Writers
The Orchard Street Press (TOSP) was established in 2016 to provide an alternative publishing opportunity for writers whose work deserves an audience beyond readers of the small literary reviews and journals. From the start, TOSP has worked closely with its writers to produce books that appeal to the heart, the mind, and the eye.
In 2017, TOSP conducted a national chapbook contest that produced Orchard Street’s first five published collections. In 2018, The Press changed things up a bit and switched to an annual Poetry Contest that considered individual poems. Prize winners and other select entrants were then invited to submit chapbook manuscripts for possible publication. That Contest yielded the next set of chapbooks and the first edition of Quiet Diamonds, an annual poetry journal composed of pieces submitted to the Contest. It has also been the occasion for the selection of the winner of TOSP’s annual Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize.
Through the Contest, books, and chapbooks we have published in the past seven years, it has been our great joy at Orchard Street to interact with so many writers from across the country. To date, we have published 63 chapbooks by 57 poets from 24 different states. In the five editions of Quiet Diamonds, we have published poems by 116 poets from a total of 30 states. Click below to identify those writers.
The Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize
The 2018 annual Poetry Contest also saw the first awarding of the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize ($500 and recognition for the First-Place winning poem in the annual Poetry Contest). The prize is named for two women who had a major influence on the people who decided to live on Orchard Street:
Before they were wives, mothers, and grandmothers, Louise Malovrh and Claire Fenlon were young women who loved poetry; and, though they never had the opportunity to study poetry in any formal sense, they never let that passion fade. And even as life caught them up in the labors of their every day, they passed that love of poetry on to their children and, through them, into the expanding worlds of their families and beyond where that love still flourishes and grows to this day. The Orchard Street Press proudly names its annual Poetry Prize to recognize and extend their gift. Click below to identify those winners.
Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize Winners
Below are brief bios of our chapbook/book writers, listed alphabetically by first name