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TURNING PLOW PRESS
Publisher of fine poetry and short fiction
Our books are available for purchase through our website, most online booksellers, and directly from our authors who provide a link.
To see a list of our authors and books, click on "Our Authors" on the menu.
Scroll down to see our current 2026-2027 releases!
New Release
and we in the middle of it is the latest poetry collection by poet and artist Steven Schroeder, accompanied by drawings by Sou Vai Keng. Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist who lives and works in Chicago. Born in north central Texas, he grew up on the high plains in the Texas Panhandle. Sou Vai Keng, born in Macau in 1966, is a literary and visual artist. As a painter, Sou specializes in ink painting and has been showing her works since 2002. Numerous solo and group exhibitions have been held in different cities around the world.
New Release
Tales of Mont Jasper is a collecion of stories of a mythical mountain town that evokes a different era--tall tales spoken by vibrant characters. In the short opening, "Stories My Father Told Me," the frame is set for all the tales that follow: "Then one day my father took me to that mountain, to that town, and introduced me to my great-grandmother, Granny Westerfield, who lived these stories. And Granny, well, she told me those stories all over again."
New Release
Paul Bowers is a master storyteller, a subtle stylist who draws characters with the bold precision of a Flannery O’Connor, limns the loneliness of broken marriages and long distance drives with the quiet richness of a Raymond Carver. We meet flawed men and women striving to somehow be better people, and although they don’t often achieve their yearning, it’s in their journeys and their interior complexities that we recognize ourselves. Each story is a gem, illuminated by exquisitely rendered details: a hunter’s knowledge of how to stalk wounded game or a native son’s understanding of a Southern Plains family headed by a matriarch who holds the family in place “like posts driven into hard ground.” Always, these stories are graced with the lives of animals, whether it’s the cameo appearance of a feral cat or the narrative force of an injured wild turkey, the beasts in these stories come as alive for us as the human characters.
We'll All Be Better People delights, engages the reader with beautiful language, insights, and stories that move with compassion and edge-of-your-seat narratives.
~Rilla Askew, author of The Hungry and the Haunted
New Release
Press Nominee for the 2027
Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
“What I offer must be carried.” So opens Ken Hada’s newest collection, Nexus, which brings readers the wisdom and beauty nested in each moment we attune our attention to. Hada pays close attention to the seasons and the cycles of life, from the blooming to the withering. He devotes himself to the daily and asks whether time passes or falls as his poems listen for the world’s gentle music and the singular magic of each day. Hada notices and distills, supervises his own silences. He takes what he carries and offers it us.
--Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas
Ken Hada’s poetry is that rare combination of worldliness and transcendence. By planting his feet firmly in the things of this world, Hada reaches up to heights that transform, challenge, and enlighten us. This is a poet to read, to re-read, to ponder.
--Joseph Fasano
To purchase a copy directly from the author, go to kenhada.org.
New Release
Press Nominee for the 2027
National Book Award in Poetry
Paul Juhasz blends his own personal history with the anguish of contemporary world events and the often, contradictory underpinnings of popular culture to remind us that the individual and the collective are integral. A whispering, but undeniable wind blows through these pages with artistic elegance matched by the critical voice of a prophet who demands a hearing.
-Ken Hada, author of Visions for the Night.
Katabasis is a poet’s witness to the complexities of the pains endured and pleasures savored in the human condition; an odyssey for our time that inspires a range of thought and feeling so all-encompassing that the book rises from the profoundly personal to the universal.
-Paul Austin, author of Mother and Son
In the poems of Katabasis, Paul Juhasz guides us through the dark landscape of a world below, as identified by the Greek roots in his title. “So many poems about healing,” Juhasz announces at the outset, “and still I do not feel healed.” The poems here ache with both loss and hope, with an understanding this remarkable poet shares with us, that “healing is not linear. The things that heal us must be returned to with a predictable regularity.” Paul Juhasz is a traveler. His longest poem here includes seventeen postcards tracing a ten-day drive through the West. Travel these pages with him. Feel the healing in his words.
-David Meischen, author of Caliche Road Poems
Juhasz aptly calls the journey a circle, not a recrossed, and these poems circle back on the same stories, landscapes, themes like a whirlpool or an old spirograph toy, each rotation a chance for re-examination. Juhasz’s poems are travelogues of the exterior and dispatches from the interior. Nature poems and postcards sent from mountaintops accompany intense encounters with the loneliness and wisdom of the inner mind. Often, these are the same poem.
-Quinn Carver Johnson, author of The Perfect Bastard
Sometimes you sit with Hope—/cradling it like a newborn,/knowing the world it will grow into,/knowing that world has no place for it—/and think you are four years behind schedule. Paul Juhasz poems are not running late. Katabasis is a collection of trees: many branches of ideas, emotions and memories. Thoughts reach out in synchronous dance then collect at the root, satisfying and sturdy, the myriad ways of blurring time and how that blurring scars the soul. The book captures piercing investigations of the interior of loss, displacement and interrupted lives, a pile of yesterdays, in eloquent, quiet graceful pleas of episodic longing. Juhasz also asks us to not only visit heartache, but his humanity. Our humanity. Yes, there is bruised hope and beauty here, but these poems also ask that we, if we are fully human, are nature, are an element of the ecosphere, not above it or here to colonize and own, but to respect and embrace as fellow passengers. Many of these poems are in conversation with a wide breadth of writers that inform his work, which speaks to the deftness and texture of this book, from the exquisite distillation of moment to the ability to laugh at himself, the poems laughing beside him. From prose poem to free verse to vaulted lyricism to poetic travelogue, Juhasz’s circular lyricism to unflinchingly political poems and satire speak truth to power in modes that are gut-wrenching, delicate and not so delicate. Gwendolyn Brooks said a poet’s job is to observe. Paul sees more than most of us. And he sees with more than eyes.
Quraysh Ali Lansana, author of Ralph Ellison: More Than Invisible and Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse