At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
The latest issue “Summer 2025” (Vol. 2, Issue 2) of Cool Beans Lit features 25 talented authors and artists of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art that capture the sharp human element and unpredictable nature of our current state. Some of the pieces involve themes of upending stages of life, a comedic view on the pervasiveness of social media influencers, a true tale of sudden life-altering hearing loss, and the struggle of an immigrant seeking a new life by means of escape and survival. These contributors represent a broad range of backgrounds, experience, and viewpoints and hail from several countries and walks of life, including physicians, educators, actors, editors and novices, as well as seasoned authors/artists and best sellers. Take a break and dip a toe in this refreshing summer issue of Cool Beans Lit.
Dream Count, Adichie’s first novel since 2014’s Americanah, picks up some of the same themes, especially around romantic relationships and race in America. However, this novel focuses much more on the relationships, as well as the expectations the four women at the core of this novel face. Chiamaka is a freelance travel writer from Nigeria, now living in America, who spends the Covid pandemic looking back on her “dream count,” the number of relationships she has had that haven’t ultimately led to marriage. Zikora, one of her best friends, is a lawyer who has a daughter that the father abandoned. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin, is the most financially successful of them all, as she has become wealthy through questionable, but supposedly common, banking practices in Nigeria.
One of the main plotlines, though, centers around Kadiatou, a character Adichie modeled on Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who accused a powerful hotel guest of sexual assault. Through that part of the novel, Adichie explores the ways culture, including other women, discount women’s stories of assault and rape. Adichie uses fiction to explore what one woman might feel in that situation, especially in unexpected ways.
Adichie’s novel draws heavily on cultural events of the past decade or so, such as the pandemic or Diallo’s assault, but, at times, that focus limits the novel. Adichie has been vocal about the rush to judgment that can happen on social media, the condemnation that comes before a trial that can ruin people’s lives and careers. Omelogor gives voice to such ideas in the novel, as she attends graduate school in the U.S. for a brief time, and her comments sound both defensive and antagonistic without the nuance of an equally strong voice to balance her ideas.
As in Adichie’s previous work, though, the focus is on the relationships and the way friends and family continue to pressure these women to follow a traditionally feminine path of marriage and motherhood. They are all successful in their own way, but those around them often question that success and the cost of it, even leading to the women doubting themselves, but Adichie provides them with full, rich lives, showing that there are a number of ways women can live in the world.
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Alfred A. Knopf, March 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
In Songs for the Land-Bound, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza sings of “memory, art, turbulence” in a woman’s relationship to motherhood, marriage, aging, writing, spirituality, and “wilderness.” Garcia-Mendoza’s assured and refined debut, divided into six bird-ornamented sections, documents the “complications” of her subjects by employing contrasting modes of discourse that illustrate the “fights between” and “the opposite effect” of dichotomous thinking, creating a dynamic interplay between coupling and countering within the choices of poetic form, linear organization, and noun constructions.
Garcia-Mendoza juxtaposes various forms: a nocturne counters an aubade, odes oppose an epithalamium, the prose of a haibun contrasts with the verse of a sonnet, the erasure found in a collage compares to the patchwork technique of a cento, and still lifes stand in contrast to “dioramas.” Within these forms, lines are often stanzaically organized in couplets or tercets, reinforcing the interplay of coupling and countering. This duality is also expressed in word pairings such as “the conditional, the subjunctive”; “relentlessness or restlessness”; and “bless & burn,” as well as through the progressions of three nouns: “starlings, selfies, sinkholes”; “soldier, poet, or king”; “color, time, light.” Gentle enjambment highlights the poet’s fine attention to the potential meanings that arise from additive and oppositional units of meaning.
Garcia-Mendoza’s narrative-lyric poems cycle “if, when, where” while considering “the carrion, the carry on, the carrying” that defines the life of a middle-aged woman. As the poet considers a “sense of life debt,” she acknowledges the “dread and marvel” of language, wilderness, and familylife, each seen as a “romance / with the unreliable,” “bearing / darkness.”
To counter the notion of “solastalgia,” the poet denies nothing but makes deliberate choices. She asserts: “My moral code is making”; “Revision means survival.” Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound are “illuminant over the scar.” Her poems of “wreckage strung with violets” — “music, all of it.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Happy Friday! Can you believe the month is already halfway over next week? Time really flies! With so much to do and so little time, I hope you’re finding moments to enjoy nature this summer with the people you love.
Don’t forget the essentials: sunscreen, bug spray, and plenty of water. Not a fan of plain water? Try flavored hydration drops—they’re especially helpful for those stubborn folks who resist staying hydrated. Cucumbers are also a great, refreshing option!
But I digress…
If you’re not able to get away just yet, NewPages is here to keep your creativity flowing. We’ve got fun writing and art prompts and submission opportunities to help you stay on track with your writing goals until you can shift to vacation mode.
🧠Inspiration Prompt: Face Pareidolia
Sounds intense, right? Face Pareidolia—is it a condition? A disease? A new form of body dysmorphia? Actually, it’s nothing scary at all.
Face pareidolia is the brain’s quirky tendency to see faces in everyday objects. Ever looked up at a cloud and seen not just a bunny or a dragon, but the face of a wise old wizard? Or maybe your pet rock “Bob” reminded you of Bob Ross, thanks to its spongey-looking “afro” and facial features?
Let your imagination run wild—what faces do you see in the world around you?
In Walking the Burn, Rachel Kellum thoughtfully intertwines literal and metaphorical language to explore the devastation wrought by fire, both in nature and within personal lives. The “burn” symbolizes not only the physical destruction marked by “a ring of char” and the “black skeletons / of juniper,” but also deeper emotional scars, including betrayals, injuries, and societal issues connected to Mormon patriarchy, sibling death, relationship failures, mental illness, and racial injustice. Kellum’s central question: “How did we get here?”
