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Independent poetry pamphlet specialist ignitionpress has won the £5,000 Michael Marks Publisher’s Award 2021 and signed two new talents.
The award recognises poetry pamphlets with prizes across four categories, including illustration, poetry pamphlet, poetry pamphlet in the Celtic language, and publisher.
Based at Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and launched in 2017, ignitionpress publishes poetry from emerging poets, with an international focus.
Dr Niall Munro, director of Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, said: “I am incredibly proud to see ignitionpress being recognised with this award. My colleagues, Claire Cox and Les Robinson and I, are deeply grateful to our poets for entrusting us with their work—it has been a privilege to publish it."
“It’s remarkable that a press focused on emerging talent has made such a powerful impact,” said the judges. “These pamphlets have a unity that belies their rich diversity. Whether it’s down to the iconic design, which lends a seriousness to the pamphlet as a form, or the high level of dedication to developing and mentoring the emerging poets it publishes, the result is a press that publishes tight, well-worked and vital early collections that sit together as well as they stand apart.”
Ignitionpress has previously been included in four Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections, for: Mary Jean Chan’s A Hurry of English, Alycia Pirmohamed’s Hinge, Isabelle Baafi’s Ripe and Fathima Zahra’s Sargam / Swargam. Hinge was also shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award in 2020.
The press has signed Michaela Coplen (pictured) and Jacob Ramírez, and will be publishing their pamphlets this summer.
Coplen is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. She earned her BA from Vassar College, where she served as a poetry editor for the Vassar Review. She was appointed a National Student Poet by Michelle Obama, and has performed her poetry in venues including Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center and the White House. In 2018, she was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for graduate study in the UK. Her poems have been published online by the Atlantic and Poets.org, as well as in the Bellevue Literary Review. She won the 2019 Troubadour International Poetry Prize, the 2020 York Poetry Prize, and is included in Here: Poems for the Planet and the 2020 Best New Poets anthology. Her work can be found at michaelacoplen.com.
Ramírez is a poet, teacher and visual artist from California. He is the recipient of Lancaster University’s Portfolio Prize; at the institution, he earned his Creative Writing MA with distinction. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Cloverse, a literary magazine celebrating Sonoma County’s teen poetry in English, Spanish and "Spanglish". His poetry appears in various publications, among them Haymarket Books’ The Breakbeat Poets - LatiNEXT, 2021’s Latino Book Review Magazine, the Indianapolis Review, and the Santa Fe Writers’ Project. He is pursuing his PhD in creative writing at Lancaster University.