Sundress Publications announces the release of this year’s free, downloadable Craft Chaps by Joshua Nguyen and Cynthia Guardado.
From self-publishing scams to academic presses, Joshua Nguyen explains the pitfalls and pleasures of the publishing world in Hidden Labor & The Naked Body: Work They Don’t Prepare You For After Publication. Useful examples of tax spreadsheets and promotion calendars are balanced with provocative writing prompts such as creating an ekphrastic poem about your own author photo or writing an unprofessional author bio listing all your insecurities. With humor and practical advice, Nguyen takes writers step-by-step through what they will have to become (accountant, social media manager, fundraiser, booking agent), while easing the anxieties of post-publication life.
Part lyric poem, part memoir, part workbook, Memories We Never Had: Writing in a Postcolonial Existence lays a path for interrogating personal and political histories. Cynthia Guardado destabilizes memory, queering the past to reveal that what we do not remember is as important as what we do: last words not spoken, questions not asked, wars not fought, yet whose consequences can be felt for generations. By constructing their own, chosen pasts, writers can build a present moment and a future to counter oppressive, white, academic, and literary standards often internalized within oneself.
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and winner of the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbook American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is the Wit Tea co-editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.
Cynthia Guardado (she/her/hers) is a Los-Angeles born queer Salvadoran poet and professor. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Cenizas, (University of Arizona Press, 2022) and ENDEAVOR (World Stage Press, 2017).
