NEWS

Lytton Smith Wins Foundlings Chapbook and Artist Residency Competition

Congratulations to the first Foundlings Chapbook and Artist Residency Competition winner Lytton Smith. Lytton Smith is the author of two books of poetry from Nightboat Books and the translator of several books from the Icelandic. The novel Öræfi—the Wastelands, from the Icelandic of Ófeigur Sigurðsson, will be published by Deep Vellum in Spring 2018. He is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo.

Lytton enjoyed a weekend residency at the Hotel henry in Buffalo, NY. Foundlings Press will release Lytton’s winning chapbook,My Radar Data Knows Its Thing, designed by guest artist Stephen Fitzmaurice, in January 2018.

We would also like to congratulate four runners-up: Terez Peipins, Tige DeCoster, Benjamin Brindise, and George Guida. These four poets submitted chapbooks that stood out among a very large crop of fine submissions -- and we're proud to announce that all four, along with our winner Lytton Smith, will have poems at the core of FOUNDLINGS IV, the next installment of "the zine that started it all," to be released in spring 2018.

OUR STORY

We seek to publish - in paper and ink - the best writing. We take our ethic and aesthetic from the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church. Not all of it; just Canon 1115, which closes with the provoking observation that "Foundlings are presumed to be legitimate until the contrary is proved."

We also take direction from Coco Chanel, who observed that “style is all that endures.”

We pledge allegiance to no ideology or school. We are fond of found text and images. We listen to other people's conversations, ready to catch and take in any cast off and abandoned language. We are in an open relationship with English.

While we will read any and every submission with interest and attention, there are some consistencies among the writers we end up publishing and promoting: They read; they revise; they are unhesitant; they do not posture; they do their best to tell the truth; and they have phenomenal ears.

Once a Foundling, always a Foundling. While our writers publish widely, and may give most of their pages to much bigger, better known, longer established presses and publications, we will work tirelessly to nurture their careers and to promote them for as long as we continue to read, write, publish, and talk about books.

We are devoted to the writers whose efforts throw off the heat that warms the living today, and to the writers whose accomplishments will throw off the light that guides the living tomorrow.