Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka goes to press

Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka has finished the editorial process and been turned into the publisher. It will be set up, a galleyproof will come to me, and barring any unpleasant surprises, will go on sale to the public in the middle to end of April in honor of National Poetry Month. I am please to thank Sanford Goldstein, Pamela A. Babusci, Bob Lucky, Patricia Prime, and Kala Ramesh for their work as editors, and I also which to acknowledge the assistance of Alexis Rotella and Liam Wilkinson. I especially wish to thank Alexis for the title, Take Five, .

It's been fifteen months of work since the project was first launched in January of last year and nursed through to fruition. The editorial team has worked hard and I am gratified to have such a diverse and intelligent lot of colleagues supporting the project. Their assistance has made a gargantuan task of this sort feasible, even if we were drowning in poetry at some points. We read over fourteen thousand poems, of which 321 poems, plus several sequences and tanka prose pieces by 138 authors made it into the anthology. I penned an introduction that covers the history of tanka in brief, and discusses the anthology in detail. Cover art is by Pamela A. Babusci. It is being published by Modern English Tanka Press of Baltimore, Maryland, thanks to the support of Denis M. Garrison.

~K~