Serving House Books welcomes Virginia LeBaron into its roster of authors as the recipient of the SHB Poetry Award. This award has transitioned over from our sister press Broken Tribe, where it ran for a number of years. Previous recipients include Colleen S. Harris and Rebecca Durham. Virginia’s new poetry collection will arrive in summer 2027.

Virginia LeBaron is a nurse and writer of poetry and non-fiction. She is the author of the chapbook Cardinal Marks (Finishing Line Press) and the ethnography Caring in Context (Routledge Press). Her writing has been supported by residencies with the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Graves Mill Farm, and she is an alum of the Lighthouse Poetry Collective. Her poetry has been recognized with the Luminaire Poetry Award, Bermuda Triangle Prize, and Cenie H. Moon Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia. In 2025, her debut collection, Care, a reckoning, was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press St. Lawrence Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Mom Egg Review, Potomac Review, and Pigeon Pages, among others. She is faculty at the University of Virginia School of Nursing and lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia. Learn more at: www.virginialebaron.com

ARTIFACTS AND OTHER STORIES is the winner in Short Story Fiction for the 2024 American Fiction Awards!

Congratulations to Ronna Wineberg! We’re honored to have published this excellent collection!

The Jewish Book Council recently published a fabulous review of Ronna Wineberg’s Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life. “The power of Ronna Wineberg’s writing,” observes Eleanor Ehrenkranz, “lies in her ability to create lovable characters. From the moment her stories begin, you feel for these smart, intense, and highly self-critical men and women who inhabit the pages…” Read the full review at the Jewish Book Council‘s website.

We are thrilled to announce that Mark Cox, SHB author of Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015, has won a $10,000 North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship. “One seeks that elusive treasure,” Cox says, “the poem that exists as a beautifully made object, but which seen, and heard, from the right angle becomes transparent—an emotional and psychological experience transcending its construction.” See the 2017 NC Arts Council’s Artists Fellowship Recipients website for more details. Congrats Mark!

Exciting news! Mark Cox’s Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 is featured on Poetry Daily today. “Alcohol” is the featured poem, and this intensely moving poem grabs you, wraps itself around you, and doesn’t let go. It begins, “In this faded family photo— / Horton, Kansas, ’36— / they are just two farmhands in overalls.” Go to poems.com to read it in full. Congratulations, Mark!

Poetry Spoken Here host Charlie Rossiter reviewed Paterson Light and Shadow in Episode #48 of his podcast. You can listen to the full review here. This collection of poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and photographs by Mark Hillringhouse pay homage to the history and changing landscape of Paterson, New Jersey. As Rossiter observes in his review, Gillan’s poems “gain power as they play off each other and Hillbringhouse’s superb photographs.” For more information on this beautiful collaborative work that is Paterson Light and Shadow, see the full description.

Donna Baier Stein’s novel The Silver Baron’s Wife was a finalist for both general fiction and historical fiction in the 2016 Forward INDIES competition and a finalist for the 2017 Paterson Fiction Prize.

The editors of Kirkus Reviews have selected Miriam Polli’s In A Vertigo of Silence as a Best Indie Books of 2015.

Sympathetic People was named one of four finalists in the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the Short Fiction category, and the book’s cover by Allen Mohr was also selected as a finalist for cover design.

Four selections from our books have been nominated for the 2015 edition of The Pushcart Prize: Edward R., “Welcome to Hell” from Letters to My Younger Self and three from Runnin’ Around: The Serving House Book of Infidelity—R.A. Rycraft, “Keeping Tabs”; Dennis Bormann, “Fishhawk”; and Roisin McLean, “Cleavage.”

Poetry Daily featured Rick Mulkey’s poem “Blind-Sided” from his collection Ravenous on Sunday, February 8, 2015.

His poem “Cured” was the 2018 winner of the Southeast Review Gearhart Poetry Prize, as judged by Barbara Hamby.

Letters to My Younger Self, edited by Jayne Thompson and Emily DeFreitas, has been selected as the common text for all entering freshmen at Widener University. The book was the subject of an hour-long broadcast on NPR that includes readings by the contributors and two newspaper columns, one in The Philadelphia Inquirer and one in the Delaware County Times.