Each spring Floating Bridge Press’s editors are busy reading manuscripts submitted to our statewide poetry chapbook competition. Judging is blind, meaning that the writers’ names are hidden from the editors, and we're never surprised that the words we're excited to honor and share as books have come to us from another great poet in Spokane. "Grist," by Kate Peterson, was our 2016 winner. In 2015, we published Brian Cooney’s "My Idea of Fun" and Maya Jewell Zeller’s "Yesterday, the Bees" as our finalists. (Brian and Maya are professors at Gonzaga, and neither knew the other had sent us a manuscript.) John Whalen’s "Above the Pear Trees" was our 2014 winner, and Laura Read’s "The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You" won in 2010. And then there are all the Spokane writers we’ve published in Pontoon, our annual journal that features poems from the manuscripts we receive each year but can't publish. You can learn about these books, and support an independent non-profit by ordering them, at www.floatingbridgepress.org. Pontoon is rich and free at https://pontoonpoetry.com/.

Will we publish more books by Spokane writers this year? We'll know, and we’ll let you know, in June. Now back to reading—we’re choosing semifinalists this week and the stack is large!

Thank you, poets everywhere in Washington, for sending us your work.