On her "Women and Books" blog, respected poet Glenda Bailey-Mershon recently published a list: "Books I Loved in 2010 and Think You Will Too." Her top ten list included "A Walk through the Memory Palace" by Pamela Johnson Parker. Here's what she said about it:

"Artful and precise in their construction, these poems won Johnson Parker the Chapbook Prize from qaartsiluni, a small press doing some of the most innovative issues on the web (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a publisher of some of my own work.) I include the Memory Palace here because I believe it will please those who favor poems that catalogue, parse, and sliver the human experience in ways that reflect like shards of glass. While I prefer poetry that is more accessible and wholistically illuminative, I couldn’t help but admire this poet’s skill. I know why it was chosen, and I think it’s important to all writers to examine carefully that which challenges as well as pleases."

There's lots of excitement at Phoenicia Publishing this spring! We'll have more announcements soon about forthcoming titles, but today we'd like to share some excellent news about one of our authors. Pamela Johnson Parker, author of A Walk Through the Memory Palace, which won the 2009 qarrtsiluni chapbook contest, has been named a Tennessee Williams Scholar by Sewanee Writer's Conference. Congratulations, Pamela, on this well-deserved honor!

A new review of Pamela's chapbook by Lawrence Gladeview was recently published at MediaVirus Magazine. Links to many other reviews and a blog tour of the chapbook, organized by qarrtsiluni, are posted here.