Girl in the Cave: A Round-Up

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Tasha Cotter's Girl in the Cave is finally available for pre-order! An exploration of the south-central Kentucky landscape and a journey through the caves that lie underfoot, Girl in the Cave delves into the land and how it shapes our perspective. To learn more about Girl in the Cave, visit our catalog. To secure your copy and take advantage of our pre-order discount, visit our online store.


Tasha recently spoke with Black Fox Literary Magazine about her chapbook, the duality within her poems of being trapped and being free, and how the landscape of Kentucky and Mammoth Cave National Park inspired and influenced her work:

I liked finding ways of linking the past to the present, the land being a marker for something we share in common. It felt like recovering history.

In an interview at Speaking of Marvels, Tasha discusses her writing process, chapbooks that influence her work, and delves into her passion for place-based writing:

I love reading the names of cities, looking at the blank spaces, and thinking about what’s there.

At Tree Light, one of our favorite ways to engage with the chapbooks we publish is through music. Music is sacred, remember? When editing, designing, printing, trimming, and assembling our chapbooks, there's always a soundtrack to the madness, an emotional marker for the labor of love (and glorious time-suck) that is handmade publishing. We ask our authors to compile a soundtrack for their work, and above is Tasha Cotter's soundtrack for Girl in the Cave. Whether you've already read the chapbook or are anxiously awaiting your copy to arrive, we think listening to Tasha's soundtrack is a wonderful entry point to her work or way to reorient or accent your experience with Girl in the Cave.


And finally, whether you're currently reading as a blurber, reviewer, or interviewer, whether you've pre-ordered the chapbook and are counting down the days to release, or whether you just want to put a pin it, you can add Girl in the Cave to your Goodreads shelf--then shortly after November 28, the official release date, you can add Girl in the Cave to your bookshelf IRL.

Tree Light Authors at AWP

It was a hard choice to make, but we decided to skip the festivities at AWP this year. Instead, we'll be pouring that money back into the press to publish more chapbooks, increase the size of our print runs, and increase the prize money awarded for the Tree Light Books Prize, while simultaneously lowering the reading fee.

Our backs and table legs are still hurting from last year's haul, anyway.

Our backs and table legs are still hurting from last year's haul, anyway.

And, as The Lettered Streets Press points out, there's no shortage of new releases and enticing online offers, making it easy for those of us skipping AWP to support small presses this week without crowd surfing at the bookfair.

Tree Light authors Tasha Cotter and J. Scott Brownlee will be attending AWP this year, and if you can squeeze it into your undoubtably jam-packed schedule, here's where you can find them:
 

Tasha Cotter

 

Thursday

10:00-11:00AM: Book signing @ Superstition Review, table 1107
11:00AM - 12:00PM: Book signing @ Bluegrass Writers Studio, table 1616
1:00-1:30PM: Book signing @ Black Fox Literary, table 1600
3:00-5:00PM: Book signing @ Gold Wake Press, table 1731

Friday

2:30-4:00PM: Blue Lyra Press & Naugatuck River Review Off-Site Reading @ Triple 8 China Bar & Grill, 800 W Olympic Blvd.

 

J. Scott Brownlee

 

Thursday

8:00PM: LA Confidential AWP Off-Site Reading with Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Richard Garcia, David Tomas Martinez, Cynthia Atkins, Francesca Bell, Michelle Bitting, & Alexis Rhone Fancher @ Beyond Baroque

Saturday

7:00PM: YesYes Books / Button Poetry Off-Site Reading with Aziza Barnes, Danez Smith, Cam Awkward-Rich, Ocean Vuong, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Tanya Olson, Jamie Mortara, and Jonterri Gadson @ ArtShare LA

Can't make one of Scott's readings? Stop by the Orison Books table to chat with him throughout the conference.

Looking Forward / Looking Back

As we get set to print and assemble the first title in our 2016 publishing queue, we're doing plenty of reminiscing on all that's happened since our little chapbook press was conceived nearly 5 years ago.

Our first chapbook, Susan Slaviero's Selections from The Murder Book was a beaut, featuring unique end pages from vintage science textbooks, cover art that elicited oohs and aahs at conferences and bookfairs, and poems that were lauded over, landing a spot in Best of the Net and also winning us our first Pushcart Prize!

Our second title, Necessary Objects, we released in 2013, and Molly Gaudry named it among her favorite and most influential chapbooks

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Our third chapbook, Bye Sea, won praise in PANK as an "absolutely gorgeous" example of "inspired typography and design" and from Barrelhouse's Dan Brady, who named it among the best chapbooks of the year.

The next year we released our fourth and fifth titles, Pedro Ponce's Stories After Goya and Alexander York's The Vanity House. Ponce's off-kilter flash fictions received lots of love from PANK and Sharkpack Poetry Review for being wildly imaginative and deftly written. York's collection earned the praise of many for its memorable, "beautiful darkness."

So what's next? We've got a publishing lineup for 2016/2017 that we're ecstatic about:

J. Scott Brownlee - On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County
Abigail Zimmer - child in a winter house brightening
C.J. Opperthauser - Cloud the Shape of Bedroom
Tasha Cotter - Girl in the Cave
Duncan Campbell - Joysong Demarcation
Jennifer Hanks - gar child

We're thrilled to be working with such a talented group of writers, to give their piercing words a home, and to partake in the utter joy of editing, designing, and building beautiful books. Here's to another year of organized chaos and stunning art!