The collection is structured into three sections — Arise, Abide, and Dissolve — mirroring the process of mindfulness and inviting readers to engage in introspective reflection. The narrative unfolds from Kellum’s childhood, addressing themes of familial trauma and the complexities of relationships with her father, intimate partners, and sons, before transitioning to a focus on aging, grief, healing, and forgiveness.
Kellum’s autobiographical poems resonate with authenticity as she candidly navigates the stark contrasts between societal expectations and personal realities. Her vulnerability reveals the tensions that persist not just in her life but within broader social landscapes. Notably poignant are the series of poems that hold vigil for murdered Black men, including Philando Castille, Terrance Crutcher, and George Floyd. Kellum invokes their names while being conscious of her place in their narratives. While she tries “Not to make this story” hers, her experience in an interracial relationship informs the outrage, grief, and anxiety apparent in these poems.
In one moment, Kellum reflects on the difficulty of “saying less,” recognizing the weight of her words. Each poem radiates a “clear promise,” attesting to her roles as a daughter, sister, lover, and mother, all while serving a greater purpose for family and society. Ultimately, in Walking the Burn, Kellum invites us to walk alongside her through both the beauty and devastation of life’s experiences.
Walking the Burn by Rachel Kellum. Middle Creek Publishing, March 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Borderlines: An Astral Experience in Poems by Alan Botsford Cyberwit.com, April 2025
“A wonderful gang of talkative alter egos meets the ego in a cosmic expatriate bar and the ego tells their story, which is the intriguing inner and outer story of the poet Alan Botsford himself.” — Sarah Arvio, author of Cry Back My Sea: 48 Poems in 6 Waves
“In these poems of self and world, an American abroad, living in Japan, with a copy of Walt Whitman under his arm, sets out on the open road of the imagination, absorbing and transcending cultural constructions of that very self and world, ventriloquizing voices that speak back frequently at and to the author, as they embody multitudes, exemplifying the interconnectedness and contingency of identity, language, place, and emotion. Borderlines offers a new vision, looking both ways, inward and outward, ahead and behind, crossing borders, in an embrace centered ultimately in love.” — Michael Sowder, author of Sacred Letters: Sanskrit, Yoga, and Awakening the Divine
Alan Botsford is an American poet, author, and professor born in Connecticut and living in Japan for many years, where he teaches in university. His poetry collections include Possessions: Poems in American Poetry and Dreamer: Poems in Culture, and the hybrid Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore.
Another summer holiday is behind us and it is so hard to let go, isn’t it?
If you’re taking your break this week instead of last, NewPages has plenty of food for your creative fodder!
In Issue 188 of the NewPages Newsletter, we bring you new issues of literary magazines, book reviews, 49 submission opportunities, and—of course—a prompt to inspire your creativity. And this time, the prompt is more of a challenge than anything else!
Inspiration Prompt: The Scintillating Story of Sister “S”
Sometimes, the best way to break through a creative block is to give yourself a constraint—and this week, we’re spotlighting one of the most slippery, stylish letters in the alphabet: S.
Whether you’re a poet, prose writer, doodler, or essayist, here are a few playful ways to let “S” lead the way:
Write a poem where every line starts with “S”
Craft a story in which each sentence (or paragraph) begins with “S”
Draw a doodle composed only of items starting with “S”
Make a collage devoted to all forms of “S”—lowercase, uppercase, cursive, serif, sans-serif
Pen an ode to the curves of the letter itself
Explore an essay on “S”—its history, phonetics, or popularity
Feeling bold? Try the Super S Challenge: Every single word in a sentence or line must start with “S.” (Silly? Sure. Stimulating? Surprisingly so.)
Straw-grasping or not, what does pushing yourself to follow such a constraint do for your creative process? Does it reinvigorate it? Help you pay more attention to rhythm and flow? Or does it feel synonymous with a different kind of roadblock?
💌 Love prompts like this? Subscribe to the NewPages Weekly Newsletter for more creative inspiration, fresh submission opportunities, literary magazine highlights, and book reviews delivered straight to your inbox.
Using the natural world as both mirror and lens, the poems in Denton Loving’s third collection of poetry explore themes of connection, longing, and the pursuit of a fully lived life. They celebrate “the light that enters the woods and cleanses the wound.” They seek the sacred order in everything, from the phases of the moon down to the delicate colors of a moth’s wings. And yet, they are not cloistered away from the human struggle — whether with nature, with each other, or with the self. Feller envisions our environment and landscape, not as backdrop or ornament but as revelatory forces illuminating the hidden chambers of the self. At once deeply rooted in his Appalachian soil and universally resonant, Feller confirms Loving’s position among those rare poets who transmute a sense of place into profound human truth.
“Loving makes lyric sense of complex issues in poem after poem in Feller, with his special blend of eco-poetics and earthly reason.” — Elaine Sexton, Site Specific
“At once timely and timeless, Feller is a superbly striking and essential book.” — Matt W. Miller, Tender the River
“Reading Feller is a transformative, joyful, loneliness-alleviating experience.” — Annie Woodford, Where You Come From Is Gone
The theme for Blink-Ink Issue #60 is “Seeds,” which could mean a small thing that we plant and nurture to grow bigger things we need, or it could mean a promise, a hope, a plan to provide and to make things better. Seeds can also be where the future waits and dreams or even stays dormant, waiting for just the right moment to burst forth. Writers submitted their best stories of “around 50 words,” and those whose works were planted in this issue include Maddie W. White, Kathy Lynn Carroll, Anne Anthony, Richard Zboray, Vali Hawkins Mitchell, Sushmita Sridhar, S.A. Greene, Tracy Royce, Lisa Williams, Daryl Scroggins, Francine Witte, Ayesha Gallion, Jill Holtz, Carolyn R. Russell, Chris Bowen, Kate Noble, Rachel Turney, Sharon J. Clark, Rosaleen Lynch, Nadja Maril, Rowan Tate, and Marcy Arlin.
Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, Run for the Hills, continues to develop themes from his most recent works, especially the idea of family and what that looks like in the twenty-first century. The main character Mad — short for Madeline — lives on a successful farm in rural Tennessee with her mother, as her father left them when she was young, and she’s never heard from him again. A man just over a decade older shows up at their roadside stand claiming to be her half-brother, as his father left him and his mother, then started a new life in Tennessee.
This development leads to a road trip, as Rube — short for Reuben, as their father loved nicknames — has had a private investigator discover that their father has two more children and is now living yet another life in California. They drive across the country picking up Pep, short for Pepper, and Tom, short (sort of) for Theron, on their way to California.
They all share the same experience, that of their father leaving, but their father reinvented himself with each new family, moving from being a detective novelist to an organic farmer to a basketball coach to a camera man/filmmaker. Thus, while each child shares the same experience of abandonment, they each have a different view of their father.
Along the way, they bond with one another through their childhood trauma, but also their love for this man who was a good father to each of them until he left and never contacted them again. They each discover what it’s like to have siblings to rely on, to tease, and even to fight with. They know they’re going to have to go home again, no matter what they find at the end of the trip, but this newfound family may help them make peace with the lives they currently live.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
There’s not much of a plot to relate from Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin, as the unnamed narrator doesn’t do much. She’s teaching at a school for underprivileged boys, but she’s not invested in their learning, though she likes her students quite a bit. She has a relationship with Sasha, but he’s clearly more in love with her than she is with him. She begins a different relationship with an unhoused man she refers to as Trenchcoat — he picked up a trench coat she left outside of her apartment — as they buy high-end purses that they can then pass on to one of his friends who will sell them at a nice profit.
The plot, though, really isn’t the point of the novel. Instead, it’s more of a character study of a Palestinian woman who is stuck in her life, partly due to the trauma of never feeling like one belongs anywhere and partly due to the death of her parents when she was young. Their death led to her inheriting a great deal of money, so her life is superficially stable, though she goes through her monthly distribution quite quickly, largely due to her obsessive focus on cleanliness. She spends hours scrubbing away what she believes is dead skin, even seeing snakes that come out of her. She clearly sees herself as dirty, and she doesn’t believe anything she can do will ever help her be truly clean. The coin of the title is a reference to a coin she believes she swallowed when she was a child, but it also seems to refer to the part of her back that she cannot reach to clean, thus serving as a metaphor for her displacement, trauma, and survivor’s guilt.
Near the end of the novel she goes in the opposite direction, seemingly trying to recreate Palestine in her New York apartment, after a theft at the school reveals how little she understands her students. The narrator addresses a “you” throughout the novel, becoming more pronounced near the conclusion of the book, though it’s never quite clear whom it might be. There are hints that it could be a person at the beginning of a new relationship, but it also feels like it could be a manifestation of her lack of belonging. If so, she might be on the track to understanding herself a bit better, though the ending is vague, at best. Regardless, Zaher has clearly conveyed a character who is struggling to understand how to live in a world that doesn’t seem to want her and her people to exist at all.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
Happy Friday and Happy Independence Day! Today is July 4, the day Americans celebrate Independence Day. Whether you’re staying cool at home or heading out to celebrate, NewPages has something for you. If you’re relaxing indoors, check out our fun writing prompt and submission opportunities to keep your creativity flowing. If you’re traveling or celebrating, no worries—our weekly roundup will be here when you’re ready.
Inspiration Prompt: Independence Day
Rather than focusing on traditional national independence celebrations, let’s explore a different angle. In 1994, country music artist Martina McBride released the powerful song “Independence Day,” written by Gretchen Peters. The song tells the story of a young girl whose mother, a victim of domestic abuse, takes a stand—marking a deeply personal and transformative “independence day” for them both.
This week, we invite you to reflect and soul search on the idea of personal independence.
What does your own “independence day” look like?
Maybe you finally left a toxic workplace or relationship.
Maybe you stepped into adulthood, fully independent from your family.
Maybe you overcame cancer or took control of your health after a pre-diabetes diagnosis.
Maybe you broke free from an addiction—whether to drugs, alcohol, or even something that seemed harmless but consumed you, like collecting rocks or scraps of paper.
Or, if you’d prefer to keep it fictional, imagine a world where independence is celebrated in a unique or unconventional way—or create a character who is desperately seeking freedom from something, anything—serious or seemingly silly, but deeply meaningful to them.
What would that journey look like?
Wishing you a safe, joyful, and creatively inspired holiday! When you’re ready, keep scrolling for this week’s roundup of submission opportunities.
Confessions, Catherine Airey’s debut novel, follows three generations of Irish women, moving from the 1970s to the 2020s, showing how each of them deal with discovering who they are, partly through love and relationships, but partly through art and culture, as well. The novel begins with Cora in New York City in 2001 as she was already struggling with stability, given the death of her mother. The death of her father begins to push her over the edge until a letter from her Aunt Róisín gives her a chance at a new life in rural Ireland.
In the 1970s, Róisín and her sister Máire watch as a group called The Screamers move into a house in their neighborhood, ultimately hiring Máire as an artist to catalog their life. Michael, the boy who lives next door, but who doesn’t fit in for his own reasons, loves Máire, but watches her ultimately move to New York to pursue her artistic desires, while Róisín stays home alone.
In 2018, Cora’s daughter Lyca lives in rural Ireland with her mother and Great Aunt Ró. Cora is one of the main activists working for legalization of abortion in Ireland, while Lyca looks through the old house as a means to understand herself and her family.
