Welcome to the Texas Review Press!

The Texas Review Press is a member of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium. The Press publishes fiction, poetry, and prose non-fiction as well as a literary magazine, The Texas Review.

The most recent issue of The Texas Review features fiction from John Michael Cummings, Don Meredith, and Phong Nguyen; essays from D.C. Berry and Anis Shivani; and poetry from Jack Bedell, Jack Crocker, Kendall Dunkelberg, Rebecca Foust, Roger Jones, Lyn Lifshin, Jack Myers, Dave Parsons, Larry Thomas, and William Wright.

Recent and Forthcoming

Basic Heart
Winner of the 2008 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize

Renée Ashley

Basic Heart is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes grounded in the fantastic landscapes of awareness, of desire and despair, Ashley draws us a map of a world and shows us just how that "world is turned like a pig on a spit." She brings us back to the recognition that we are all ordinary, that sometimes we need saving, and that "what is saved just might turn beautiful."

Renée Ashley is the author of three volumes of poetry as well as a chapbook and a novel. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as a Pushcart Prize. She is on the core faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency Master’s of Fine Arts in the creative writing program. She lives in Kingwood, New Jersey.

". . . offers us new kinds of songs for our broken-down age. . . ." —Jack Myers, series judge

Hog to Hog

Winner of the 2007 George Garrett Fiction Prize

Jack Smith

A dark comedy written in rollicking prose, Hog to Hog deals with excessive development in a relatively pristine Midwestern rural area. The spoils of misadventure go to the top polluters, like Dick Columbus, who makes money for the state’s coffers with his Wheeleroo!, an ATV mega event that runs roughshod over the local nature sanctuary. Columbus wins a seat in the state Senate. Bernie Sapp, the novel’s protagonist, lacks political savvy and power and ends up in one of Columbus’s pet projects, the newly constructed prison. With a culture based on plunder and socio-economic injustice, the ordinary man’s American Dream turns into the American Nightmare.

Jack Smith has published fiction in such literary journals as The Southern Review, The Texas Review, North American Review, X-Connect, Happy, In Posse Review, Southern Ocean Review, and B&A: New Fiction. His reviews have appeared in Missouri Review, Texas Review, Georgia Review, Pleiades, X-Connect, RE:AL, and Environment magazine. He also has written a number of articles for Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market and The Writer and co-authored the nonfiction work Killing Me Softly (Monthly Review Press, 2002). He is founder and co-editor of the Green Hills Literary Lantern, an online journal, published by Truman State University.

“Jack Smith’s stunning first novel, Hog to Hog, proves William Styron’s thesis that ‘only a great satirist can tackle the world’s problems and articulate them.’ The pace is feverish, with non-stop action revealing new heights of national folly, greed, and excess. Bernie Sapp, Smith’s protagonist, is by turn a fearful, angry, arrogant, acquisitive, horny, and touching Everyman as he scrambles avidly for his slice of the pie. Smith’s prose is crisp and acerbic, his themes reminiscent of Heller, Southern and Nathaniel West: surely this is what black humor is all about.” —Geoffrey Clark

“Boisterous and compelling, Hog to Hog is often a funhouse mirror reflecting American materialism, greed, and crassness. Jack Smith’s spot-on dialogue will make you laugh; this award-wining tale, the taller it grows, will convince you to treasure it as good old satire.” —Mark Wisniewski

Hamlet Off Stage

D.C. Berry

POLONIUS: "The beautiful beauty of Berry’s art is he can’t decide if Hamlet is an old maid like me or not."

CLAUDIUS: "Berry brilliant at showing the tragic results of a college boy not getting any."

OPHELIA: "I agree with ’Ratio. Hamlet oddly sexmatized in his development. Berry nails it, next time less Hambone and more Hardbone."

REYNALDO: "Every hypocrisy on earth revealed here. Shaky tried to write a thriller for the bucks. Got thrown off by artsy-fartsy, which the keen Berry brilliantly avoids."

ROSENCRANTZ: "Berry brilliant here. Finer concluding couplets never penned."

D.C. Berry taught at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, where for years he was poet in residence. There he published hundreds of poems and several volumes and three times won the Excellence in Teaching Award, while being honored as a Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

News

A reminder for all those with manuscripts they'd like to submit to any of the Texas Review Press competitions. The submission deadlines are as follows: the Robert Phillips Poetry Prize (June 15); the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Chapbook Prize (July 15); the George Garrett Fiction Prize (September 15); and the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize (October 15). For more information, complete guidelines, and catalog information for previous winners, please check out our competition pages.

Mom's Canoe

Winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize, 2008

Rebecca Foust

Mom’s Canoe is a chapbook of 24 poems rooted in the author’s memories of growing up in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania, an area of rich farmland and thickly wooded hills and valleys that was also the site of heavy coal mining and railroading activity in the last century. The eventual decline of those industries and the environmental and economic devastation left in their wake are important themes in this book, which also pays tribute to the enduring natural beauty of the region and to the strength, suffering, and joy of the people who have made their lives there.

In 2007 Rebecca Foust’s book Dark Card won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize (Texas Review Press), and her full-length manuscript was a finalist for Poetry’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award. A finalist in five competitions, a second chapbook, Mom’s Canoe, won the Robert Phillips Poetry Prize in 2008. Foust’s recent poetry was nominated for two Pushcart Awards and appears or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Margie, North American Review, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others.

“Rebecca Foust’s work is beginning to garner attention. I found these poems astonishingly strong and beautiful. It’s not common for me to find an unpublished collection of poems as good as this one.” —Susan Griffin

Painting the Christmas Trees

Joe Weil

In Painting the Christmas Trees, Joe Weil explores the meaning of neighborhood, both its rootedness and its transience in terms of the port city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in which he was formed as a poet. His work mixes different registers of language, from the Rust Belt working class speech of his family and friends to the poetic influences of his first reading: Roethke, Williams, Stevens, and Yeats. His Irish Catholic working class upbringing instills his poetry with a sense of communion. The poems in this book are anchored to the loss and the brio of people he has known and worked among both as a toolmaker and as a poet. He is essentially a spiritual comic in so far as his interest lies as much with the vitally ugly and broken as it does with the smoothly eloquent. Unlike many volumes of poetry, Painting the Christmas Trees is full of characters, not unlike a novel. Weil believes a poet should reclaim the name of storyteller. He is not ashamed to be one.

Joe Weil was born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At the age of twenty he dropped out of Rutgers and became a toolmaker in order to help out his family. Weil remained a toolmaker for twenty years while writing and publishing his poems, building a reputation on the New Jersey/NewYork poetry scene. He is now an instructor in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing departments at SUNY, Binghamton. His previous books include In Praise We Enter, A Portable Winter, and The Pursuit of Happiness.

Taking the Switchback

Stephen Gardner

Do you see a book that interests you?

You can contact the Texas Review Press either by mail or by telephone:

Texas Review Press
Sam Houston State University
Department of English
PO Box 2146
Huntsville, TX 77341-2146

Telephone: (936) 294-1992
Fax: (936) 294-3070