Deep Vellum announces Central Track Poetry partnership with SMU Project Poëtica

Deep Vellum is proud to announce that SMU Project Poëtica and Deep Vellum Publishing are collaborating on a new partnership, Central Track Poetry. Together we will publish ten poetry books per year—both English-language originals and works in translation—and SMU Project Poëtica will sponsor all of Deep Vellum’s poetry events held at the bookstore and throughout the city.

Two of the first books to be published under this partnership are Hera Lindsay Bird’s Juvenilia (out June 3, 2025) and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s TERROR COUNTER (out June 24, 2025). Juvenilia is a tender yet comedic collection of poems that has reviewers “more excited about poetry than [they] have been in a long time,” from New Zealand’s Hera Lindsay Bird, (Guardian). This is the poet’s American debut. TERROR COUNTER is a debut poetry collection which acts against the many languages constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians from the Palestinian performance artist, Fargo Nissim Tbahki. This collection is among Autostraddle’s “Most Anticipated Queer Books for June” and has received praise from poets such as Fady Joudah, author of [...], who says, “Anyone who understands poetry as a search for liberation, whatever the level of that liberation, will hold TERROR COUNTER as compass.” The first Dallas event hosted by Central Track Poetry is a book launch for the poetry collection Cataclysm Moves Me I Regret to Say by Stephanie Yue Duhem on Tuesday, July 1st, 2025 at Deep Vellum Books.

SMU Project Poëtica aims to make SMU a center of the English-language poetry world by hosting an ambitious series of readings, lectures, symposia, and creative conversations. This collaboration aligns with Deep Vellum’s mission in bringing books, writers, and translators to Dallas in a continued effort of making Dallas a hub for art and literature.

Deep Vellum is a nonprofit publishing house and literary arts organization with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature. Founded in 2013 in Dallas, TX, Deep Vellum has expanded to encompass six distinct publishing imprints and is now the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States.

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