Given the title, the main irony of the novel is that the characters don’t often confess the truth to one another, as most of the revelations that come in the novel do so because a separate character finds out information about one of the others. Given the different points of view, readers often hear about one character from another, not from themselves. Thus, they all have to decide what they should reveal and what they should hide, usually out of a desire to protect.
Overall, Airey’s novel shows the struggles women have faced and continue to face — whether that’s abusive men, a culture that outlaws choice, or isolation that comes from their not following the dominant narrative —but also how they can support one another to build real community, at times.
Confessions by Catherine Airey. Mariner Books, January 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
The sunny new Summer 2025 issue (58.2) of Southern Humanities Review features poetry selected by Guest Poetry Editor Gabrielle Bates.
The issue includes poetry by Sean Cho A., Rhony Bhopla, Leia K. Bradley, Patrycja Humienik, Willie Lee Kinard III, Jeni O’Neal, and Mandy Shunnarah. Readers will also enjoy new nonfiction by Allison C. Macy-Steines and Julie Marie Wade, and fiction by Nwanne Agwu, Leslie Pietrzyk, Alyssa Quinn, and William Pei Shih.
Cover art by Jaye Bartell, Gray Stray Cat 68th Avenue, December, 2022. (Olympus Pen FT half-frame camera. Courtesy of the artist.)
Thunderstorms and rain swept through, trying their best to cool down the nearly 90-degree heat. Hopefully, you’re all staying cool and comfortable. Our weekly newsletter is here to help with that—packed with great reads to keep you inspired and plenty of submission opportunities to keep your writing goals on track. This week’s writing prompt explores the power of names in storytelling—how they shape identity, perception, and even destiny.
Speaking of which, let’s dive into that prompt and explore how the power of names can shape our stories—and ourselves.
Inspiration Prompt: What’s in a Name? More Than You Think.
A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but Anne wasn’t so sure Shakespeare got that right (remember, she thought Ann was just dreadful).
In an era of high infant mortality, Japanese children were often given temporary names to ward off misfortune—only receiving their “true” names once they reached a safer age. The belief was simple but profound: names carry power.
Even in nature, names shape perception. Every plant has at least two: the scientific name—precise but often forgotten—and the common name, which varies by region and culture. Take the autumn olive, for example. Despite its poetic name, it’s not an olive tree at all. Scientifically known as Elaeagnus umbellata, it also goes by Japanese silverberry, spreading oleaster, and autumn berry. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Yet in the U.S., it’s considered an invasive species—beautiful, but disruptive to native ecosystems.
It’s strange how something so beautiful can be misunderstood—or misjudged—because of a name.
In some communities, a family name alone can open doors—or close them. In schools, neighborhoods, and small towns, your last name might precede you like a rumor. Some names are spoken with admiration, others with disdain, long before anyone meets the person behind them. Maybe your uncle made headlines. Maybe your cousin got expelled. Maybe your last name means you’re always the troublemaker because of older siblings—or never taken seriously.
Somewhere out there, there’s a person whose entire job is to receive new products—lotions, gadgets, teas, sneakers—and test them, not for quality, but for identity. Their task? To find the name that tells a story, sparks curiosity, and makes someone fall in love at first glance. A name that whispers a story before the product is even touched. Imagine the power in that.
So, do you believe in the power of names? Have you ever liked something until you learned what it was called? Or disliked something, only to be won over by its name?
This week, let names guide your writing. Explore how they shape identity, perception, or even destiny. What stories lie hidden behind the names we give—or the ones we’re given?
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Want more inspiration prompts before committing?Dive in here and explore past prompts to spark your creativity.
Fragments of Cerulean is a surreal and emotionally resonant collection of short stories that blurs the boundaries between horror, memory, and myth. Structured in five evocative phases, this book invites readers into a world where the familiar becomes uncanny and the subconscious takes center stage. Each story is a journey through eerie landscapes — abandoned highways, sentient motel rooms, and cryptic machines that trade in secrets — crafted with immersive, cinematic prose.
This collection explores the fragile nature of identity and the haunting echoes of loss, transformation, and fear. With a tone that shifts between dreamlike introspection and psychological unease, the stories challenge perceptions of reality and self. Readers will encounter narratives that tug at the heart while unsettling the mind, offering a reading experience that is both emotionally raw and intellectually provocative.
Ideal for fans of atmospheric, genre-defying fiction, Fragments of Cerulean delivers a powerful blend of dark beauty and symbolic depth. It doesn’t offer easy resolutions — instead, it invites introspection and lingers long after the final page. Perfect for those drawn to the liminal, the strange, and the deeply human, this collection is a haunting exploration of what lies beneath the surface of our stories — and ourselves.
The Shore Issue 26 meets the blistering heat and the storms of early summer with its face turned directly into the weather. Scorched or soaked, it features electric new poems by Samuel Dickerson, Richard Siken, Natalie Padilla Young, Yishak Yohannes Yebio, Ryan Wong, Bethany Schultz Hurst, Yan Zhang, Rongfei Mu, Kathleen Winter, Carter Rekoske, S Janaki, Rebekah Rykiel, Anastasia Nikolis, Emily Pérez, Lorrie Ness, Ken Holland, Deirdre Lockwood, David Dodd Lee, Donald Pasmore, Haley Hodge, Ann Chinnis, Jenny Maaketo, Amrita Noor, Jordan Cobb, Rowan Tate, Chloe N Clark, F M Stringer, Kelle Groom, Charles Kell, Melissa Hughes, Virginia Kane, Lindsay Kellar-Madsen, William Varner & D A Angel. It also features art that screams with life and smoke and shade and brightness by Derek Ellis.
