Celebrate with us!

We want to thank all of our amazing contributors who made our first year so special. Here are just a few of the successes and accomplishments of some that we’d love to share. Celebrate with us by supporting their books and projects!

Asterales: Year One

  • jason b crawford’s collection Yeet was released in 2025 from the University of Chicago Press.

    Amorak Huey’s collection Mouth is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2026.

    Matt Kish’s The Inferno in Pictures, a book collecting 136 illustrations for Dante's "Inferno," will be published some time in 2027 by Tin House Books. 

    Travis Chi Wing Lau’s collection What’s Left is Tender was released in 2025 from Small Harbor Publishing.

    Megan Merchant’s Honoring the Wisdom of the Poem, a craft book on revision and agency, has been acquired by Black Lawrence Press.

    Lanecia Rouse was the Artist RVA + HTX Berg Global Artist-in-Residence Fellow at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2025.

  • John Paul Davis’s podcast The Uncomputable, where he reads one of his own poems each week, is available on his website.

    Ellene Glenn Moore’s Provenance (which contains “Stories My Father Tells”) won the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Prize and will be published by Seneca Review Books.

    Richard Jordan’s chapbook Spotting the Rise was released in 2025 from Rockwood Press.

    Jone MacCulloch’s photo and mixed media show “Far Flung Places” was selected to be shown in two venues through the Clackamas County Arts Alliance and she is working to independently publish a middle grade novel in verse in 2026. 

    Erin Murphy published her tenth poetry collection, Human Resources, in June 2025. Her 2024 collection, Fluent in Blue, won the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. Her collection of lyric essays, Mother as Conjunction, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions in January 2026. 

    Pamela Tucker’s show, Lyrical Still Lives, was installed in NYC’s Blue Mountain Gallery in October. Tucker’s still life paintings were accompanied by the poetry of Nicole Callihan, which had been written in direct response to the paintings. The paintings and poetry were installed next to one another in the gallery and were also featured together in the exhibition catalog. The show was capped with a closing event where Callahan gave a reading of her work, and led a painting inspired, poetry writing exercise with the audience.

    Rachel Turney has four books coming out in 2026: Record Player Life with The Poetry Lighthouse, Retired Wannabe Club Kid with Parlyaree Press, To Be (a Woman) with Red Rose Thorns, and  Women Making Soup Together with Vinegar Press. She also hosts a free online poetry reading series called Poetry (in Brief).

  • Melissa Fite Johnson will have an essay about Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” in the 2026 March Sadness 90s edition tournament this spring.

    Frances Klein published Another Life (Riot in Your Throat Press) in February of 2025 and launched the new magazine  Flight: A Literary Sampler.

    Laurie Marshall is in her third year of MFA studies in Creative Writing at University of Arkansas where she is heading into her thesis year writing a novel in flash/short pieces.

    Kerry Trautman has two poetry books coming out in spring/summer 2026: Things to Say When You Have Nothing to Say from Roadside Press (full-length), and Days of Bees from Dancing Girl Press (chapbook). 

    Meghan Sterling published You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press) in 2025 and has another collection Sick Letters from the Lovebed forthcoming from Small Harbor Publishing in 2026.

  • Allison Blevins released her chapbook Keeping Up with Seven Kitchens Press in 2025. (Cover art by Issue One artist Megan Merchant!)

    Jill Kitchen joined SWWIM's team as social media manager in June of 2025. She has also finished a first draft of her first collection!

    Charles Jensen has started a lit journal called Villain Era which publishes “lit of revenge” with new work every Tuesday and Friday. 

    Sarah Mills has signed with Lit Fire Books for her debut poetry collection in 2027.