Hybrid & Mixed Genre Consultations with Darby Price

Darby Price is the author of All the Lands We Inherit,a lyric memoir forthcoming in June 2025 (Black Lawrence Press). She earned her BA at Florida State University and her MFA at George Mason University, where she was a Heritage Fellow and the Poetry Editor for Phoebe. Her work has appeared in No Contact, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Redivider, and Zócalo Public Square, among others. She has taught literature, creative writing, and rhetoric to students from K-12 through college, and has developed curriculum in a range of genres for PEN America, UC Irvine, and WriteGirl Los Angeles. Darby serves as a Continuing Lecturer at UC Irvine and makes her home in Long Beach, CA.

Darby is accepting everything from short pieces (up to 2 pages) to full-length manuscripts (up to 200 pages). The fees and parameters for each of these categories is as follows:

• Short pieces, up to 2 pages in length, $25
• Folios, up to 7 pages in length, $55
• Extended pieces/chapbooks, up to 40 pages in length, $275
• Short manuscripts, up to 90 pages in length, $425
• Long manuscripts, up to 200 pages in length, $625

Darby will provide detailed comments on your manuscript as well as a cover letter. After receiving these files, participants who submit chapbooks and manuscripts may also book phone/video conferences with Darby at no additional charge.

All manuscripts should be double-spaced and formatted in 12-point font. The deadline to submit work for this consultation program is November 30. Darby will complete her work and respond to all participants by December 31.

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Darby Price's Statement pf Purpose

 When I’m reading a draft of anything, my first goal is to see the shape of the forest among the proverbial trees. To find, in other words, the true identity of the piece. Sometimes, a writer is close to having a full forest, as it were—they know what their work is about, and what they need is a reader who can help them refine toward the final-final draft. And sometimes, a writer has a beautiful mess on their hands, and what they need most is a sharp reader who can identify the threads that tie it together, the burning ember at the heart of it all that gives the piece its light and heat. From there, they can begin the work of writing toward the essay, chapbook, etc. that rises from that early draft.

Wherever you find yourself on that continuum, I’ll help you find the best ways to proceed toward the most authentic, most fully realized version of your hybrid project. My revision notes will be guided by this intention, and I will highlight both what’s working well and what specifically could be drawn out or developed in order to help your manuscript become what it was always meant to be. Throughout the process, I will not try to make your project into something that I would write; I will pay attention to your own voice, style, and methods, and I will give you feedback that will support, utilize, and amplify those qualities as you revise.

I’m open to the full range of hybrid writing, from more straightforward, narrative-driven work to more experimental manuscripts. Standouts who inspire me in both form and voice include Eric Pankey, Cole Swensen, Harryette Mullen, Susan Howe, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Lia Purpura, Mary Ruefle, and Maggie Nelson, among others. In my own writing, I love the potential of hybrid forms for highlighting contradiction and/or capturing complexity and multifacetedness, and I am drawn as a reader to work that mixes intellect with soul and the personal with the broader world; but mostly, I am drawn to texts that show me new ways of seeing, or introduce me to subjects and realities I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to know. Whatever the shape or composition of your manuscript, I look forward to working with you to help you find its final form!