Announcing our next three poetry pamphlets
The Emma Press is delighted to announce the acquisition of three poetry pamphlets: Noon by Zain Rishi, Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois and Milk & Moon-Water by Milena Williamson. The pamphlets were selected from 516 proposals submitted in response to our August 2024 open call and all three titles will be published in 2026.
Zain Rishi’s debut pamphlet Noon navigates the loss of mother tongues in a polylingual culture and its effect on experiences of home, kinship and faith. Occupying the spaces where language becomes porous, Rishi’s poems exhibit a rigorous, lyrical attention to sound and linguistics in the worlds we inherit. (Publishing February 2026).
Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois is a pamphlet about food, belonging and connection. Traveling between Penang, Brussels, London, South Africa, and beyond, Du Bois considers food not only as sustenance or indulgence, but as a rotating door into memory, language, longing, loss, anxiety, adventure. Through brimming bowls of noodle soup, kaya toast and custard apples, Du Bois’ debut sheds light on the complexities of selfhood given mixed heritage and familial distance. (Publishing July 2026)
Following her 2024 debut collection with Dedalus Press, Milena Williamson’s Milk & Moon-Water is a collection of medicinal, magical poems offering new tellings of Old English metrical charms. Engaging with the climate crisis, ageing, fertility, and modern medicine, the pamphlet ranges from the incantatory to the unhinged and explores how the speaker of the charm may solve their problems and ward off harm. (Publishing July 2026)
What they said:
Suyin Du Bois said: “As a long-time fan of their catalogue, I couldn’t be more thrilled that The Emma Press has chosen to publish Eating Air. With its focus on food and belonging in the context of mixed identity, this feels like such a natural and warmhearted home for this pamphlet.”
Zain Rishi said: “Noon is about the barriers between mother tongues and our constant search for ways above and beyond language to practice love. As a Brummie writer, it means the world to be working with Birmingham-based The Emma Press on my first small collection of poems. The team have been an absolute delight, and I can’t wait for what the rest of this journey will bring next year.”
Milena Williamson said: “I have been a reader of pamphlets and books from The Emma Press for many years now. My new pamphlet contains charm-poems, transformations of the Old English metrical charms as well as new poems that remix this ancient material. These poems are full of plants, food and creatures; they portray bodily illnesses and ailing lands. I’m thrilled that they have found a home with The Emma Press, who embrace poetry and creative translation in many forms.”
James Trevelyan, Director of The Emma Press said: “To have found three pamphlets of exceedingly high quality was not a surprise given the strength of our submissions. Pamphlets remain a key step in the journey of emerging poets and we’re thrilled to be bringing rising stars Suyin & Zain to wider attention, and delighted to be publishing a short concept work from Milena, a writer we’ve admired for some time.”
About the authors:
Milena Williamson is the author of Into the Night that Flies So Fast (Dedalus Press, 2024) and Charm for Catching a Train (Green Bottle Press, 2022). A recipient of the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award in 2021, she has a PhD in poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Her poems have appeared in The London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, The Stinging Fly, The Kenyon Review and more. Originally from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, she now lives in Belfast.
Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London. Her poems have been published in Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing, 2023) and Malaysian Places and Spaces (Maya Press, 2024), amongst others. She is a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2024/25. When not obsessing over word choice, Suyin spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff.
Zain Rishi is a writer from Birmingham, UK. He graduated with a masters in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh in 2023 and has since worked in independent bookselling. He won first prize in the 2025 Ware Poetry Competition, third prize in the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize, was highly commended in the Poetry Wales Award 2024-25 and is a Young Poets Network prizewinner. His poetry has featured in wildness, Fourteen Poems, New Writing Scotland, Horizon, Gutter, Propel and various anthologies. He is currently based in Edinburgh.
For further information or to request a review copy, please contact:
Georgia Wall, Publishing Manager, The Emma Press
About The Emma Press:
The Emma Press is an award-winning independent publishing house based in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham. It was founded in 2012 by Emma Dai’an Wright and is dedicated to producing beautiful, thought-provoking books for adults and children, and to making poetry accessible to everyone. The Emma Press publishes themed anthologies, illustrated chapbooks and children’s poetry and fiction, with a growing list of translations which includes titles from Latvia, Estonia, Indonesia, Spain and the Netherlands. The Emma Press were shortlisted for the 2024 and 2025 Bookseller’s Small Press of the Year (Midlands) and the 2024 Independent Publisher Guild Awards.
