innovative. daring. beautiful.
Rockwood Press makes right-sized poetry chapbooks for people who need poems.
We believe chapbooks are an art form as much as a literary form, perfectly suited for revolution, protest, political change, and social critique. They can be both haunting and hauntingly beautiful.
We believe in emerging and established poets and aim to make room for all kinds of mighty voices in teeny books that might not otherwise find their way into the world.
We believe that a work doesn’t have to be full-length to have a full life. That’s why almost all of our releases are open editions.
from the preface of HEAVY: poems that count
I began grieving enormous wildlife population declines of the twentieth century during college in the mid-1990s. However, with attention to macro and microaggressions toward humans and wildlife, Heavy highlights the inherent inadequacy of numbers for measuring loss of life.
While quantity fails intimacy, population data provides critical information about the health status of species, including humans, and their communities. Individuals are not numbers and totals count. In 2017, Gerardo Ceballos and colleagues reported population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is “extremely high” even for species of “low concern” and cited equally “severe” loss reported for terrestrial invertebrates and plants. They described a “biological annihilation” and called for immediate action. Almost a decade on with immediacy increasingly felt, we are indebted to these scientists and all who continue to witness and tally healthy, diseased, and dead individuals. Their work rightly sounds alarm and shapes policy to save and improve all lives, and made possible this witness poetry.
Megan Hollingsworth, MS, is an East-West Psychology PhD student and writer with an interdisciplinary background in community health and environmental studies. Influenced by her Quaker upbringing and Engaged Buddhism, Meg’s creative spiritual practice Extinction Witness expresses and supports grief associated with genocide and anthropogenic species extinction. Her writing has been published in several journals and print anthologies. She is the author of Frog Song, an educational book that leads with a poem inspired by the life of Toughie, who was the last-known living Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog when he died in 2016.
Title: HEAVY: poems that count
Author: Megan Hollingsworth
Illustrations: Bryan Holland and Grace Vejvoda
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - April
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, gloss cover
Pages: 40
Price: $12
ISBN: 978-1-59498-225-5
HEAVY
HEAVY
Recent titles
HEAVY: poems that count by Megan Hollingsworth
by-the-wind-saylor by Maya Cheav
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Masquerading as a Gastropoda by Hachi Chuku
Off to War, Daughter by Trapper Markelz
Secrets she has saved by Rachel R. Baum
Different With Him by mk zariel
my mother is a mixed metaphor by Shivani Gupta
The Biology of Leaving by Candice M. Kelsey
Sky Over by Lana Hechtman Ayers
Lavender Stones by Kenneth Pobo
From the Bowels of Molluscs by Carlie Daley
View all our available chapbooks
submissions
We select manuscripts through an open submissions process that occurs year-round.
Manuscripts should be tightly linked collections of ten to thirty poems or up to forty pages, submitted in .rtf, .doc, or .docx formats only. All submissions should be made via email. We do not accept unsolicited paper submissions.
Eligibility: Poets writing in English are eligible. Previous book publication is not a consideration. Simultaneous submissions are permissible, but entrants are asked to notify Rockwood Press immediately if a manuscript becomes committed elsewhere.
There is no open submission fee.
We do our best to reply to submissions within one month, but the time can vary depending on submission volume. If your work has not been accepted or declined, it’s still under consideration. Every submission is considered thoroughly before a response is made.
All submissions are eligible for publication by Rockwood Press with a standard royalty contract.
submissions at Rockwood Press dot com
If we seem familiar
That’s because, Rockwood Press, a not-for-profit literary imprint, is a project of Fernwood Press and its parent company, Barclay Press. For years, we’ve made our books and full-length poetry collections available through POD services, but we wanted to produce more books in-house where we have control over color, texture, paper quality, and the overall shape each project takes.
We’ve also seen a ten-fold increase in poetry submissions over the last year and sensed from our conversations with writers that it’s getting harder and harder to find homes for good work.
The project of Rockwood Press is to bring more great poetry into the world in smaller, focused collections that can be produced locally, quickly, and beautifully.
