Charlotte Lit Press, created in 2022, publishes poetry chapbooks and full collections, and showcases poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit. From 2022-2024 we awarded more than $20,000 and publication to writers in and from the American South as part of the Lit/South Awards.
Submissions: Book submissions are currently closed, but check this page or the Charlotte Lit newsletter for updates.
Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit
Poetry from Charlotte Lit Press
Irene Blair Honeycutt, Mountains of the Moon
In Mountains of the Moon, her fifth collection, Irene Blair Honeycutt takes readers on a journey from creeks of childhood through rivers and inlets all the way to the Red Sea and back again. The natural world has always been Honeycutt’s closest companion and theme, never more so than in these poems—so many of them written during the forced exile of the pandemic—through which we learn the power of living within the paradox of joy and sorrow. This lyric, elegiac collection demonstrates the power of evolution and reveals a storehouse of treasures left by the dead for the living. In rich and surprising language, Honeycutt shows us how to transmute grief into a conscious letting go. How to embody forgiveness, accept the unacceptable. How, in a world that sometimes seems to lack it, to find hope.
Born in Jacksonville, FL, Irene Blair Honeycutt, award-winning poet and teacher, is the author of four previously published poetry collections. Her debut collection won Sandstone Publishing’s New South Poetry Book Regional Contest. Her third book, Before the Light Changes (Main Street Rag), was a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell Book Award. During her long tenure at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, NC, she received the Award for Excellence in Teaching and founded the Spring Literary Festival (later named Sensoria), which had a twenty-nine-year run. Other honors include the college’s Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lectureship, the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award and a Legacy Award in her name.
Title: Mountains of the Moon: Poems & Pieces
Author: Irene Blair Honeycutt
Format: Paperback, 6″ x 9″
ISBN: 978-1-960558-09-1
Publication Date: December 3, 2024
AE Hines, Adam in the Garden
In Adam in the Garden, AE Hines lyrically examines the thresholds we cross: from childhood to adulthood, youth to old age, from rejection to self-acceptance. Using both personal narrative and persona, and with a variety of forms, these poems are rich in both eros and pathos as Hines explores queer love and joy that is hard won. Whether set in the garden of the body, our fragile earth, or the biblical Eden, these poems fall through gaps in their subjects to reveal the extraordinary that is hidden in the middle of everyday life.
He is the author of Any Dumb Animal (Main Street Rag, 2021). He has won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize and Palette Poetry’s Love and Eros Prize, and has been a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. His poems have been widely published in such journals as The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Sun, and Alaska Quarterly. His literary criticism can be found in American Poetry Review, Rain Taxi, and Northwest Review. He currently resides in Charlotte, NC, and Medellín, Colombia.
Title: Adam in the Garden
Author: AE Hines
Format: Paperback, 6″ x 9″
ISBN: 978-1-960558-07-7
Publication Date: March 2024
Lola Haskins, Homelight
Homelight is the 14th poetry collection from Lola Haskins, past winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Florida Book Awards, two NEA fellowships, and other honors. As late work sometimes does, Homelight has a broad reach. In the first section, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” Haskins remembers poets who preceded her, Sappho to Blake to Merwin. After lingering to consider a Michelangelo drawing, she moves on to birds in “Wings.” Then, in “And They Are Gone” and “(In)humanity,” she turns to the arrogance of the way we treat the planet and each other. A pause for “Corona,” then on to love, both bad and good, in “The Slapped Girl.” The final section, “Rehearsing,” considers death, in the form of tributes to lost friends and her own preparations to follow them. There is humor here, lyricism and epic sweeps, and, almost at the end, these lines to a lover: “I wear you under my clothes the way a Sikh wears his cord, / in token of the ineffable beauty of the world,” which – as Merwin, who praised her work, would have seen immediately – might as well have been addressed to poetry itself.
Lola Haskins has published 13 previous poetry collections, the most recent of which, Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), was featured in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEA fellowships, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Review, a Florida’s Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America.
Title: Homelight
Author: Lola Haskins
Format: Paperback, 6″ x 9″
ISBN: 978-1-960558-03-9
Publication Date: September 1, 2023
Poetry Chapbooks
