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In case you wondered how we select the winner of our Annual
Poetry Book Award winner, here’s a look at the process and the people who
make it possible.
1. After the deadline has passed and all of the entries have been
received, usually 200-300, we distribute the manuscripts evenly to each
member of our editorial staff. Each reader then carefully reads 20-30 manuscripts on his/her own. This takes 3-4 weeks; sometimes
fewer, sometimes more.
2. From there, each reader selects approximately 10-15
manuscripts that he/she feels strongly about and those manuscripts move on
to a second reading by a different editor on staff.
3. At this point, each editor holds 10-15 manuscripts that
he/she has not previously read. The editors will then read each new
manuscript and select the top 3-5 from their batch, and those will then be sent to final judging. This
takes 2-3 weeks.
4. Final selection is done exclusively by Sam Pierstorff,
Founding Editor of Quercus Review/Quercus Review Press, who reads each
manuscript at least twice. Should he be torn between 2 or 3
manuscripts, a final meeting is called where all the editors come together
to debate, discuss, and finally, determine a winner.
That’s our process in a nutshell. As we grow as a press,
we hope to hire some notable “outside” judges, but as of now we like to
stay in-house, because after all, we must believe strongly in the books we
publish in order to spend so many long hours and thousands of our dollars
on publishing and marketing them. We care deeply about the quality of
the poetry and the poetry books we publish.
If you are reading this section to gain
insight into our likes and dislikes, we might encourage you to read a copy
of Quercus Review since the editors who select the poetry to appear
in the journal are the same (mostly) as those who end up judging the book
contest.
But rest assured, all of our editors are knowledgeable,
trustworthy, ethical, honest, and fair. They make hard decisions but
mostly the right ones. There’s no doubt that a gem of a book might fall
through the cracks sometime, but we pray that a publisher somewhere will
stumble upon it, because that’s the goal we all share: to put good poetry
into the hands of people.
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