Our Latest News
WINTER/SPRING 2025
Since COVID make celebrating our 2020 anniversaries impossible, we are excited to begin celebrating this year's 30th anniversary of Hidden River Arts, and the 15th anniversary of Hidden River Publishing. Please be sure to subscribe to our blog in order to learn of book giveaways, sales, and other activities and offerings during this year.
We are slowly catching up on the delays in our publishing pipeline and with our awards and publications. The struggles of COVID are still upon us, and many in the arts community still feel the impact of the years of shutdown. You can read about our titles under "Our Imprints". We're thrilled with the new books and very happy to welcome our newest members of the Hidden River family.
Our open readings and some of our awards programs were put on hold during the pandemic. Many arts organizations are finding it difficult to build their in-person audiences back to pre-pandemic numbers. We're currently working to design programs that take advantage of virtual spaces while waiting for our live events to be3come more tenable. Please check out our blog for updates on new developments, and feel free to write to share ideas.
We wish all of you continued good health, safety and great creative progress. Please keep checking in for updates and news. We are still here; we are still dedicated to our mission of Serving the Unserved Artist; and we still send you all much love, respect and best wishes.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Past News:
JANUARY 2020
And here comes 2020! It's our ANNIVERSARY!
Hidden River Arts was established by our Founder, Debra Leigh Scott, in 1995. She took a portion of an arts grant that she received for her own writing and launched Hidden River Arts as a way to pay forward her own good fortune. It began small, with one yearly short fiction award, given for either a short story or a novel excerpt. The award was named after Debra's beloved teacher and mentor, William Van Wert, a writer and poet and dedicated educator. Since that time, the organization has grown to provide live arts events, gallery events, public readings, workshops, classes, more awards and, in 2010, an independent small press, Hidden River Publishing. So -- not only is 2020 our 25th anniversary, it is the 10th anniversary for our publishing venture. We're planning events, activities, offers, book sales, new activities and launches, a few relaunches. It's going to be a very active and exciting year.
To Recap:
The year 2019 was one of our busiest. We saw more growth, more announced awards and an expanded internship program. We’re currently working with our new team of interns and assistants, and are busy with the reading cycle for our newest competitions. We are currently wrapping up last year’s competition decisions. For updates on all our activities, awards and events, please be sure to follow our blog.
We dramatically expanded our awards program in 2018/2019, and have detailed information at our blog, where we provide information about the winners of these awards, and the future deadlines for submissions. The awards now include not only our three long-standing awards (The William Van Wert Award, The Hidden River Playwrighting Award, and The Eludia Award), but we now are offering awards for historical fiction, speculative fiction, non-fiction, as well as poetry. We have also added a short play award to our script awards. In 2020, we'll be expanding into awards for visual art, music, film.
Winners recently named are: Jeffrey Voccola who won our Blue Mountain Novel Award for Kings Row, a fictionalized account of an actual murder which took place in Kutztown, Pennsylvania; Carol Tyx won the Willow Run Poetry Book Award for her wonderful manuscript, Remaking Achilles: Slicing Into Angola's History; Marjorie Sandor won the Tuscarora Historical Fiction Award for her novel, The Secret Music at Tordesillas; and Justine Dymond is the most recent winner of our Eludia Award, for her story collection, The Emigrant and Other Stories.
Our newest Sowilo Press book, the fifth Eludia Award winner, is In Progress, by Catharine Leggett. We are currently working on our sixth Eludia Award winner, The Emigrant and Other Stories, by Justine Dymond, Please be sure to follow us here and on our blog, where we'll be announcing more information about that launch.. Our most recent books, all published under the Hidden River Press imprint, are Kings Row by Jeffrey Voccola, Remaking Achilles, by Carol Tyx and The Secret Music at Tordesillas by Marjorie Sandor. More information about each of these titles can be found under "Our Imprints". Follow us, too, for announcements and profiles of other award winners and information about their forthcoming books.
This year will also see the launch of the first title on our Many Frog imprint – an imprint dedicated to the exploration of arts, arts education and alternative education and learning methods. This first title, by Jeffrey lesser, is Your Voice, Your Instrument: Learning to Play. Jeff is a musical theatre performer, a cabaret performer who has a run a very successful cabaret class in Philadelphia, with sold-out performances at L’Etage nightclub being a long-time favorite among Philadelphia cabaret lovers. He has recently moved to California and is taking Palm Springs by storm, with new cabarets and performances, classes and programs. He has been teaching voice for well over two decades, and decided that it was time to share some of his experience in print. We’re planning an interactive eBook with links to a youtube channel where you will find videos of lessons and voice technique, and a website that allows you to contact Jeff directly for voice advice. We are also planning the launch of an interdisciplinary online arts review, and will provide additional information as the launch approaches.