Zone 3 annual literary journal published by Austin Peay State University and their Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts is now available for readers to enjoy online, including their Editor Prize Winners as well as new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Sara Beth Childers, Heather Hawk, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Nicole R. Zimmerman, Amy Bagwell, Derek Jon Dickinson, Anna Abraham Gasaway, Hailey June Gross, Morgan Hamill, Callie Jennings, Quincy Gray McMichael, Mary Meriam, Dayna Patterson, Laura Ribitzky, Carson Sandell, Jon Tobias, Milagros Vilaplana, Genevieve Abravanel, Brett Biebel, Frank Reilly, and many more.
Spent, Alison Bechdel’s latest work, is subtitled “A Comic Novel,” setting it apart from her first three graphic memoirs. That said, while this work is fiction, it still draws heavily on Bechdel’s life, mainly in themes more than in events, including a main character clearly modeled on Bechdel herself. In this reality, though, she’s a pygmy goat farmer in addition to being a graphic artist and writer. As in real life, she has had a work become so successful that it’s been turned into a television show, much as Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home became a Broadway show. However, the difference here is that Bechdel has lost control of that intellectual property, so it has steadily moved away from her original vision.
One of the main themes that Bechdel explores through that change is fame and all that goes with it, especially the idea of selling out. The Bechdel of this novel has achieved a level of success, but she wonders if it’s worth it, especially when her next book offer comes from Megalopub, which is not only a large corporation, but one owned by a right-wing-supporting owner, one who goes against everything Bechdel supports. Similarly, Bechdel’s partner Holly creates online content which pushes her into a higher level of notoriety. At first, that change seems positive, as she begins to receive free equipment for their farm, but she begins to obsess over statistics and views, spending more time on metrics than on enjoying their life.
There are also subplots of relationships among their friends, which should remind readers of the community in Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, but the main focus, as the title implies, is on what and how one spends, whether that’s money or time or energy. The fictional Bechdel feels overwhelmed by the trajectory of the world, but she ends by finding a glimmer of hope in the community that might help replenish her and those around her. That’s an approach most of us could use these days.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
While public dissent was unthinkable in Stalin’s Soviet Union, some citizens, inspired by civil rights movements of the 1960s and Khrushchev’s “thaw,” decided to fight for a change after his death. Historian and Professor Benjamin Nathans chronicles the roughly twenty-year history of this intelligentsia movement in To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause — titled after a common dissident toast. Relying on declassified Soviet archives and retained underground dissident literature, he relates a compelling tale of resistance in the face of state persecution.
Nathans carefully corrects dissident stereotypes from Cold War rhetoric. Though Western darlings like Sakharov and Solzenitzyn play their roles, most protagonists are not motivated by Western democratic ideals, but by promises of socialist reform in keeping with the 1936 “Stalin Constitution” and its latent — ultimately empty — guarantee of rights. They lacked the public attention of right movements in the democratic world, but the playbook for highlighting state hypocrisy was similar. Unfortunately, with no real mechanism to enact these types of reform, the state simply attacked its critics as anti-Soviet and the KGB decisively crushed the movement in the early 1980s.
While some readers might be intimidated by its 816 pages, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction serves as an added testament to the book’s quality. In this political moment, when so much feels out of control in America and the world, these stories of quixotic, principled dissents may be just what we need to weather it.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
Welcome to our June 27, 2025 writing prompt and submission opportunities roundup—your weekly dose of inspiration and places to share your work.
It’s the final full week of June—hard to believe the year is already half over, isn’t it? If you’re lucky enough to be getting a break from the heat vortex that’s been smothering much of the country in sweaty malaise and creative inertia, maybe now’s the time to hit the pool. Or, if it’s still too hot to think, stay inside and focus on your writing, editing, and submission goals.
This week, I was torn between which writing prompt to include in the newsletter versus our weekly roundup of submission opportunities—but in the end, I went with my gut.
Since the end of 2023, I’ve been dealing with a new gut issue: acid reflux. It’s amazing what stress (and the bad eating habits that come with it) can do to your stomach on top of some newly discovered FODMAP issues. That got me thinking…
Writing Prompt: Gut Instinct
When the world is too loud, sometimes the only voice we can trust is the one rumbling in our gut. Whether it’s intuition, indigestion, or something in between, this week we invite you to write about your gut—literally or metaphorically.
What if your gut had a voice?
What if it was a character, a symbiote, a weather vane for your emotional climate?
As Ebenezer Scrooge once said in The Muppet Christmas Carol, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”
Sometimes our ghosts—and our stories—start in the stomach.
And in the immortal words of Little Giants: “I use these for acid indigestion.” “What are we going to use them for?” “Intimidation.”
If you know, you know. If you don’t…go watch Little Giants now.
Gut health is a serious topic, but maybe getting creative about our woes and maladies can bring some relief—if not physical, then at least mental or spiritual.
After going with your gut, keep scrolling to find a submission opportunity that speaks to it.
In the Editor’s Note for the Spring 2025 issue of Hiram Poetry Review, Willard Greenwood writes, “When the HPR first came into existence, we published poems by Charles Bukowski — see our first couple of issues. Since then, we have been on the lookout for outlaw poets and their various desperado philosophies in poetic form.”
Joining the ranks in the newest issue of Hiram Poetry Review are works by Fred Arroyo, Katie Berta, Neil Carpathios, Lynn Gilbert, Jake Hunter, Jeff McRae, Daniel Morris, J. Alan Nelson, Gloria Parker, Robert L. Penick, Joseph Powell, Beth Brown Preston, Gabriel Ricard, Claire Scott, JR Solonche, Jeff Tigchelaar, and many others.
New England Review 46.2 features stirring prose by Kirk Wilson, Nur Turkmani, and Rebecca Chace; luminous poetry by Bridget Lowe, Inkyoo Lee, and Jon Pineda; the special folio “The Sharpened Will of Us All”: Contemporary Salvadoran Writing in Translation, guest edited by Alexandra Lytton Regalado; and much more. Cover art: Homogenized, 60×36 inches, acrylic and multimedia on canvas, by Josué Rojas.
