Brick Road Poetry Press

poetry made to edify

341 Lee Road 553 Phenix City, AL 36867 United States

The mission of Brick Road Poetry Press is to publish and promote poetry that entertains, amuses, edifies, and surprises a wide audience of appreciative readers.  We are not qualified to judge who deserves to be published, so we concentrate on publishing what we enjoy. Our preference is for poetry geared toward dramatizing the human experience in language rich with sensory image and metaphor, recognizing that poetry can be, at one and the same time, both familiar as the perspiration of daily labor and as outrageous as a carnival sideshow.

Brick Road Poetry Press was founded by Keith Badowki & Ron Self in 2010 and was based out of Phenix City, Alabama. In the summer of 2024, Brick Road was acquired by Matthew Layne, Miriam Calleja, Halley Cotton, Isaac Griffin-Layne, and Barry Marks when it moved to its new home in Birmingham, Alabama.

Matthew Layne—reader

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. A founding member of the 1990s improvisational poetry collective, The Kevorkian Skull poets, Layne believes in the radical transformative power found in the intersection of poetry and art, and he wants you to write your truth and share it out loud. A multiple Hackney Award winning writer, he has also been recognized by the National Society of Arts and Letters and been featured in Peek Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal, Steel Toe Review, B-Metro, and elsewhere. Look for him at your local library.

Miriam Calleja—2024 Judge

Miriam Calleja is a Maltese bilingual freelance poet, nonfiction/fiction writer, ghostwriter, workshop leader, and translator. She is the author of 3 poetry collections, 2 chapbooks, and several collaborative works. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and in translation worldwide. Her latest chapbook is titled Come Closer, I Don’t Mind the Silence (BottleCap Press, 2023). Her essays and poems have appeared in platform review, Odyssey, Whale Road Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Miriam has been highly commended by the Stephen Spender Trust for her work in translation. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Read more on miriamcalleja.com.

Isaac Griffin-Layne—REAder

Halley Cotton—Designer

Halley Cotton is the managing editor of the Birmingham Poetry Review, contributing editor for NELLE, and production manager for both publications. She is the founding director of the SPARK Writing Festival, and her work has appeared in places such as The Greensboro Review, Poetry South, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. Cotton teaches freshman composition, creative writing, and literature courses at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is a 2023 Poetry Fellow with the Alabama State Council on the Arts which funded TheCahabaProject.substack.com 

Barry Marks—Lawyer

Barry Marks is the author of four books of poetry, including two published by Brick Road, and several chapbooks. A frequent reader and seminar leader at poetry gatherings, he is a past president of the Alabama State Poetry Society and the winner of numerous contests and awards, including Alabama Book of the Year, and a finalist for both the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies. When not writing poetry, he finds time to practice law.

 

We are an independent poetry press based in Birmingham, AL.