• Galleys available for sales force by request, poetry media, select tech/AI media, regional (CA) media, academic media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
• Major media outreach, with special focus on major/national media to build author's platform nationally, as well as poetry and regional media, with targeted outreach to writers covering how robotic technology and AI is changing our culture
• Cover reveal and preorder social media and newsletter campaign in collaboration with Oakland/SF-based bookstore
• Major virtual launch event in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets to elevate author's platform
• Advertising with the Academy of American Poets, Poets.org and PNBA
• Newsletter promotion via the publisher to poetry and academic lists of more than 20K contacts
• Events and touring in CA and NY

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.

Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don’t exist. In discerning verse, she workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named “Nia,” who her boss calls “his type”; she loses hours researching “June,” an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day “trying to break” a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of Stevenson’s poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams “about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints.” With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their own—where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.

Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: “I want to say better.”