Additionally, in the Editor’s Note, Carolyn Kuebler contemplates with readers on the shifting threats we are negotiating daily and the role of literature in the fray: “Authoritarianism has always been antithetical to literature, which questions what we’re told and how to think. Even when it’s being ignored, literature works as a tool for freedom: freedom to create, reflect, observe, tell the truth, and imagine; freedom from ‘the tyranny of the present.’ But when the margins no longer offer cover, when you’re no longer invisible but vulnerable at the center, then what? Like in dodgeball, is it preferable to concede? To dodge and continue to play by the rules, or walk away from the game entirely? Maybe the metaphor ends here, because when it comes to writing, publishing, and the work of NER, we plan to stay in the game as long as possible.”
Astray. Adverb. Meaning to be away from the correct path or direction, much like being lost.
In our latest newsletter, It’s Looking Like a Lit Wave, we shared literary updates, submission opportunities, book reviews, and new releases to help you stay creatively inspired through the summer heat. One standout feature this week is our inspiration prompt, which invites writers to explore the emotional and creative terrain of being “still astray.”
🌡️ Why This Prompt?
Inspired by the haunting refrain from Stray Kids’ song “Lonely St.”, this prompt taps into the feeling of being unmoored—creatively, emotionally, or existentially. In the thick of a heatwave or a creative dry spell, it’s easy to feel directionless. But what if being “astray” isn’t a failure, but a form of freedom?
Sometimes, others only show support once you’ve nearly arrived at your destination or finally “made it.” But what if you’re still in the in-between? Do you welcome that support—or stand firm in your journey, even if it’s unfinished?
✨ Prompt: Still Astray
Write from the perspective of being “still astray.”
What does it mean to be lost in a world that demands direction?
Is being astray a failure—or a kind of freedom?
What do we discover when we stop trying to arrive?
Whether you’re working on poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction, let this be your invitation to explore the beauty and tension of the in-between.
🎧 Bonus inspiration: Watch the “Lonely St.” music video by Stray Kids — a visual and lyrical journey through solitude, resilience, and self-direction.
If the idea of being astray doesn’t resonate with you, what does the music video inspire? What story do you see playing out? (Closed caption English subtitles are available if you want to follow the lyrics.) Or maybe this is your chance to learn more about this internationally composed Korean band.
📬 Want more prompts like this? Subscribe to the NewPages Newsletter to get weekly writing inspiration, submission calls, literary news, and indie publishing highlights—delivered straight to your inbox. 👉 Subscribe here and never miss a lit wave!
The Cobbler’s Crusaders by Rick Steigelman Author Published, May 2025
Jacquelyn Pajot, a nine-year-old American visiting her sanctimonious grandmother in Paris, falls in with a pair of young French girls whose carefree grasp of ‘right and wrong’ has the wide-eyed American narrowly averting prison, purgatory and, most perilously, her grandmother’s righteous indignation.
“A charmingly whimsical, whip-smart slice of Parisian life wrapped in equal parts heart and humor…Rick Steigelman’s prose is wry, warm, and beautifully descriptive, capturing the magic of Montmartre through the curious, wide eyes of young Jacquelyn Pajot.” — Alex Norton, Likely Story
“Dialogue sparkles with life, especially as Jacquelyn navigates the humorous pitfalls of being an American tween in a French-speaking world.” — Swapna Peri, Book Reviews Cafe
“Beneath all the comedic mishaps, there’s a beautiful sense of intergenerational connection. The dynamic between Jacquelyn and her grandmother, Catherine, is particularly touching as it anchors the story in emotional truth while allowing the young cast to explore their own emerging identities and moral boundaries. I’d easily recommend it to readers who enjoy novels like A Man Called Ove or The Elegance of the Hedgehog, stories that offer laughter, but also invite you to pause and feel something deeper.” — Heena Pardeshi, The Reading Bud
Arcana: The Lost Heirs by Author/Illustrator Sam Prentice-Jones Feiwel & Friends, June 2024
Debut author/illustrator Sam Prentice-Jones explores fighting against destiny and reconciling the actions of ancestors in Arcana: The Lost Heirs, a tarot-inspired fantasy YA graphic novel.
James, Daphne, Koko, and Sonny have all grown up surrounded by magic in the Arcana, an organization of witches that protects the magical world, run by the mysterious and secretive Majors. Eli Jones, however, hadn’t even known other witches existed, until he stumbled into James. As James introduces him to the world of the Arcana, Eli finds the family he never had and a blossoming romance with James.
The five new friends soon realize that sinister influences are afoot, and everything may not be what it seems at the Arcana. When the group delves deeper into the mystery surrounding the deaths of their parents and the Majors’ rise to power, they discover that they’re at the center of a curse — one they’ve just unwittingly set into motion. As the friends search for answers, they’ll have to confront the cursed legacy that links them in hopes of freeing their futures.
“Careful/Care-full Collaboration,” the May 2025 issue of About Place Journal, is now available for readers to enjoy open-access online in addition to the publication’s full archive.
“Creative collaboration,” write the editors, “is an opportunity to summon and practice ways of being in the world that honor multiplicity, reciprocity, reflection, and, foremost, care. Challenging myths of exceptional individualism as constructed within colonial and capitalist contexts, collaboration arises as a method of and commitment to seeding and nurturing webs of knowledge, histories, practices, and relationships with each other and the places that are sacred to us. Guided by these understandings, the most recent issue of About Place Journal contemplates what it means to entangle in co-creative practices and processes that are both careful and full of care.”
About Place is a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute, dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society.