Since COVID make celebrating our 2020 anniversaries impossible, we are excited to begin celebrating this year's 30th anniversary of Hidden River Arts, and the 15th anniversary of Hidden River Publishing. Please be sure to subscribe to our blog in order to learn of book giveaways, sales, and other activities and offerings during this year.
We are slowly catching up on the delays in our publishing pipeline and with our awards and publications. The struggles of COVID are still upon us, and many in the arts community still feel the impact of the years of shutdown. You can read about our titles under "Our Imprints". We're thrilled with the new books and very happy to welcome our newest members of the Hidden River family.
Our open readings and some of our awards programs were put on hold during the pandemic. Many arts organizations are finding it difficult to build their in-person audiences back to pre-pandemic numbers. We're currently working to design programs that take advantage of virtual spaces while waiting for our live events to be3come more tenable. Please check out our blog for updates on new developments, and feel free to write to share ideas.
We wish all of you continued good health, safety and great creative progress. Please keep checking in for updates and news. We are still here; we are still dedicated to our mission of Serving the Unserved Artist; and we still send you all much love, respect and best wishes.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Past News:
JANUARY 2020
And here comes 2020! It's our ANNIVERSARY!
Hidden River Arts was established by our Founder, Debra Leigh Scott, in 1995. She took a portion of an arts grant that she received for her own writing and launched Hidden River Arts as a way to pay forward her own good fortune. It began small, with one yearly short fiction award, given for either a short story or a novel excerpt. The award was named after Debra's beloved teacher and mentor, William Van Wert, a writer and poet and dedicated educator. Since that time, the organization has grown to provide live arts events, gallery events, public readings, workshops, classes, more awards and, in 2010, an independent small press, Hidden River Publishing. So -- not only is 2020 our 25th anniversary, it is the 10th anniversary for our publishing venture. We're planning events, activities, offers, book sales, new activities and launches, a few relaunches. It's going to be a very active and exciting year.
To Recap:
The year 2019 was one of our busiest. We saw more growth, more announced awards and an expanded internship program. We’re currently working with our new team of interns and assistants, and are busy with the reading cycle for our newest competitions. We are currently wrapping up last year’s competition decisions. For updates on all our activities, awards and events, please be sure to follow our blog.
We dramatically expanded our awards program in 2018/2019, and have detailed information at our blog, where we provide information about the winners of these awards, and the future deadlines for submissions. The awards now include not only our three long-standing awards (The William Van Wert Award, The Hidden River Playwrighting Award, and The Eludia Award), but we now are offering awards for historical fiction, speculative fiction, non-fiction, as well as poetry. We have also added a short play award to our script awards. In 2020, we'll be expanding into awards for visual art, music, film.
Winners recently named are: Jeffrey Voccola who won our Blue Mountain Novel Award for Kings Row, a fictionalized account of an actual murder which took place in Kutztown, Pennsylvania; Carol Tyx won the Willow Run Poetry Book Award for her wonderful manuscript, Remaking Achilles: Slicing Into Angola's History; Marjorie Sandor won the Tuscarora Historical Fiction Award for her novel, The Secret Music at Tordesillas; and Justine Dymond is the most recent winner of our Eludia Award, for her story collection, The Emigrant and Other Stories.
Our newest Sowilo Press book, the fifth Eludia Award winner, is In Progress, by Catharine Leggett. We are currently working on our sixth Eludia Award winner, The Emigrant and Other Stories, by Justine Dymond, Please be sure to follow us here and on our blog, where we'll be announcing more information about that launch.. Our most recent books, all published under the Hidden River Press imprint, are Kings Row by Jeffrey Voccola, Remaking Achilles, by Carol Tyx and The Secret Music at Tordesillas by Marjorie Sandor. More information about each of these titles can be found under "Our Imprints". Follow us, too, for announcements and profiles of other award winners and information about their forthcoming books.
This year will also see the launch of the first title on our Many Frog imprint – an imprint dedicated to the exploration of arts, arts education and alternative education and learning methods. This first title, by Jeffrey lesser, is Your Voice, Your Instrument: Learning to Play. Jeff is a musical theatre performer, a cabaret performer who has a run a very successful cabaret class in Philadelphia, with sold-out performances at L’Etage nightclub being a long-time favorite among Philadelphia cabaret lovers. He has recently moved to California and is taking Palm Springs by storm, with new cabarets and performances, classes and programs. He has been teaching voice for well over two decades, and decided that it was time to share some of his experience in print. We’re planning an interactive eBook with links to a youtube channel where you will find videos of lessons and voice technique, and a website that allows you to contact Jeff directly for voice advice. We are also planning the launch of an interdisciplinary online arts review, and will provide additional information as the launch approaches.
