Julia Brennan is a writer and performer from central New York. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University, where she won the Frances Mason Harris ’26 manuscript award. Her work has been published in Hotel Amerika, Big Big Wednesday, and Gulf Coast, among other publications. Her debut novel, Hunting Season, won the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. Julia lives and teaches in the high desert of Albuquerque, NM.
"This slim journal contains multitudes. It’s a compulsively readable account of returning to a childhood home, a provocative meditation on artists such as Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and a radical reexamination of concepts like ruin porn, tourism, and translation. But mostly it’s an urgent manifesto. Göransson concludes: "This is written without hope." But paradoxically, Poetry Against All offers just that." (Jeff Jackson) "Moralists who find themselves clutching their pearls about this book of noir perversions should read less literally and see that Göransson's Poetry Against All -- for all its anti-libidinous interrogations of pornography, the Holocaust, and cadavers -- concerns some of the most relatably humanist emotions of all: grief, the meaning of home, and the protectiveness one has about one’s children. Göransson imagines pornography as the body at the edge of otherness, at once alluring and perverse, which is not unlike the lens through which he conceives his own role as immigrant, the contaminant in our body politic, alive to the sheer horror of America but never quite able to go home himself." (Ken Chen)
A Small Press Distribution Fiction Bestseller
Navy veteran Steven Dunn’s second novel plunges into military culture and engages with perceptions of heroism and terrorism. water & power is a collage of voices, documents, and critical explorations that disrupt the usual frequency channels of military narratives. "Dunn’s remarkable talent for storytelling collapses the boundaries between poetry and prose, memoir and fiction." (Nikki Wallschlaeger) Dunn unrelentingly captures the difficult, funny, abject, exhilarating, heartbreaking and maddening aspects of Navy life, both on and off duty. Read this book and understand the veterans in your life better ... complex and bold and conflicted and powerful and terrified and tough and human." (Khadijah Queen)
A 2021 Whiting Award winner, and shortlisted for Granta magazine’s “Best of Young American Novelists,” Steven Dunn is the author of two books from Tarpaulin Sky Press: water & power (2018) and Potted Meat, which was a co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and has been adapted for a short film entitled The Usual Route, from Foothills Productions. Steven was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Denver.
Rebecca Brown is a the author of a dozen books published in the US and abroad, including American Romances, The Last Time I Saw You, The Dogs, The Terrible Girls (all with City Lights Books), and The Gifts of the Body (HarperCollins). She been awarded The Boston Book Review Award, The Lambda Literary Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, two Washington State Book Awards, and a Stranger Genius Award, as well as grants to MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Hawthornden Castle, and The Breneman-Jaech Foundation.
Rebecca Brown’s thirteenth book is narrative cycle that revamps old fairy tales, movies, and myths, as it leads us from where we are to where we might go. Praise for Not Heaven, Somewhere Else: "It feels dangerous and exciting, like if (Brown) puts her big brain to it long enough, she could completely rewrite the story of who we are." (Seattle Review of Books) "Highly recommended and highly rewarding." (The Stranger) Praise for Rebecca Brown: "Strange and wonderful...Brown strips language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need." (The New York Times) "Simply one of the best contemporary lesbian writers around." (Dorothy Allison) "America's only real rock ‘n’ roll schoolteacher." (Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth)
Jennifer S. Cheng's hybrid collection Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems, was chosen by Bhanu Kapil as co-winner of the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. Cheng is also the author of House A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize.
Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”
SPD Poetry Bestseller
Winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, chosen by Bhanu Kapil
“Exquisite imagination…” (Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”) Exhilarating…An alt-epic for the 21st century…Visionary…Rich and glorious.” (Publishers Weekly Starred Review) “If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life.” (Bhanu Kapil)
Piper J. Daniels is a Michigan native, queer intersectional feminist, and professional ghostwriter who holds a BA from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA from the University of Washington. She is the co-winner of the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize for her debut collection of essays, Ladies Lazarus. Her work appears in Hotel Amerika, The Rumpus, The Monarch Review, WomenArts Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington State with her dog, Omar Little Daniels.