Mary Anne Trasciatti’s biography of intrepid civil liberties and labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn [1890—1964] is as much an account of Gurley Flynn’s nearly 60-years as an organizer, speaker, tactician, and fundraiser, as it is an account of government crackdowns on dissent during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. The heavily detailed and exhaustively researched volume digs into Flynn’s earliest work with the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW), where she developed a reputation as a fearless, outspoken firebrand. Dubbed The Rebel Girl, her work in support of exploited laborers took her from her home in the Bronx to cities across the country where she mounted a soapbox and exhorted crowds to support striking workers in Paterson, New Jersey, Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington.
Her humor and ease with people won her approval from everyday folks – and attention from rightwing politicians and police who tried to silence her. But she would not be cowed. Instead, her defense of labor rights and free speech led her to the then-fledgling American Civil Liberties Union and Communist Party. Although she was booted out of the ACLU during the height of the Red Scare, her commitment to working people never faltered.
Nonetheless, there were setbacks. In 1955, for example, Flynn was jailed for violating the Smith Act, legislation that made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the US government. She used her time in prison to read, write, and agitate from afar. Once released, she fought against repressive legislation that sought to revoke US citizenship from those convicted of rebellion, insurrection, seditious conspiracy, or Smith Act violations.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn lived a life of resolute political engagement. At the same time, Trasciatti makes Flynn fully human, detailing several failed relationships and the heartbreaking loss of her only son to cancer. The end result is a richly drawn portrait of a bold, principled, and savvy woman who deserves to be remembered and celebrated.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Submissions deadline for the 2025 New American Fiction Prize has been extended! Winner will receive a contract including a $1500, publication, twenty-five copies, and promotional support. EXTENDED DEADLINE: JULY 15, 2025.All full-length fiction manuscripts are welcome, including novels, novellas, collections of stories and/or novellas, novels in verse, linked collections, as well as full-length collections of flash fiction and short-shorts. Full-length fiction manuscripts tend to be at least 100 pages. There is no maximum length. To submit, please access our convenient online submission manager, which saves paper and helps keep things organized. Entry fee is $25.
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Application Deadline: July 15, 2025 Realize your vision with acclaimed novelist, memoirist, editor Kate Moses, as invested in your story & your growth as you are. Taking writers under her wing for 3 decades. Individual mentorships and small group retreats. Now enrolling for September writers’ residency at Hewnoaks in Maine. Substack: The Museletter with Kate Moses. View flyer or visit website to learn more.
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Deadline: August 1, 2025 About Place Journal, the arts publication of Black Earth Institute, seeks submissions for its Fall 2025 issue On Freedom from June 1–August 1. We publish poetry, prose, visual art, music, and more that explore spirit, earth, and society. Join us in building a just, interconnected world. View flyer to see theme details and guidelines or visit our website.
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The HEART Poetry Award 2025 is open to entries of unpublished reflective modern prose poems through June 30! $10 fee to enter up to 3 poems. Winner of the HEART Poetry Award will be awarded $500 and publication in HEART 20 (Fall/Winter 2025). This year’s judge is Grey Held. View flyer to view more information and visit Nostalgia Press to view judge bio and submit.
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Noetic Variations, v1 and v2 are experiments in extreme poetic abstraction, eschewing the appearance of formal narrative and mainstream convention. The NV project is an exciting postmodern exercise in pure language, stripped of all meaning and impervious to literary interpretation. Download free copies here: V1V2 or purchase here: V1V2. View flyer for more information.
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In Consequence Volume 17.1, a theme emerges of how affecting a difference doesn’t only have to happen on a global scale—it can and should include the more local ones. This is maybe most conspicuously expressed in the essay “A Trip to Kosovo” where a doctor returns to the war-torn country to navigate its broken bureaucracy in hopes of getting his nephew immediate cancer treatment and ends on the line: If the world can be saved, it will be by small acts of kindness. View flyer for more information.
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JOIN us for SOMOS’ 9th Annual Taos Writers Conference, in beautiful Taos, New Mexico, July 25th—27th, 2025, featuring keynote speaker, memoirist, & poet, Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City). Over twenty workshops in every genre. Conference includes receptions, keynote reading, lunch roundtable discussions on publishing, faculty readings, and book sales. FYI: view our flyer, visit our website, or call 575-758-0081.
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What is it that makes a region unique? That’s the question we want to answer. America’s North Coast, defined for this anthology as adjacent to Lake Erie from Toledo to Buffalo and even Michigan. In their voices, we want to hear the poetic stories of those who have lived, worked, vacationed or just passed through this region. See flyer for more info and link to website.
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Today marks the first day of summer—the summer solstice. And in honor of both the season’s arrival and the oppressive heat that’s rolled in this week, what better way to get your creative juices flowing than by exploring one of summer’s more dramatic downsides?
We’re also back with a fresh roundup of submission opportunities to help you find a home for your work. So grab your laptop, a cold matcha latte, and head to your local library, bookstore, or that blessedly air-conditioned coffee shop—and dive in.
Writing Prompt: Stormy Weather
There comes a time in every life when the air turns thick and stale—when the heat presses down like a weight, and even the hum of a fan feels like a cruel joke. The energy to move, to think, to cook, evaporates. You sit, sweat pooling, praying for something—anything—to break the spell.
Then, it comes. A low rumble. A flicker of light. The sky cracks open and the storm rolls in—thunder shaking the windows, lightning slicing the sky, and finally, finally, a breath of cool air. Relief, wrapped in chaos.
Have you lived through days like these? When your clothes felt like damp rags and your mood was as volatile as the weather? When the phrase “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” became a personal mantra—or a punchline?
Or maybe you’ve never known that kind of oppressive summer. But can you imagine it? A world where the very air turns against you, where you long for the violence of a storm just to feel alive again. In our house, it was tradition to throw the curtains wide and marvel at the storm, even as the radio warned us to take shelter in the basement.
