Prose & Poetry Anthology to Celebrate Military Uniforms, Swag & Kit

Forthcoming in November 2023: Offering an explosive mix of nostalgia, insight, humor, and wisdom, more than 100 emerging and established writers of military themes celebrate their favorite (and sometimes, hated) pieces of uniform gear, swag, weaponry, equipment, and kit.

“The military uniform is a symbol of the service, a tool for the wearer, the representation of a culture. The accoutrements have meaning,” writes author and 33-year U.S. Army veteran Vicki Hudson in the book’s foreword. “Some tell of the wearer’s valor, sacrifice, loss, duty, accomplishment, or rite of passage. Some parts are hard-won, like a tab on the right shoulder. Some mark a history, like the overseas ribbon on a sleeve. [...] Each uniform tells a story.”

Through May 1, 2023, editors invite submissions to the book at: middlewestpress.submittable.com

“We’re looking for 100-line poems, and 300-word fiction and non-fiction items, each centered on the stories of the military stuff we once wore or used—and that may now be on our walls, in our old footlockers, or lost to time,” says project co-editor Randy Brown, a retired 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army National Guard and former active-duty U.S. Air Force “brat.”

Brown is the author of Twelve O’Clock Haiku: Leadership Lessons from Old War Movies & New Poems (2022) as well as the award-winning collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire (2015). He is also co-editor of the 2019 anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War, published in partnership with Military Writers Guild.

U.S. Marine Corps spouse Lisa Stice rounds out the editorial team. Stice has explored her family’s experiences with the military through collections such as Uniform (2015), Permanent Change of Station (2018), and FORCES (2021). Stice is also a past poetry winner in the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards, annually administered by the Chicago-based literary journal Line of Advance.

Starting Nov. 1, 2023:

Things We Carry Still: Poems & Micro-Stories about Military Stuff We Loved (Estimated 200 pages, Middle West Press LLC) is available in a $19.99 trade paperback edition through Amazon and other booksellers, as well as a $9.99 Kindle e-book edition exclusively via Amazon.

Middle West Press LLC is a Johnston, Iowa-based editor and publisher of non-fiction, journalism, and poetry. As an independent micro-press, we publish one to four titles annually. Our projects are often inspired by the people, places, and history of the American Midwest.