Sold Out
The inaugural LemonLight anthology closes its print run six weeks before it ships.
Something remarkable, and mind-blowing, has happened.
The LemonLight Prize 2026 Anthology — a limited edition of two hundred and fifty copies, hand-bound and mailed in September — has sold out. Two months before it prints, six weeks before it ships, and forty-eight hours after the shortlist was announced.
Two hundred and fifty is a small number by publishing standards - although one of the greatest ironies is that poetry books do not sell, and if they do it’s around a couple of hundred. But two hundred and fifty is a real number for us in Year One of our press. It means that two hundred and fifty readers — poets who submitted, longlisters, shortlisted contributors, Ink Well subscribers, donors, friends of the press, and a surprising number of people who just heard about it and decided to trust a new publisher with a bold visiona, and put their names on something they had not yet held. They read what the press stood for, and they said yes.
That is the entire proposition of what we’re trying to do here. Poetry, crafted, collected. Books that carry a life inside them, made by people who care about how they’re made, sold to people who care about the same.
To everyone who pre-ordered: thank you. To the fifty-one shortlisted poets, whose work will now reach readers who will hold this book alongside titles they return to for decades: you have chosen well, and I am grateful for the work you sent. To Leila Chatti, whose reading has shaped this from the first cut to the last: thank you. The winner and the four honorable mentions will be announced in early August.
For anyone who missed the anthology, our debut publication Sesquipedalian Rain Chant by Brooks Lampe is still available — but there are only thirty copies remaining. Brooks put five years into that book, and it is the collection that started this press. A recent reader, David W. Berner, current Poet Laureate of the Village of Clarendon Hills, Illinois, wrote to us last week: “What a lovely, classy press. I just received Sesquipedalian Rain Chant — gorgeous work, compelling poetry, stunning simple book design.”
Ink & Ribbon Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher based on Bainbridge Island, Washington. We publish limited editions of unified poetic works and select one poem each year through the LemonLight Prize. This year, we published our first book, opened our first prize, closed our first anthology, and grew The Ink Well past 6,500 readers. None of that happens without you.
The 2027 LemonLight Prize opens in the spring.
With warmth and thanks,
G. K. Allum
Congratulations 👏
brava!