welcome!
Why open a small press?
Someone once told me, “The greatest story ever told was probably never finished.” The idea might have manifested itself on the page, but for one reason or another never made it to publication.
I want to give those writers who have a great story to tell or stellar poems to share an outlet for their voice. I want to publish authors I believe in.
V Press LC is small. I like it that way. There’s more flexibility. I can publish works that are fresh and original, works that empower, educate, encourage or inspire–the best works are those that get into the bones. And I look forward to reading pieces that will live inside my marrow.
—Torie Amarie Dale, Director & Managing Editor
latest news
V Press LC is thrilled to announce LYRICS FOR ROCK STARS has won the 2021 SOVAS Voice Arts Award!
LYRICS FOR ROCK STARS, Heather Mateus Sappenfield, Michael Crouch, and V Press LC are all credited as Audie Awards Finalists.
Marlys West
Winner of the $700 Poetry Book Prize for The Vital Function of Constant NarrativeWhatever flows from you, you are: black bird, old dog, white cat. This new cup.
This line from the opening poem in Marlys West’s The Vital Function of Constant Narrative suggests elegantly the main thread that runs throughout the collection: here is no barrier between past, present, and future; this and other worldly; the living and the dead. All that has ever been or ever will be—plant, mineral, or animal—are vital parts of the ongoing narrative of both the conscious and the unconscious. West’s award winning book is a stunning collection of lyrical, wise, and haunting reminders of the connected, sacred nature of all things.
— Cathy Smith Bowers, Guest Editor and Former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
Chapman Hood Frazier
Finalist with Publication and $300 Monetary Award – Poetry Book Prize
Chapman Hood Frazier’s The Lost Books of the Bestiary is both requiem and elegy. The arrangement of the poems is evolutionary in nature, an exploration of a natural world that continues to teach us one of life’s greatest paradoxes: that only in loss do we truly understand the essence of that which is now gone. Frazier’s collection instructs us how to celebrate life even as it is passing from us, to realize that the stone by the tomb’s door…[is] a luminescence.
— Cathy Smith Bowers, Guest Editor and Former Poet Laureate of North Carolina