News

The BPJ team is thrilled to announce that the 2020 title in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series is Victoria C. Flanagan's Glossary of Unsaid Terms. Flanagan holds a dual-genre MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Virginia Commonwealth University. Their writing has appeared in New South, Crab Creek Review, and Blackbird, among other journals, and has been awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Emerging Poets Prize from Palette Poetry, and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship. They currently serve as the nonfiction editor at Anomaly and teach in central Washington.

The collection, chosen by the editors, grapples beautifully with the challenges of inheritance—physical, cultural, and psychic. Editor Melissa Crowe writes, “Flanagan's book is a coming-of-age narrative—but not the kind we've seen before. Its speaker, in their twenties and in treatment for cancer, reveals in poem after poem how hard it is to grow into one's full personhood while also engaged in an effort to survive. What's remarkable is that Flanagan never lets us believe the project of becoming is less urgent than the speaker's effort to stay alive; it's precisely this intermingling of urgencies that gives the collection its electricity and its import."

When you subscribe to the BPJ, you’ll receive as part of your subscription a copy of the forthcoming chapbook in the series. Subscribe now to receive Glossary of Unsaid Terms, due to ship in May, as your first issue.