June Press Updates: New Chapbook, Upcoming Events, & Other Offerings!
Happy Pride Month! Pre Order Sea Changes by Hayun Cho now!
Our latest poetry chapbook Sea Changes by Hayun Cho is officially available for pre-order and will be available July 1st! Check out some of the blurbs for the chapbook we’ve received so far:
"Hayun's poems are enveloped in the tender meat of a soft, colorful creature with a poisonous stinger. Like waves, they push and pull, lapping at the shores of our deepest longing. Otherworldly yet grounded in the sticky matter that makes up our lives, Hayun's writing stares back at history's capacious glare, and within her gaze, home moves through us like ocean water."— Ashia Ajani, author of Heirloom"Hayun Cho's Sea Changes is a captivating new take on womanhood, feminine rage, diaspora, consumption, and the responsibilities we bear and carry as our ancestors' descendants. Seemingly mundane moments between women - as in 'I walk to the Korean grocery store to buy apples' where an elder teaches her how to select the best ones - and haunting imaginings - such as 'A House Full of Women Who Live Forever' where dream women become her allies - are given equal weight and opportunity to move readers. With precision and beauty, this is a collection that, much like Cho's ghosts, will stay with you long after the last poem rings true." — Sofía Aguilar, author of amor. and STREAMING SERVICE: season two Sea Changes by Hayun Cho is a hybrid collection that weaves theories of survival and transformation in the face of negotiating rage, grief, pleasure, kinship, and the Korean diaspora. The collection imagines everyday life and the natural world as mediums of revelation through which another world may be possible, traversing kitchens, attics, cities, and seasons. At turns argumentative and mystical, Sea Changes explores the intersections between women’s embodiment, intergenerational memory, and creative practice. The errant lyric voice, buoyed by the intimacies of sisterhood and friendship, arrives at the necessity of dreaming. Sea Changes reflects upon the insurgent promise of being the reader and writer of one’s life.
The official cover art will drop this week & we can’t wait to introduce this gorgeous chapbook into the world! <3
Catch us at Poesía y Jotería in San Antonio!
Abode will be celebrating Pride by tabling at Poesía y Jotería--a queer Spanglish open mic here in San Antonio on Saturday, June 7th from 6 to 8pm. Featured readers include Violeta Garza, Marcela Hernandez, and RatQing Rios. There will also be a drag show, mercadito, resource fair, and open mic. We’ll be tabling with our chapbooks and information about our 2025 programming. Stop by and say hi!
Abode Press Virtual Retreat Programming + Fellows!
This week is the start of our Abode Press Virtual Retreat with faculty instructors including KB Brookins, mónica teresa ortiz, Ariana Brown, Stephanie Macias, and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. The Retreat spans the entire month of June, with workshops taking place on Sundays. Throughout the week, fellows have access to 2-3 weekly programs. Our Retreat Programming is packed with seminars, lectures, craft talks, and workshops that are available to the public with tickets set to $25. Take a look at the programing here and don’t miss out on these incredible sessions!
In addition, we have 57 incredible fellows joining us this summer studying in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and speculative fiction and are incredibly grateful and excited to welcome them to Abode Press family. Take a look at our 2025 fellows and read their bios to learn more about them.
Chapbook News!
In addition, we’re excited to announce that Bilingual Bitch sold out of its first 100 copies, and we ordered an additional 50 because of the immense love for the book. Make sure to get your copy before it officially sells out. Sofía Aguilar, a journalist at HipLatina, also interviewed Angelica Dàvila about her chapbook. Thank you, Sofía for championing our author. You can read the interview on HipLatina here!
Secondly, our beloved first poetry collection Quererme En La Luz by Farrah Fang has officially sold out and is out of print. It’s a bittersweet feeling, but after two solid print runs, we are so thankful to have had the opportunity to bring this much needed chapbook into the world. Thank you to all of you for supporting Farrah, and we are so grateful to be her publisher.
Join our Intern Reading Program!
Ever wanted to work with us at Abode Press? We’re currently open for volunteer intern readers for our 2025 chapbook reading period, which starts August 15th! Interns can apply to read for our hybrid, prose, or poetry sections. Interns will have the chance to read manuscripts and gain access to the CLMP internship program to network with others in the publishing industry. Learn more on Submittable here.
Upcoming Abode Workshops!
On top of the Virtual Retreat program that the public can sign up for, we also have two stellar workshops planned for the month of June. Take a look at them below:
The Music of Minor Distractions: A Multi-genre Revision Workshop
Wed, Jun 11 | Virtual Workshop | 6:30-8:00pm CST
In this course, we will pay attention to what exists at the periphery of our current drafts and move through a revision process that embraces strangeness, unmaking and remaking, and unconventional approaches to plot and/or poetics. Get tickets here.
Temporary Utopias
Sat, Jun 14 | Virtual Workshop | 11am-12:30pm CST
Drawing upon AIDS literature for reference, Temporary Utopias seeks to provide a space of possibility in the past, present, and future tenses: example poems from queer ancestors, providing a blueprint for survival; forward-looking leaps in prompts encouraging alternative world-building; & more. Get tickets here!
Lastly!
June is one of the busiest months for us at Abode Press, and we hope to see you in-person or virtually at any of the events mentioned above. We’re also excited to announce that we’ll be attending AWP 2026 in Baltimore, and we cannot wait to keep meeting more and more of you all in person at the conference center if you plan to attend.
Since it is Pride Month, we also want to take a moment to reflect on the fact that our Masthead is mostly comprised of people of color who are also queer and/or trans. It’s important to us to uplift queer stories, and we are proud to be home to authors who also identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community. Want to support us or our authors for Pride Month? Check out TOY SOLDIERS by MICHAEL CHANG which queers language and culture to critique 21st century living. Or, make a one-time tax deductible donation to support us and the work we do at Abode Press. Your contributions, especially right now with slashes towards grant funding, are incredibly important to keeping us afloat so that we can continue to do this work.
Thank you, as always, for your support! Happy Pride y’all!