The Washington Writers’ Publishing House celebrates the 2027 winners of its annual book contests! Jason Gebhardt will read from Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s 50th Anniversary Editor’s Prize winning, Dictionary of Air. Yael Kiken will read from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s Translation Prize winning, Zarpamos. Emily Holland will read from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize winning, Notifications On, and Samantha Neugebauer will read from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s Fiction Prize winning, Villains. Reception to follow.
FREE and open to the public. RSVP required below.
About Washington Writers’ Publishing House
Washington Writers’ Publishing House is the longest, continuously operating nonprofit, cooperative, literary organization in the United States. Established in 1975 in our nation’s capital, we have published over 100 volumes of poetry, as well as in more recent years, fiction and nonfiction. The press sponsors annual competitions for writers living in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and the winners of each category comprise our annual slate. In 2021, WWPH launched an online literary journal, WWPH WRITES to expand our mission to further the creative work of writers in our region. In 2023, WWPH added creative nonfiction to our annual press slate. In 2024, WWPH launched its biennial works in translation series and began presenting WWPH Literary Salons to engage with new and established writers and foster the richness and diversity of the literary arts in our community.
Jason Gebhardt‘s Dictionary of Air explores family, memory, and history with precision. From domestic quiet to historical echoes, each poem reveals how ordinary moments-washing dishes, caring for a child, remembering the dead-become luminous. With tenderness and humor, Gebhardt reminds us that love and attention are forms of work, and language is our home.
Zarpamos is the first complete collection of poetry translated into English from across the prolific career of Guadalupe Ángela’s poems traverse the rugged landscape of knowing – from being invisible and naïve to the world and to oneself, to how it feels to come into being and to recognize one’s own shape and voice as a woman, as an artist, and as a human. Ángela follows this thread through striking dreams and everyday experiences, over floors of adobe and jacaranda trees, through cave mouths and sterile dentist’s chairs, permeating each encounter with wonder, curiosity, longing, and play.
Emily Holland‘s urgent debut collection, Notifications On, interrogates fluctuations of lesbian desire across physical and digital landscapes. Against the backdrop of climate collapse, these places and platforms become sites of wanting, embodying locations where the speaker attempts to make their yearning-and their queerness-legible. Social media bots, rural convenience stores, internet memes, sites of remembrance, and online chat rooms all become spaces that refract the speaker’s sense of self and interrupt the flow of their desire.
Set across the United States and around the globe, Samantha Neugebauer‘s debut short story collection, Villains, follows characters longing for purpose, enchantment, and love. Bound by conflicts arising from social hypocrisy, self-mythology, and shame, often within mother-daughter relationships, these thirteen stories expose how we misread our lives, confusing what is large or small, lasting or illusory, meaningful or merely familiar. In Villains, Neugebauer delivers a stunning, seductive collection.
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