Great news for Pulley Press! Ricardo Ruiz’s We Had Our Reasons has just won the 2023 Washington State Book Award.

The announcement came from the Washington Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, administered by Washington State Library (a division of the Office of the Secretary of State).

What Pulley Press aspires to—celebrating literature from from rural places—is what Barbara Kingsolver does masterfully in Demon Copperhead, her new novel. We absolutely love it—for its depiction of Appalachia as a real and nuanced place, and for its main character, Demon, an orphan with a big voice.

In the hopes of connecting with poets in Alabama and Louisiana, Frances decided to take a trip to the South. Birmingham, Alabama is a city of 180,000 but unlike boomtowns in the American West, Birmingham is getting smaller as the days go by. Miles of abandoned warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and deserted homes lined the roads and train tracks limited access to different sides of the city. The trains came in long strings of freight and sat in the flats.

Michael McGregor, the writer of the review, talks about first meeting Ricardo Ruiz at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. With no surprise, he was intrigued by both Ruiz’s poetry content and his demeanor. McGregor highlights Ruiz’s accessibility in verse, comparing it to that of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. He also mentions how the content and verse work in tandem together to paint a portrait of an overlooked community through its yearning, hardships, familial relationships.

The Association of Writers and Programs Conference came to Seattle and this meant that we saw thousands of writers and editors stumbling around downtown and Capitol Hill! Zaira Bardos, Kate Brackman, Krista Orejudos, and Julia park were running the booth and they worked enthusiastically from a humble table in a far-off corner speaking to passerbyers. Zaira says that they met people from New York City, New Orleans, Tuscaloosa, and other far-off places.