Coal Hill Review

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2009 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize is Shake it and it Snows by Gailmarie Pahmeier of Reno, Nevada.  Her chapbook appears to your left, in the volume navigation bar, as the Spring 2010 edition of Coal Hill Review, and it’s available in a paper version as well.  

About the Winner

In the popular imagination, the American West has always been a place that holds the promise of new beginnings. Gailmarie Pahmeier’s poems reveal the dark side of this mythology–the seedy bars, the ruined dirty trailer parks, the desolate highways that allow us to escape from our lives without changing them. Out of this unlikely material, Pahmeier creates characters whose songs and stories are heart-breakingly transcendent.

Gailmarie Pahmeier, originally from rural Missouri, has been a Nevadan for 25 years. She currently teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at the University of Nevada, where she has been honored with the Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award. Her work has been widely published and anthologized (most recently in Passenger and The Pedestal Magazine and in the anthology Literary Nevada, University of Nevada Press, 2008). She is the author of the poetry collection The House on Breakaheart Road (University of Nevada Press, 1998) and two chapbooks from Black Rock Press. After a decade of publishing individual poems, working on prose manuscripts, and assisting her husband in his design/build business, a new book of her poetry, West of Snowball, Arkansas, and Home, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Her literary awards include a Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship and two Artists Fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council. In 2007, she received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts (state of Nevada). Pahmeier is considered a ‘domestic’ poet; her work focuses primarily on family and home. One anthology which contains her work is Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets do Housework (University of Iowa Press).

Please Note: Coal Hill Review currently accepts submissions only through our chapbook competition. For more information visit our submissions page, here .

More Featured Poets

Rebecca Kinzie Bastian
Rebecca Kinzie Bastian’s work appears in a number of journals, and she was the 2007 Bread Loaf Margaret Bridgman Scholar. Born and raised in Sweden, she holds an MFA from Vermont College, and currently works as an editor and copywriter in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband and two sons.

Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein’s books include Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School), new in 2008; Girly Man (University of Chicago Press), now in paperback; Shadowtime (Green Integer), libretto for an opera on Benjamin; Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press), Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Northwestern), and Controlling Interests (Roof). He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. More info: epc.buffalo.edu.

Chana Bloch
Chana Bloch is the author of three books of poems, including the prize-winning Mrs. Dumpty; her new collection, Blood Honey, is available through Autumn House Press. She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs, now a Modern Library Classic; The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and his Open Closed Open; and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. She has received awards from the NEA, in poetry and translation, the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, PEN, and the Poetry Society of America.

Helen Conkling
Helen Conkling grew up near Chicago. Her degrees are from Northwestern University and she lives, at present, near the city of Buffalo, New York. Her poems have appeared in The Ohio Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, The Hudson Review, The Antioch Review, Field, 5 AM and others. She was awarded the Hugh J. Luke Award for work appearing in Prairie Schooner during the year 1989. And in l996, received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press for her book Red Peony Night, which was published by them in 1997. Since then she has been engaged in working with and completing her second book.

Jo McDougall
Jo McDougall’s most recent books of poetry are Dirt and Satisfied With Havoc, Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh. Widely anthologized, she has won awards from the DeWitt Wallace/ Reader’s Digest foundation and the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been adapted for film, theater, an artist’s book, and contemporary classical compositions. Towns Facing Railroads, a compilation of her poetry, was recently produced by the Arkansas Repertory Theatre.

Andrew Zawacki
Andrew Zawacki is the author of three poetry books Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia) and of the chapbooks Arrow’s shadow (Equipage); Georgia (Katalanche), co-winner of the 1913 Prize; Roche limit (tir aux pigeons); Bartleby’s Waste-book (Particle Series); and Masquerade (Vagabond). A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers’ Association, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine) and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s new and selected poems, Without Anesthesia, due in fall from Persea. His translation, from the French, of Sebastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is forthcoming from Burning Deck. He teaches at the University of Georgia.

Miranda Field
Miranda Field’s first book, Swallow, won a Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Award. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, and has received a Discovery/The Nation Award and a Pushcart Prize. She was born and raised in London, UK, and currently teaches poetry at the New School and New York University. She lives in New York City with poet Tom Thompson and their two children.

Anne Haines
Anne Haines is the author of the chapbook Breach (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, both in print and online, including Barn Owl Review, Best of the Net, Blackbird, Calyx, Sea Stories, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She has been the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Agha Shahid Ali Scholarship in Poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. Anne lives in Bloomington, Indiana where she works as the Web Site Editor for the Indiana University Libraries.

Clyde Kessler
Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, VA with his wife Kendall, an artist, and his son Alan. His home has Kendall’s art studio called Towhee Hill. He has published several poems in the past couple of years online in magazines such as Barnwood, Boxcar Poetry Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Sugar Mule, Wazee, and Xelas Magazine.

Scott Minar
Scott Minar is the editor of a poetry-writing textbook, The Working Poet: Seventy-Five Exercises and a Poetry Anthology, published by Autumn House Press. He is also the author of The Body’s Fire (Clarellen 2002) and The Palace of Reasons (Mammoth Books 2006), and he is the co-author, with Edward Dougherty, of Exercises for Poets: Double Bloom (Prentice Hall 2007). His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Ariel, Prairie Schooner, TicleAce, The Ohio Review, Flyway,The Mid-American Review, West Branch, The Laurel Review, and other magazines in the US and Canada. Scott teaches literature and writing at Ohio University Lancaster. His translations in Coal Hill Review are co-authored with Dr. Thomas Piontek of Shawnee State University in Ohio.

Elizabeth Onusko
Elizabeth Onusko received an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in English from Fordham University. She is the Managing Editor of Guernica: a Magazine of Art and Politics (GuernicaMag.com). Her work has appeared in Poetry East and is forthcoming in The Briar Cliff Review.

Liz Rosenberg
Liz Rosenberg is the author of 5 books of poems, most recently The Lily Poems (Bright Hills), a chapbook of poems about adoption, and Demon Love, from Mammoth Press. She is also the author of the novel Home Repair, (Harper/Avon) about a middle aged woman whose husband walks out on her in the middle of a garage sale. Target selected Home Repair as its Break Out Book for June. It is also available in a Large Print Edition. Liz teaches English at the State U of NY at Binghamton.

Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor
Maureen Seaton is the author of the memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, Living Out Series, 2008) and six poetry collections, most recently, Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009). She is the co-author of Facial Geometry (a chapbook from NeO Pepper Press, 2006) with Neil de la Flor and Kristine Snodgrass; and co-editor, with Denise Duhamel and David Trinidad, of Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Her awards include the Lambda Literary Award, the Audre Lorde Award, the Iowa Prize, the NEA, and the Pushcart. Poems co-authored with Neil de la Flor have appeared or are forthcoming in CaKe, H_NGM_N, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Sentence, and elsewhere.

Neil de la Flor’s solo work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Lodestar Quarterly, Barrow Street, Scene 360, Court Green, Sentence, and elsewhere. His first collection, Almost Dorothy, won the 2009 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and is due out in January 2010.

Karen Steinmetz
Karen Steinmetz lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches at Manhattanville College. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, Inkwell, Poet Lore, Illuminations, So To Speak, The Midwest Quarterly, and The Carquinez Poetry Review. Her young-adult novel The Mourning Wars is forthcoming from Roaring Brook Press.

Mark Sullivan
Mark Sullivan’s first collection of poetry, Slag (Texas Tech University Press, 2005), won the Walt McDonald First Book Series competition. His other awards include a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.

© 2009 Autumn House Press