Building Upward

Graffiti of members of the 27 club by Khayim Ben Atar

June 30, 2024

Lost at 27: Poems Needed

If you’ve been looking around the Cicada Song Press Website, please direct your attention to the submissions section and Lost at 27:Musicians, Artists, Mortals. We are currently accepting poetry submissions for our first collection of works. These are all poems about artists, musicians, and actors who died at the age of 27.

Any poet can send poems about these members of the “27 Club.” You can look that up on Wikipedia where they have a good, but incomplete, list. This list includes some famous names like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. It also includes people who are less well-known, like Wally Yohn, Mia Zapata, and MohBad.

You’ve got until August 15 to send your poems to Mona@CicadaSongPress.com. You can send up to 5 poems of any style, just 2 pages or shorter for each poem. Check on the Submit page for more details.

Building the Scaffolding Behind Cicada Song Press

We are all busy creating the workings of our press. We envision multiple people reading each piece of writing submitted to us. Using a rubric plus comments to track responses to each piece and either accept or to tell rejected pieces why we say no. That rubric is being built as we speak, as well as the system to move pieces of writing through to various readers and editors.

Another piece of architecture we’re trying to build is funding. We are hoping to find some grants, but if not that, some loans to get us up and rolling. I would love to print some actual books to sell, pay people for their work, get a more reliable modem, and lots of other things. We’ve got an editor who is down one computer. I’d love to get a work computer for her.

Right now we’re running on my savings and a couple of gifts, plus a lot of gifts of time and labor. I’m so grateful, but this is not a recipe for long-run success. We need to reach a point where we make money on book sales. Everything else serves of that goal.