August Updates: Chapbook Subs Open, Preorder "Recipes for Grief," and Workshops Galore!!
We Open for Chapbook Submissions on August 15th!
We open for our chapbook submission prize on August 15th! We will be accepting poetry chapbooks up to 30 pages and hybrid chapbooks up to 40 pages. We look forward to reading your submissions and thank you for sending your work to us!
Learn more about our chapbook prize here: Submissions | Abode Press
Pre-order Our Next Chapbook: Recipes for Grief by Jonathan Wlodarski
We’re incredibly excited to introduce our next chapbook: Recipes for Grief by Jonathan Wlodarski!
Book Description: Not all hunger can be satisfied by food. Recipes for Grief by Jonathan Wlodarski is a collection of three surreal stories where food and mourning become inseparable. In “The Cake,” a funeral cake slowly drives an isolated town to sacrifice itself for one more taste. In “Spider Lung,” a caterer who coughs up spiders confronts grief, illness, and the limits of medicine must decide how he wants to face his own death. In “The Bread and the Bird,” a son struggles to preserve his family’s magical bakery while caring for his abusive, dying father. Through strange, unsettling worlds, these stories explore what we consume to survive loss as well as what loss asks us to surrender. Recipes for Grief is a meditation on death, family, hunger, and the ways we nourish ourselves when comfort is no longer enough.
Jonathan Wlodarski is a graduate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His book Love Letters to a Future Ice Age is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. His work has appeared in F(r)iction, Foglifter Journal, and The Forge Literary Magazine, among other venues.
Welcome Crystal Odelle: Our New Senior Hybrid Editor!
We are so excited to welcome Crystal Odelle to lead our Hybrid Chapbook team. Crystal began reading with Abode when we first started and found her way back to us. Because of her fearless championship for incredible work, strong editorial experience with Newfound and others, and a renowned writer herself, we couldn’t be more grateful to promote Crystal to lead the section. Learn more about her below!
Learn more about Crystal: Author of Trans Studies, Crystal Odelle (they / she) is a storyteller of trans / polyamorous / whore practice, writing and revising into the desire for something like a life. Their stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Split Lip Magazine, smoke and mold, Apogee, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. A Lambda Literary fellow and McCormack Writing Center Scholar, Crystal was awarded the 2026 Waasnode Short Fiction Prize selected by Megan Milks and anthologized in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. She co-organizes Changeling Queer Series and serves as senior hybrid editor at Abode Press. Her writing and performances trouble the divide between fiction and reality toward liberation.
Fall 2026 Workshops!
Our Fall 2026 workshops are officially live for the rest of year, and we have four incredible programs coming your way. Read about them and snag your tickets!
Epistolary Poetics against Prisons led by Dkéama Alexis on Sat, August 15th from 12-130pm CT. In an increasingly technologically-dependent world, letters remain a critical link between our incarcerated comrades and the outside world. In this workshop, attendees will reflect on their own letter-writing practices, learn about the role of letter-writing within the tradition of supporting Black political prisoners, and then choose between two writing activities: creating a Black August-themed epistolary poem or writing a letter to an incarcerated Black freedom fighter. Get tickets here.
Unlearning Adult Supremacy: Writing Toward Youth Liberation led by Sirajum Sandhi on September 5th from 1-3:00 CT. Adult supremacy is one of the oldest violences we inherit — a quiet architecture that teaches us whose voices matter, whose bodies are believable, whose futures are worth protecting. This workshop invites writers to name, interrogate, and undo adult supremacy as a cultural logic rooted in colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery — and to imagine youth liberation as essential to collective freedom. Get tickets here.
Fictionalizing the Family Archives led by Noelani Piters on October 10th. What happens when we turn our attention to family and what our ancestors leave us? What is revealed when we reimagine shared history and that which we do not know? How can we honor the stories we inherit, while also incorporating our own perspectives? In this 1.5-hour generative class, we will read, listen, and look closely at literary and visual work that engages family and heritage through innovative and surprising methods. Then, we will use our own family archives as a jumping-off point. “Fictionalizing” in the context of this class is loose, allowing for emotional truths, hybrid explorations, and a sense of play to take the lead. We’ll experiment with literary devices, forms, and perspectives to create evocative writing that is rooted in the real. Get tickets here.
Writing to Remember: Intro to Flash Prose led by Tala Khanmalek aka mecca monarch on November 28th. Flash prose, whether fictional or non-fictional, is characterized by its capacity to tell an unforgettable story in very few words.In this workshop, we will approach flash prose as a self-contained window onto socio-historical processes that emerge from our most specific lived experiences and in particular, memories. Get tickets here.
Book News!
How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse officially landed on our shelves on Friday, July 31st.
We are excited to be tabling at the book launch in San Antonio, Texas on Wed, August 26th from 630-830pm at the Juice Joint where the launch will be led by Poesia y Joteria (a queer Spanglish open mic series in SATX). There will be poetry readings, music by Son Queers, plus platica y chismecito. We hope to see you there!
Aerik Francis, author of BODYPOLITIC, was recently featured in The Poets Podcast where they discussed their chapbook and more. Listen to the episode here.
MK Thekkumkatil was recently featured in smoke and mold for an interview about their newest book The Sexuality of Care and their Abode chapbook Weaving Liberation. Read the interview here.
Abode Staff News!
We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.
Addie Tsai’s cyanopoem was accepted into an online cyanotype exhibition to celebrate World Cyanotype Day. Find it here!
Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.
Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!