About Slapering Hol Press

Named from the Old Dutch for Sleepy Hollow and founded in 1990 by Margo Taft Stever to advance the national and international conversation of poetry and poetics, principally by publishing and supporting the work of new poets, Slapering Hol Press (SHP) is now one of the oldest chapbook presses in the United States. SHP launched its first publication, the chapbook anthology, Voices from the River, which featured upcoming and established luminaries such as Hayden Carruth, Jean Valentine, Dana Gioia, Stephen Dunn, and Billy Collins, and set a high aesthetic and literary standard. 

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Since 1991, SHP has conducted an annual anonymously judged national competition for the publication of a chapbook by a poet who has not previously published a poetry collection. For close to four decades, SHP has published over fifty finely crafted poetry chapbooks by promising new poets whose work has not yet appeared in book form; collaborations between new and established authors; books and chapbooks by poets from other countries who have not reached American audiences; and anthologies. Through publications, readings, and workshops, Slapering Hol Press, the small press imprint of the Hudson Valley Writers Center, features poets whose diverse themes of survival and hope cross cultures. Slapering Hol Press has sustained an enduring tradition of discovering new and significant voices in contemporary poetry.

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In 2008, Slapering Hol Press Co-editors initiated the “Conversation” series in which a well-known woman poet chooses an emerging poet to appear in the same chapbook with an interview at the end. Poets published in this series include Elizabeth Alexander, Denise Duhamel, Toi Derricotte, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Kim Addonizio, Molly Peacock, Kimiko Hahn, and Dorianne Lux. In 2014, Slapering Hol Press published Seven New Generation African Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, in collaboration with Prairie Schooner and the Poetry Foundation.