About Us
Founded in 1979, TRP: The University Press of SHSU (Texas Review Press) is committed to publishing quality poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and scholarship. TRP currently publishes between fifteen and twenty-five titles each year.
Housed at Sam Houston State University, TRP: The University Press of SHSU is a member of the Texas A&M Press Texas Book Consortium, the Association of University Presses, and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Distribution
Our titles are distributed worldwide through the Texas Book Consortium.
Director
J. Bruce Fuller, Ph.D.
J. Bruce Fuller is the author of How to Drown a Boy (LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter’s Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared at The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Best New Poets 2022, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow.
Managing Editor
Pete “PJ” Carlisle, Ph.D.
PJ’s cross-genre creative work has won numerous prizes—including the Internal Mary McCarthy Award for Fiction (Innovative Novel) at Bard College, the Turow-Kinder Prize (Novella), and the AWP Journals Project Award in Fiction; it has appeared in journals such as Thickets, Quarterly West, and Passages North. He is a Fiction Fellow of Lambda Literary and was the Herbert Woodward Martin Post-Doc Fellow at the University of Dayton. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah where he served as Managing Editor of Western Humanities Review.
Publishing Specialist
Karisma "Charlie" Tobin, MFA, MA
Charlie Tobin grew up in the mountains of New Mexico and Alaska. She is currently the Publishing Specialist at TRP: The University Press of SHSU, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Interim, and Plainsongs, among others. Charlie holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing and an MA in English from Sam Houston State University.
Editor-at-Large
Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is also a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, and a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board. She is the author of two chapbooks, her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press (which won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry) and her second full-length Resting Bitch Face, forthcoming in August 2025. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, from TRP, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins.
Associate Editor
W. Scott Thomason is an award-winning writer of fiction whose stories have appeared in numerous journals and publications. He is a former Residential Fellow at the National Humanities Center and was the Managing Editor of Yellow Flag Press. He holds degrees from UNC-Greensboro and an MFA from McNeese State University. He lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife and old dog.
Assistant Editors
Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War (YesYes Books 2020), winner of the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares among others. She has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Currently she is a Ph.D. student in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she is also a writing instructor.
Sebastian H. Páramo (he/him) is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Curbstone Books, 2023) and was named a finalist for the 2023 Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters. His poems have recently appeared in AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, Prairie Schooner, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. His work has received fellowships and support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and CantoMundo.
Adele Elise Williams is the author of WAGER selected by Patricia Smith for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Series, and with Dana Levin, is co-editor of Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master. Her critical and creative work explore how gender performances and working-class ecologies engage designations of high and low art, specifically within confessionally-innovative poetics.
Brett Hanley holds an MFA from McNeese State University and a Ph.D. from Florida State University. Their debut poetry collection, Small Fabric, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2026. She has worked as Poetry Editor at both Southeast Review and The McNeese Review. Their poems are forthcoming or have recently been published in West Branch, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.
Jannessa Hester is a transgender writer and scholar based in Lubbock, Texas. She is a Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry and has been a finalist for the Rhysling Award and Prufer Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Bellingham Review, Cream City Review, HAD, and elsewhere.
Matthew Tavares is the author of the chapbook In Search of Venusian Oceans (Defunkt Press). His work has been published widely in journals such as High Noon, Cagibi, and Bullshit Lit. He holds an MFA from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, where he is now a Lecturer of English. TRP partners with the MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, & Publishing at Sam Houston State University to offer fellowships to students in the MFA program. TRP Fellows work part-time at TRP as part of their graduate assistantship and receive an additional scholarship from TRP. Chance Givens, Publishing Fellow Allie Phillips, Publishing Fellow B. J. Tunnell, Publishing Fellow LaKyndra Bridges, Editorial Fellow Hannah Chinn, Editorial Fellow Aline Doolittle, Editorial Fellow Elijah Keith, Editorial Fellow Amanda Chidinma Nwosu, Editorial Fellow The TRP University Press Advisory Committee serves as the editorial advisory board for TRP. The committee serves in conjunction with the Director to establish editorial policies and procedures. Paul Ruffin, Ph.D. Paul Ruffin (1942-2016) served as the 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate, Texas State University System Regents’ Professor, and Distinguished Professor of English at SHSU. He was the founder and director of TRP and the founding editor of the Texas Review. The award-winning author of two novels, five collections of short fiction, four books of essays, seven collections of poetry, Ruffin also edited and co-edited dozens of other books and was widely published in magazines, journals, anthologies, and textbooks.
Photo Credit: Katherine Tejada
Readers
2024-2025 TRP Fellows
TRP University Press Advisory Committee
Founder