Gold Line Press

Cover Reveal!

Winner of the 2024 Poetry Gold Line Press Chapbook Contest, Mr. Time by Aishvarya Arora.

About the collection: “My birth / isn’t my only origin,” writes Aishvarya Arora in this sharp and tender collection. Keenly attentive to sound, Arora makes words sing and singe within the compressed spaces of sonnets and tightly-clipped couplets. Restless, words and bodies glint in the light and take on new meanings, enacting the belief in the possibility of change required by both gender transition and grief. Arora is an exciting new voice that writes with equal parts control and imagination, “invention / & inheritance.” -Franny Choi, author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

About the author: Aishvarya Arora is a poet, teaching artist, and cultural organizer from Queens, New York. Their writing has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and Foglifter, among other publications. Currently, they live in Ithaca, New York, where they create zines and broadsides through their micro-press, Lavender Codex.

Cover artist and headshot 📸 credit to Esther Kondo Heller

Cover Reveal!

Winner of the 2024 Nonfiction Gold Line Press Chapbook Contest, Saliendo Adelante by José Rios

About the collection: José Rios’s writing is surprising with emotion, vulnerability, and tenderness. In the essays that make up Saliendo Adelante we have a narrator who sees the world with curiosity, who shows us characters that are flawed and real. With humor and grace, Rios defies heteronormative expectations, charming us, making us laugh, breaking our hearts.
—Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls

About the author: JOSÉ RIOS is a poet and educator living in the hills above the high desert of Palmdale, California. His poems are found in Catamaran and San Pedro River Review. He’s been part of two exorcisms, the longtime host of Southern California’s only biweekly birdless cockfight, and the last person to have seen the Taco Bell Chihuahua alive.

We’re thrilled to announce that our poetry judge for this year’s chapbook contest is Claire Hong! ( )

Claire Hong is the author of Upend (Noemi Press). She received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and has creative writing degrees from the University of Arizona (MFA) and Pratt Institute (BFA). She was born in San Francisco, CA and currently lives in Tucson, AZ where she teaches writing at Pima Community College.