Open Through July 1 – New Voices Series

The New Voices series is aimed at bringing diverse voices and perspectives to print. We will be looking for work by poets who write outside traditional expectations, from varied ethnic, gender and class backgrounds.  Open to poets globally.

Submit 40-80 pages of poetry via email attachment to jacarpress@gmail.com

$15 fee can be paid through the Donate link at on our Contact page.  Or pay by check at Jacar Press 6617 Deerview Trail, Durham, NC 27712.

Series editor Jaki Shelton Green, a North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee, is the 2019 North Carolina Poet Laureate.  She is the first African-American to hold this position. Her many awards include the North Carolina Award for Literature, Sam Ragan Award for contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina, and the first NC Piedmont Laureate (2007). She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Feeding the Light (Jacar Press).

Yes, We Be

Yes, We Be is an integrated-design poetry book that connects with the Black Arts Movement, Harlem Renaissance and Afro-Futurism. Proceeds will benefit Black Lives Matter, SistaWRITE, and COR AME community programs.

“Patrick Howell’s Yes We Be is affirmation and confirmation of the resilience of Black people and Black poetry. Reminiscent of Amiri Baraka’s A Black Value System, as well as Haki Madhubuti’s Book of Life and Rise Vision Comin—Black Arts meditations laying down a foundation for being.”

— Tony Medina

“In the tradition of Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman, Howell writes a truly American poetry in the language of the streets, office cubes, living rooms, bars—the everyday landscape of humanity. In poems at once ecstatic and reflective, Howell celebrates his heritage while unblinkingly portraying the African American experience. A modern day hymnal for, of, and by the people, his music will reverberate long after the last page has been turned.”

— Angela Narciso Torres

2017 Winner – New Voices
Anonymous by Monique-Adelle Callahan D.

“Anonymous follows vulnerable bodies impelled to service—for work, lust, purgation, and song. Even that last knells from halls where “the applause is from the whips.” This, the caustic art of Monique-Adelle’s often brutal debut: for every several of its dahlias, there also wait parasites. I wouldn’t claim the grotesques, here, amplify the beauties; rather, the one bleeds steady into the other. “No room for honeystomach,” the poet, steeled, tells us. From this exceptional collection, such a lament rings as tune and warning.”

— Douglas Kearney

“Monique-Adelle Callahan ushers forth a style/voice that is uniquely and wholly her own. This selection of poems demonstrates the complexities of fragility and strength… a fierce fusion of poetic precision and experimentalism.”

— Jaki Shelton Green

2016 Winner – New Voices
Raising the Sky by Howard L. Craft.

“Raising the Sky  is unpretentious, attempts no lofty poetic experiments with heavy themes but rather surges with philosophy caked on the sneaker bottoms of young slickster/trickster wannabes, and top-shelf gold standard prose shuffled across army fatigue blankets. Howard Craft allows the reader to perceive the moments, landscapes, and particulars of his own brand of Southern urbanism. He takes us there. Place. Physicality. His poetry becomes the hushed drum carrying the meter of persistence, racial identity, and invocations of the immensity… in which the unavoidable are saddled hip to hip to joy and revelation.

— Jaki Shelton Green