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.
TRP University Press Advisory Committee
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.
Distribution
Our titles are distributed worldwide through the Texas Book Consortium.
Staff
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. He teaches at Sam Houston State University where he is Director of TRP: The University Press of SHSU.
Managing Editor
Pete “PJ” Carlisle, Ph.D.
PJ’s cross-genre creative work has won numerous prizes–including the Internal 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. His book reviews have appeared in Western Humanities Review and Lambda Literary Review. He is a Fiction Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices and was awarded the Herbert Woodward Martin Post-Doc Fellow for Inclusion, Diversity, and Creative Writing at the University of Dayton.
PJ majored in art and design at NYU and taught for Horizons: The New England Craft Program (now Snow Farm) in both the Massachusetts (US) and Avignon (France) studios. Before coming to TRP, he was the Coordinator of Dayton LitFest, taught for the Antioch Writers Workshops, and was appointed Assistant Professor of English at Central State University. As a freelance editor, he has even managed color teams (via ZOOM) and designed e-books for tech companies’ proposals with the US Military, RTOC, and DOD.
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. Interests beyond poetry and prose include: Underrepresented Voices in the Media; Zine-Making; and Poststructuralist Feminist and Queer Theory.
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 Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins.
Readers
Matthew Tavares is the author of In Search of Venusian Oceans (Defunkt 2024). He holds an MFA in Poetry from Our Lady of the Lake University, where he now serves as an Instructor of English.
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.
2024-2025 TRP Fellows
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
Allison 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
Founder
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.