Pleiades Press is pleased to announce that after an open reading period during the summer of 2019, we have selected Rodney Gomez’s Geographic Tongue to be the fifth book published in the Visual Poetry Series. The book will be released in Fall 2020.
Rodney Gomez is the author of Citizens of the Mausoleum (Sundress, 2018), a finalist for the John A. Robertson Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; Ceremony of Sand (YesYes, 2019), and the forthcoming Arsenal with Praise Song (Orison Books, 2020), a finalist for the Orison Prize and the Dorset Prize. He is the recipient of the Drinking Gourd Prize from the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern University, the Editors’ Prize from RHINO, the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, the Rane Arroyo Prize, and the Orison Anthology Award. His work appears in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, North American Review, Pleaides, Rattle, Denver Quarterly, Verse Daily, and other journals. He is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop and works at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. In 2020 he will serve as the Poet Laureate of the city of McAllen, Texas.
Previous titles in the Visual Poetry Series include: How to Tell If You Are Human: Diagram Poems by Jessy Randall, In Between: Poetry Comics by Mita Mahato, Book of No Ledge by Nance Van Winckel, and Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours by Bianca Stone.
A selection of Gomez’s visual poems can be seen online at the Indianapolis Review.
A special thank you to all who entered the Visual Poetry Series this year. We would like to commend our finalists, whose manuscripts in our opinion were all outstanding and publishable:
Gabrielle Bates, Johnny Damm, Nick Potter, Katy Didden, Alex Moni-Sauri, and Katrina Roberts.