Showing posts with label 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition. Show all posts

Monday, December 15, 2014

Two Author Interviews

Thank you to Kim Winternheimer, fellow fiction writer and founding editor of The Masters Review, for interviewing me about my chapbook Families Among Us (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). Kim asked me some really thoughtful questions that I had a lot of fun thinking about and answering. Topics include putting a chapbook-length collection together, naming characters, transformation, and writing fully into setting. You can read it all here.

Jack Hill also interviewed me for American Microreviews & Interviews. Jack asked a lot of wonderful questions. We talk about forgotten weirdness, layered fiction, Barthelme, radio adaptation, loss and the Iraq War, and what's up next for me. You can read it all here.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Pushcart Prize Nomination!

I'm honored Black Lawrence Press nominated my story "A Family Among Us" for a Pushcart Prize! The story appears in my chapbook Families Among Us, winner of the 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition and published by Black Lawrence Press in September 2014.

"A Family Among Us" was also adapted for radio broadcast on NPR-affiliated stations across the country, which you can listen to here.

I can't thank Black Lawrence Press enough for their ongoing support of my writing. This is my third Pushcart nomination and I'm hopeful this is the year I make it into the anthology!

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Pegasus Reading Series - 11/20 @ 7PM

I'll be a featured reader in support of Families Among Us at The Pegasus Reading Series on Thursday, November 20th at 7pm. I hope you can make it! The evening is sponsored by WordSpace Dallas and will take place in Lower Greenville at Two Bronze Doors, which was recently named 2014's Best DIY Venue by The Dallas Observer and also featured on NPR.

I'm very happy to be part of this great monthly forum for DFW-area poets and writers. And I'm thrilled to be reading with Jenna Hockema. If you can make it, please RSVP here. And thank you so much to Sebastian Paramo & Robert Torres for hosting the evening and inviting me to read! 

Monday, November 3, 2014

Families Among Us - Small Press Bestseller!

Thank you to everyone who has purchased a copy of Families Among Us thus far, making my chapbook a Small Press Bestseller for the months of September and October. I'm very honored to be on this list, and I can't thank y'all enough for supporting this book and my writing over the years!

I'm currently finishing my first novel and polishing my first full-length story collection. Hopefully I'll have more for y'all soon! 

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Book Launch & Reading 10/29 @ The Wild Detectives

The Wild Detectives. Read. Drink. Laugh. Buy a book(s).
I'll be celebrating the release of my book of short tales (Families Among Us) with a book launch and reading at The Wild Detectives bookstore, located in the Bishop Arts District of Oak Cliff on Wednesday, October 29th at 7pm.

I hope you'll join me for what I think will be a very fun evening. I've read in Vermont, New York City, Iowa City, and Los Angeles, and this will be my first reading in Texas, and I'd love for you all to be there for this special evening.

If you haven't yet read about The Wild Detectives, as featured in the New York Times, it is a beautiful new independent bookstore that is part coffee shop, part bar, and 100% awesome. It is a wonderful place to launch a book, and I'm lucky to have such wonderful hosts. KERA, the local NPR affiliate in Dallas, has thrown their Art & Seek support behind the evening as well.

Please let me know if you think you can make it. The Wild Detectives would appreciate an estimated head count.

For directions and more information, you can find The Wild Detectives on Yelp. I can't wait to talk with you and share a drink on October 29th! Thank you so much for all of your love and support.

Photo from the evening:

Thank you to everyone who came out!

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Families Among Us - Available to Order

Black Lawrence Press is publishing my chapbook of six short tales, Families Among Us, in mid-September. Winner of the 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition, it is now available to order for the low-low price of $8.95.

I hope you'll give this little collection a look and get a copy for yourself and/or as a gift for the person in your life who loves to read. You can order the book here, which will be giving future you a gift when it arrives via post later this month.

And here are some awfully kinds words about the book:

These stories are like tiny portholes into worlds teeming with rich, surprising life. Blake Kimzey is a master miniaturist. —Ramona Ausubel, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and A Guide to Being Born

Each of the stories in Blake Kimzey’s astonishing chapbook Families Among Us are intricate, beautifully written universes unto themselves. These stories blur the lines between what is real and what is possible yet they are also intimate and familiar because they are stories about people and connection and the very human desire to be a part of something greater than ourselves. —Roxane Gay, Author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist

Blake Kimzey has given us all the pleasures our imagination can bear, six stories to savor slowly, to break our hearts and then mend them. I wanted more of these good things. —Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk and In the Devil's Territory

In Families Among Us, Blake Kimzey’s inventive prose summons six weird worlds of the imagination—but more than anything else, these imagined worlds conjure not some other space but the forgotten weirdness of the world we know, revealed here in all its wondrous everyday magic. —Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

Thank you for supporting my writing!

Monday, August 19, 2013

Families Among Us - Black Lawrence Press - 2014

My chapbook of short tales, Families Among Us, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in September 2014. I couldn't be more excited about this. Out of close to 500 entries, Families Among Us was named winner of the spring 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition.

Here is what Kit Frick, the Black Lawrence chapbook editor, had to say about my collection:

"Surreal, beautiful, unnerving, and all-round awesome. The sentence-level cadence you set in the title story really reeled me in and builds so beautifully toward the conclusion, and the mix of strangeness and emotional rawness present in the families throughout the stories is so right on." 

I'm so happy to be part of the Black Lawrence family now, and to work with their editors and book designers. Black Lawrence Press, an imprint of Dzanc Books, is a beautiful New York-based house publishing some of the finest contemporary American and European poetry and fiction.

I can't wait to share this short book with y'all a year from now. Families Among Us will be a handsomely designed, perfect-bound book, distributed through Consortium, a national distributor, as well as on Amazon and the Black Lawrence Press website. I'll have more information to share soon. As always, thanks for reading!