about

Launched in 2001, Fence Books publishes poetry, fiction, and critical texts and anthologies, and prioritizes sustained support for its authors, many of whom come to us through our book contests and then go on to publish second, third, fourth books.

prizes

To keep informed about contests and their results, sign up for our newsletter.

You can submit to our book prizes during their submission windows.

We are seeking fiscal sponsorship for two book prizes: The Fence Modern Poets Series and the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Please contact Editorial Directors Emily Wallis Hughes and Jason Zuzga with your ideas. 

The Ottoline Prize reading period will open in fall 2023. 

The Fence Modern Poets Series is open to poets of any gender or gender identity and at any stage of career, and offers a one thousand dollar cash prize in addition to book publication, as well as a residency at Eliot House, in Gloucester, MA. Past winners include Joyelle McSweeney, Prageeta Sharma, Paul Legault, and Steven Alvarez.

The Ottoline Prize, formerly incarnated as the Motherwell Prize and the Alberta Prize, is an annual series, generously endowed by Jennifer S. Epstein, which offers publication to a first, second, third, fourth or beyond book of poems by a woman, any woman~~however she chooses to define or identify herself as being a woman, and including trans-women~~a five thousand dollar cash prize, and a residency at Eliot House, in Gloucester, MA. Past winners include Lesle Lewis, Chelsey Minnis, Harmony Holiday, Sasha Steensen, Laura Sims, and Ariana Reines.

In 2013 we launched the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, a contest for open-form prose projects of any length written in English. Alternating genres include novels, travel writing, criticism, memoir, poetics, biography, autobiography, speculation. Winners include Mark Baumer, Ottessa Moshfegh and Hilary Plum.

From 2007 to 2015, Fence Books was publisher in the National Poetry Series, and through this prize published books by Rodrigo Toscano, Douglas Kearney, Kevin Holden, and Jena Osman, among others. Judges included Marjorie Welish, Catherine Wagner, C. S. Giscombe, Bernadette Mayer, Ariana Reines, and John Keene.

Fence Books is a program of Fence Magazine, Incorporated, a nonprofit organization in the state of New York. Fence Magazine, Inc. enjoys the support of the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Fence is supported by membership, subscription revenue, and the sale of our books.

Born in 2016 Fence Digital is an electronic imprint of Fence Books and publishes multimedia poetry, fiction, and hybrid image texts that reinvest digitization with materiality, treating the screen as a skin. This extends Fence's mission to redefine the terms of accessibility to contemporary art writing by sharing it within its own variousness. Fence Digital believes that idiosyncratic and alternative writing should be read wherever you are, whomever you are with, and on any device you can hold. It is Fence Digital's mission to publish objects that relate systemically and formally to their media and that collaborate with the newfangled modes of dissemination and representation available in digital publishing environments. Fence Digital is edited by Robbie Held.

Fence Digital hosts Elecment, (eclectic states engaged), a hybrid poetic-critical project edited by Emily Wallis Hughes; and The Constant Critic, timely poetry criticism edited by Anthony Madrid and Tyrone Williams.

Afrosonics/ Mythscience is a suite of interdependent projects spearheaded by Harmony Holiday in conjunction with Fence Books, and including a podcast on MixCloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/Brightmoments/ and digital archive of diasporic oratory ,https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/afrosonics a living physical archive of uncollected jazz poetics lps.

Listen to a reading from MAAFA held in Brooklyn in 2022, where Harmony read along with Ariana Reines: https://www.buzzsprout.com/764150/10619619-harmony-holiday-and-ariana-reines-a-live-fence-reading-may-14-2022?t=0

Watch Harmony Holiday perform and discuss the work and music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSL-T5mzYzw

Launched in 2002--one of the earliest sites for poetry criticism on the web--and published almost continuously since then, The Constant Critic was formulated to answer a lack of timely and trustworthy long-form critical attention to new books of poetry from small and large presses. Newly reformulated in 2018 with editors Anthony Madrid and Tyrone Williams, The Constant Critic continues to apply a theory of trust and time to its attention to the current publishing industry and the new books it produces.

FENCE understands our podcast as a means of freely distributing content from each issue of the biannual print journal. These audio-journal/podcasts will be substantial in length, each "season" divided into approximately hour-long episodes.

Across these episode, most of the works published in the journa are read intimately and personally in place aloud by our writers, so you can hear where they are, not in a studio, their human voices enfolded by diverse soundscapes.

The occasional contributor breaks into song. Songs by musicians are interspersed. For subscribers who might read along with journal in hand, we hope to provide another means of encounter with the texts.

You can listen here on this website. You can also find Fence Sounds anywhere you usually listen to podcasts -- just search for Fence Poetry.

We will also as time permits be bringing you shorter episodes: idiosyncratic FENCE content. Conversations, investigations, book excerpts, and stories--discovering and instigating collaborations through audio.

La Presse is an imprint of Fence Books and is dedicated to contemporary French poetry and hybrid-genre work translated by English-language poets. We're a nano-press; we publish one to three books a year.

With our books, we hope to honor and extend the poetic friendship that has existed between France and the U.S. since at least the mid-19th century and has been particularly active since the 1960s.

Since its inception, this friendship has been based on a mutual exploration of and experimentation with language and on the conviction that translation can lead to ways of surpassing the limits of a given language that exist nowhere within that language itself. La Presse hopes to create a space for such surpassments.

BOOKS