A little bit of how's your father/motherhood anthology

Publishing 27th Feb 2014

We've had a great response to our call for submissions to The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood and The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood, with 346 people from around the world sending in their poems before the deadline on 9th December. We received 170 submissions to our anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse earlier in the year, so we were slightly startled by the response to this new call, and delighted by the number of people who felt moved to submit.

Rachel (my co-editor) and I have now read all of the poems (nearly 1000!) and we met up last week to compare notes. It took 8 solid hours of discussion over two days, during which we found that most poems fell into one of a handful of categories. Popular ones included: loving portraits of children and pregnancies; anxious reflections on the responsibilities of parenthood; difficult relationships with parents; and poets considering their parents in the light of their own parenthood. In order to create a balanced pair of collections, we tried to select the strongest poems in each category, but the extremely high standard of submissions meant it was frequently difficult to make the final call.

Publishing 29th May 2014

We ended up with two shortlists from which we'll be crafting our final selections next week, and I hope to start sending out responses in the last couple of weeks of January. I can already tell that these are going to be two incredible books, full of wisdom and heartbreaking insights, and I can't wait to share them with everyone next month and in May. In the meantime, I am also very excited about the covers (exclusively revealed on this blog), and about the launch party for the Anthology of Motherhood, which will be on Thursday 27th February in Vauxhall, London. I hope that lots of Emma Press supporters will come along to support us - do join the Facebook group or put it in your diary if you'd like to attend. I will also try to take the books out of London and around the country, so watch this space.