Press Announcements
2026
March 14, 2026
HLP poet Kenneth Lyon (Pushing the Limits, A Dance Horizontal, and the forthcoming collection Listening to the Icemaker) has won Second Prize in the California State Poetry Society‘s contest for the month of February. On the theme of Love, Ken’s poem is titled “Pack Your Portmanteau.”
Monthly contest winners’ names and the titles of their poems are announced as they are awarded, and all winners for the year are listed in the first CSPS Newsbriefs of the following year. For more information on CSPS contests, including prizes and a list of themes for each month, see the Submissions section on the society’s website.
March 12, 2026
March is National Small Press Month, an annual occasion for celebrating small, independent presses such as HLP, which are dedicated to publishing and showcasing new and established, diverse and unique voices you’ll find nowhere else. There’s no better time than right now to support HLP by contributing to our current fundraising campaign. We add every donor’s name to our public Donor Honor Roll in gratitude for helping us reach our goals this year and in the future. Every new book HLP publishes represents our thanks to you for purchasing and sharing our titles with your friends or book club, or on your social media, and for affirming our belief that books matter.
March 1, 2026
Dennis Sampson’s If You Only Knew, is available for purchase now!
An elegant collection of some of Sampson’s greatest poems, If You Only Knew draws on the poet’s life experiences, from childhood to the present, addressing such subjects as the American South, love, death, and spirituality. Written by an American master late in his seventh decade, these transformative lyric narratives have been described as being as “clear and deep as the pristine water of Oregon’s Crater Lake.”
If You Only Knew is Sampson’s fourth book from Homestead Lighthouse Press.
Homestead Lighthouse Press poet Suzanne Rhodenbaugh, author of The Girl Who Quit at Levitcus (2022), has published an essay-length memoir of her life, “The Decades,” in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Issue 81.
Coming in July! Bruce Lawder’s Three For the Road, three novellas of “on the road” stories, each concerning moving, mentally and physically, in and out of love, from one place to another. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the stories take their readers on a journey across America, from New York to California, east to west, then back again and beyond.
In California, Lawder’s young protagonist is driven, not driving, when he appears at the beginning of the book and when he leaves it at its end. In the two other tales, Schlemm and The Marriage Ceremony, the settings are different, varying from a topless dance club called “The American Dream” to a publishing house, from an office cubicle to a New York cab; however, the characters, like the protagonist in the first novella, are survivors, though each in a different way. The question their survival asks is, quite simply, about the value of surviving. With the Vietnam War ongoing, that question ultimately becomes existential: Is one’s survival alone an adequate reason to take another person’s life; or, is death, no matter whose, a contradiction of survival as a value? What do human beings stand for? How far are they willing to go — to lie, for example, or kill, to compromise or not, as they search for something positive, something meaningful in life? And how is meaningful defined, in work or relationship? What is it we should not or refuse to do?
The road “(not) taken” in these three stories is present in the promise of the collection’s title, echoing not only Jack Kerouac and Robert Frost in suggesting the journey’s difficulty but also in recalling Walt Whitman, as every American road does, as open or closed as that road might now be. It’s a road that leads us all over America, finally becoming the imaginary though very real trajectory that took the author himself to Europe, where he now lives.
2025
December 16, 2025
Please help Homestead Lighthouse Press reach its $3,000 goal before the Christmas holiday arrives! The campaign has raised to date $1,167.00, for which HLP is most grateful. We need just $1,833.00 more to ensure sufficient funds are available to publish our ambitious lineup of six new books of poetry and two prose collections.
All donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Won’t you join our other generous donors? By supporting our GoFundMe campaign, you will be helping to sustain for another full year our nonprofit’s continued existence and the livelihood of our inspiring and daring authors.
November 7, 2025
Hi, everyone! Please see HLP’s GoFundMe fundraising campaign for 2026. Every tax-deductible donation you make supports another year of publishing daring books of poetry and prose. Thank you!
May 18, 2025
Bruce Lawder’s new book of poetry, Breakwater Rock, is now available!
Breakwater Rock is a book of exits and entrances, and, equally important, of the bridge that is the critical experience between the two. Born of an epiphany the author experienced as he was wheeled into surgery in a Swiss hospital, Lawder saw how to overcome space and time and bring together the two halves of his life lived in Switzerland and the U.S. Lawder describes this process as putting back together “the two tectonic plates of my life.” The results of this fearless effort of reclamation are poems of superb lyric and contemplative insight.
Little Collage
– Pray you, draw homewards.
Once more to walk the place,
tongues in the trees,
books in the running brooks,
as if there were
no enemy
but winter and rough weather
–
Exile from exile,
free at last of war –
color it blossom, color
it fall,
each leaf a letter,
silence over all.
May 12, 2025
Writing Workshop Opportunity
A writing workshop combining writing and Tai Chi and featuring HLP poet Michael Favala Goldman is scheduled at the Northampton Center for the Arts on June 7 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Participants will move back and forth between writing and discussion indoors, and learn Tai Chi practices outdoors, weather permitting.
Recently published poems by Michael Favala Goldman can be enjoyed in the pages of Bar Bar and Sad Girl Diaries.
Goldman continues to lead bi-monthly Poetry Critique Meet-ups through Straw Dog Writers and the Northampton Center for the Arts. All poets are welcome.
January 29, 2025
Bruce Lawder’s poem “Another Winter’s Tale,” from his forthcoming collection for HLP, Breakwater Rock, appears at Every Day Poems on Substack.
January 14, 2025
Michael Favala Goldman’s poetry collection “Destinations” is the subject of reviewer Glynn Young’s “Poets and Poems” column at TweetSpeak Poetry.
In “Michael Favala Goldman writes of relationships and brokenness,” Young notes that it is Goldman’s “simple, almost stark language” that “creates the sense of statement of fact,” giving the writer a “unique voice that sets him and his poems apart.”
Goldman has published several other books with HLP, including his prize-winning “Small Sovereign.” (See Books & Authors for more information.)
2024
September 25 – October 25, 2024
Launch of HLP Fundraising Campaign on Go Fund Me
September 27, 2024
HLP poet Michael Favala Goldman participated in “Open Mic Night” at the Homestead. Hosted by poets Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua, the program was part of the 12th Annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts.
September 29, 2024
Release of Dennis Sampson’s What It Must Be Like: Poems