Here's to 2022! And Here's a Sale...
2022 was a big year for ASP and our writers. In March, we had a booth at the annual AWP Conference, and our offsite reading, featuring authors Saida Agostini, Dave Housley, Elizabeth Hazen, and Richard Peabody, along with special guests Teri Ellen Cross Davis and Leslie Pietrzyk, had a standing-room-only audience packed with literary stars.
In April, ASP sponsored the American Authors Weekend at the Oxford Literary Festival in Oxford, England. Saida Agostini, David Downie, Elizabeth Hazen and Dave Housley each gave fabulous presentations on their current titles, and ASP co-founder Rose Solari chaired two panels.
In autumn, we launched David Downie’s Roman Roulette, his second Daria Vinci mystery, with a book tour that included appearances at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, Book Passage in Corte Madeira, California, and the Museo Italo Americano in San Francisco.
We’re so very glad to be back to live readings, and grateful to all who came out in support of our authors. In gratitude, we celebrating 12 years of independent literary publishing with a special holiday offer: All ASP titles are on sale here for just $10. Order more than one and we’ll throw in a surprise free gift!
We’ve got big plans for 2023, so stay tuned!! And thank you for your support of ASP — A Small Press With Big Ideas.
Featured Audio: “Letter from Sligo Creek” a poem by Rose Solari
Like the cover photo, the poems in Difficult Weather are timeless and—unlike the poems in many first books—extraordinarily mature. Although the narrative voice is generally that of a young woman in her late twenties and early thirties whose subject matter sometimes ranges back to early childhood, these are poems of adulthood: the discovery and endlessly painful rediscovery of human frailty, sexual and emotional betrayal, bad love in all its familial and romantic varieties, memory, and elegy…
Listen to Grace Cavalieri Interview fmr. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Grace Cavalieri is known widely for her stirring and empathic poetry, collected in her Legacy work Other Voices, Other Lives, but did you know that she is also an impressive interviewer? On her NPR show, The Poet and The Poem, she interviews significant poets from the US and around the world, with an aim of interpreting their lives through their poetry. In her tenure on the program, she has interviewed 9 US Poets Laureate (you can find a list with these archived interviews HERE), including the incomparable Robert Pinsky.
Featured Poetry: “Toytown” by Grace Cavalieri
The name Other Voices, Other Lives, is not purely poetical, in fact, for Grace Cavalieri it is a mission statement. In her Legacy Book of the same name there are several sections in 3rd person omnipotent which aim to breathe the same air as famous women who have suffered adversity. Tragic figure Anna Nicole Smith, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Cora from William Carlos William’s Kora in Hell. All in all they are an admix of Grace Cavalieri’s poetic life, all brought together in one beautiful volume; so, perhaps, we might figure that Anna Nicole Smith converses with Mary Wollstonecraft for the very first time in the pages of Other Voices, Other Lives.
Today, from the Anna section we have the heart-rending “Toytown”