Alice James Books Welcomes New & Returning Poets
Alice James Books is thrilled to announce new titles forthcoming from Leigh Sugar, Michael M. Weinstein, & Cecily Parks!
Leigh Sugar (she/her) is a Michigan-raised-and-based disabled artist. Her first book, FREELAND, was a finalist for the Alice James Award and Jake Adam York Prize. She also created and edited the anthology That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and poetry by artists teaching in carceral institutions (New Village Press, 2023), and formerly coedited the annual Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing. She is an assistant on Rachel Zucker’s poetry podcast Commonplace, and created and co-facilitates Access Oriented Lit, a free online reading series by and for disabled poets. Her own poems and prose appear in POETRY, Split this Rock, jubilat, Poetry Project, and more.
A former dancer, Leigh earned an MFA in poetry from NYU, where she served as a Veteran Writers Fellow, and holds a Masters in Public Administration in Criminal Justice Policy and Administration from John Jay College. She has taught at various institutions and community settings including CUNY's Institute for Justice and Opportunity, New York University, Poetry Foundation, and Justice Arts Coalition. Leigh lives with her dog, Elmo, in Ann Arbor, and is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. Learn more and say hi at leighksugar.com or on Instagram @lekasugar.
Michael M. Weinstein is a trans/crip poet, scholar, essayist, and photographer. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.org, and elsewhere. A former MFA candidate and Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, he holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard and formerly served as a Fulbright scholar in Siberia. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Earlham College.
Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O'Nights and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry 2022. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University, where she directs the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center.
FEATURED TITLES
