“Depression wasn’t an endless grey sky, it was no sky at all.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Neil Hilborn and Victoria Morgan. Congratulations poets!
Sierra DeMulder’s new chapbook, We Slept Here, is now available for order in The Button Shop. Check out this video of Sierra performing a poem from the book!
Danez Smith is the winner of a 2014 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. They are the author of Homie (Graywolf), Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf), “[insert] boy” (YesYes Books, 2014), one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2014, & two chapbooks– “black movie” (Button Poetry, 2015), winner of the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, & “hands on ya knees” (Penmanship Books, 2013).
Smith is a Cave Canem, VONA, and McKnight Foundation Fellow. Their writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative & elsewhere. They were featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Emerging Poets Series by Patricia Smith. They are a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural collective Dark Noise. Danez placed second at the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam and is the two-time Rustbelt Regional Champion. In 2014, they were the Festival Director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam. Danez holds a BA from UW-Madison where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They live in Minneapolis, MN.
“She says, ‘funerals are like birthday parties, except better. No one wastes money on presents, and everyone dresses up for the theme.’ ”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Maxine Wright, Phil Kaye, Darius Simpson, Scout Bostley, and Matt Coonan. Congratulations poets!
Darius Simpson & Scout Bostley’s poem, “Lost Voices”, from this year’s College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational Finals, has gone viral, with write-ups from The Huffington Post, Mic.com, DailyKos, APlus, Seventeen, and more! Congratulations to the poets and their team, Eastern Michigan University, who placed third at the tournament!
Hey Button Fans! In case you missed it, we’ve released two amazing new books this spring: Mahogany L. Browne’s smudge and Neil Hilborn’s Our Numbered Days! Check out all our books and merch at the Button Shop, and stay tuned for the great authors we’ll be publishing in the coming months!
When we saw the list of this year’s Minnesota Book Award Finalists, we were so excited to see Button Poet Hieu Minh Nguyen included!
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The Button YouTube page just hit 300,000 subscribers, and 60,000,000 views! Thanks, as always, to all of our watchers, friends, supporters and artists for making this possible. To celebrate, check out our first video to ever go viral on the channel, Denice Frohman’s “Dear Straight People”.
If you haven’t yet, check out our most recent books in the Button Store!
We’re excited to announce our full 2015 publishing catalog!
Chapbooks by:
DANEZ SMITH (winner of the 2014 Button Poetry Prize)
CAM AWKWARD-RICH
JACQUI GERMAIN
MAHOGANY L. BROWNE
SIERRA DEMULDER
Full-length collections by:
HANIF ABDURRAQIB
NEIL HILBORN
We’re proud to welcome these writers to the team, joining our other great Button Poets. We’d like to once again thank everyone who submitted work to us over the course of this last year. We can’t wait to put these books out into the world. Keep an eye out for publication dates this spring!
We’re excited to announce the winner of our 2014 chapbook contest: Danez Smith, for his manuscript, black movie.
Danez Smith is the recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Magazine & The Poetry Foundation. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, VONA, & elsewhere. Danez is the author of [insert] Boy (YesYes Books, 2014) & the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship books, 2013).
Congratulations to all our finalists! The competition was fierce–we received hundreds of awesome submissions this year. Huge thanks to Marcus Wicker for serving as our Final Judge, and thanks to everybody who submitted. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for the announcement of the full list of books we’ll be publishing in 2015, and check out the Button Shop for our current library.