeply interconnected framework and small town setting brought to mind a kind of Appalachian Spoon River Anthology: another work that assembles a “roster of…

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Last week, Rachael Maddux joined us to talk her memoir, Life Expectancy and the lifelong awareness of death that shaped her coming of age in the American South.

This week, we’re staying with the story behind the book: the decade-long drafting process, the years on submission, and the moment she decided to publish it herself. Maddux speaks honestly about …

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In this episode, we’re joined by Willie Carver Jr. for a conversation about writing and teaching in a time when it feels like everything is on fire. We talk about joy, not as a performance or a slogan, but as something you protect day to day. Willie shares how he steps out of guilt, how he shifts toward love and concern for other people, and how writing keeps him in community.

We also talk about what happened when Willie was named Kentucky Teacher of the Year, and how quickly that public recognition turned into backlash in the middle of the culture war. He walks us through what it meant to defend queer, Black, and brown students in a system that often would rather quiet the conflict than do the right thing, and why he ultimately left the classroom.

From there, we get into language and place, and what it means to protect Appalachian English instead of sanding it down. Willie talks about the pressure to “correct” a Southern accent, why “you might could” says something standard English can’t, and how voice becomes an ethical choice on the page. He also introduces Tore All to Pieces, and why the stories within needed the voice they have.

In this episode, we talk about
Joy without performance, and refusing guilt
Writing as community and conversation
Kentucky Teacher of the Year, backlash, and leaving the classroom
Advocacy as calling out and trusting people to respond
Appalachian English, accents, and what gets erased
“You might could” and the humility built into the language
Tore All to Pieces, and why the stories needed the voice they have
Reading: “Sometimes I miss these hills” and a Keisha excerpt

Books mentioned

Gay Poems for Red States: https://bookshop.org/a/113834/9780813198125

Tore All to Pieces: https://bookshop.org/a/113834/9781985903708

Further Reading: “I’m Afraid to Return to the Classroom”: A Gay Teacher of the Year Speaks Out (Education Week), https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/im-afraid-to-return-to-the-classroom-a-gay-teacher-of-the-year-speaks-out/2022/05

Episode Credits
Hosted by: Andrew Mack
Guest: Willie Carver Jr.
Produced by: Loblolly Press
Music: Summersteen by Tony Sopiano

Rachael Maddux has been thinking about death since she was a kid. Ahead of the March 24 release of Life Expectancy, we sat down to talk with her about her new memoir, coming of age at the turn of century, and what it means to keep writing a book the traditional market wouldn’t place.

Rachael Maddux is a writer and editor based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. …

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Everything was fine and then it…

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A bear once mistook my truck for a vending machine. I keep returning to that memory not only because it’s funny — but because it’s such a simple metaphor for how our built world intersects with something as natural as hunger. I left a McDonald’s bag with a few fries inside my truck, went camping, and returned to find the bear had investigated the entire…

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Dear Readers,

Welcome back to Loblolly’s Winter Reads series! I’ve been so excited to share these lists because series like this show how Southern writing is not one story. It includes Indigenous sovereignty and women’s knowledge. It includes Black critique and literary inheritance. It includes Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, the Ohio River, and the woods be…

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