This week, we invite you to write about stormy weather—literal or metaphorical. Maybe your character is trapped in a sweltering city, waiting for the sky to break. Maybe the storm is emotional, a long-awaited release after a period of tension. Or maybe you want to explore a sci-fi world where humidity is weaponized and storms are currency. Perhaps you’ll craft a poem where the pacing mirrors that bated breath and sweet release.
Whatever your take, let the pressure build—and then let it pour. Then see below for places to submit your work.
Introducing readers to Posit Issue 39, the editors write, “Four months into the ever-more-alarming New World Disorder seems like as good a time as any to offer something other to contemplate…if not an antidote, then at least a respite, and perhaps a reminder of what else we humans can produce.” The works in this open-access online issue, note the editors, “we believe they can help. Help us see and feel more deeply. Help us confront where we are in these drastic and alarming times. And help us imagine going forward.”
Featured in Poist Issue 39 are poetry and prose by Joan Baranow, Daniel Biegelson, Charles Borkhuis, Julie Carr, Shou Jie Eng, MK Francisco, Shawnan Ge, Julie Hanson, Denise Newman, Randy Prunty, Elizabeth Robinson, and Dan Rosenberg; paintings and sculpture by Steve Greene, Elizabeth Hazan, and Sarah Peters; and text + image by Dale Going and Marie Carbone.
If literary publications are concerned about their future, they might do well to assess what they are doing to fuel the creative interests of the next generation, as evidenced by Apotheca Journal, a monthly online publication showcasing poetry, short stories, novel excerpts, creative non-fiction, photography, artwork, and more by contributors aged 14-22.
Founder and Editor Ann Sproul explains how one experience encouraged her to launch a literary magazine, “When I was in seventh grade, I received my first writing award: publication and a $1,000 scholarship from Bluefire Journal. The whole experience really raised my confidence not only as a writer but as a person. Ever since then, I have wanted to edit for a magazine. The world needs young writers and artists who realize that their voice is valuable. Those are the people who are going to grow up and be unapologetic for what they have to say. It can be difficult for young writers and artists since the majority of magazines are for adults. Through Apotheca, I am hoping to afford other young writers and artists the same confidence I felt when I was first published.”
Finding fresh inspiration for our weekly newsletter isn’t always easy but seeing yet another jury duty summons in my mail made me ponder how real life sparks writing. And no, I am not making it up.
Since my first year out of college, I’ve been summoned nearly annually—one year, even twice! What are the odds? No, really—I want to know! This week’s newsletter (Issue 185) turns that ‘wonderful’ luck into writing fodder, plus editor updates, bookstore news, new releases, and book reviews to bulk up your reading list.
Writing Prompt: The Only Things for Certain Are Death, Taxes… and Jury Duty
Some people breeze through life with luck on their side—finding true love, scoring dream jobs, even cracking the perfect lotto numbers. But others? Well, their luck is a bit… different.
Enter jury duty, that unavoidable civic summons, popping up again and again. What are the chances that one person is randomly selected every year—sometimes even more? Statistical bad luck? Or is fate playing an ironic joke?
For those who have experienced jury duty, the process can feel surreal—being scrutinized in selection, locked in a room, cut off from communication, then ushered into a courtroom to make decisions that may alter someone’s life. Some feel the crushing weight of responsibility, while others just want out.
Your Challenge:
Imagine a world where the only luck some people have is jury duty. What does that do to someone? Do they accept their fate? Try to avoid selection at all costs? Or do they lean into the absurdity?
Or, if you’ve served on a jury, share your own experiences! Was it what you expected? What was the strangest, most intense, or oddly hilarious moment?
Need even more inspiration? Not subscribed yet? Don’t miss out—sign up today for weekly inspiration, plus early access to submission opportunities and events! You can also find more writing prompts in our weekly Where to Submit Roundup.
Sanam Mahloudji’s debut novel follows three generations of Iranian women: Elizabeth, the grandmother; Seema and Shirin, her daughters; Bita and Niaz, Seema and Shirin’s daughters, respectively. Because of the Iranian revolution, the family becomes split, with Seema, Shirin, and Bita moving to the United States, leaving Elizabeth and Niaz in Iran. They were an important, wealthy family in Iran, mainly due to their tracing their lineage back to an ancestor they refer to as the Great Warrior.
One of the main themes of the novel, though, is the false narratives the family has been telling themselves. They have spent so much time looking to the past, as well as hiding the truth about various parts of their past, that they haven’t developed healthy relationships in the present. Thus, much of the novel is an unraveling of the stories they’ve told themselves, which have prevented them from seeing each other (and their family, in general) as they really are.
The larger conflict in the novel that brings everybody together and into tension is a legal case involving Shirin. She’s the most over-the-top character, flaunting the family’s wealth and believing Persians in the U.S. should still care about their family. An undercover police officer propositions her, believing her to be a prostitute, and she jokingly plays along with him before throwing a drink on him. Bita, who is in law school at the time, tries to help her aunt. Elizabeth and Niaz travel to the U.S. near the end of the novel as the trial approaches, leading to a number of revelations about the family.
The more important conflicts are the interpersonal ones, as each character has to figure out who they want to be and how they want to live the rest of their lives. Elizabeth reflects on her marriage and the man she once loved, but whom she set aside. Shirin has to come to grips with how others perceive her and how she presents herself. Bita and Niaz have the most to decide, as they are young women in very different situations. Bita is in law school because she thinks she needs to live up to some ideal that her mother couldn’t, while Niaz lives under the oppressive Iranian regime, trying to rebel where she can. Ultimately, the novel is about women trying to figure out how to live in relationship with one another, learning how to be mothers and daughters.
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji. Scribner, March 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
Walloon Writers Review Ninth Edition is a collection of short stories, poetry, and nature photography inspired by northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula’s natural beauty. More than sixty contributors pack this year’s edition with reflections, adventures, memories, and discoveries. Suitable for general audiences, readers in Michigan can pick up a copy while they’re exploring “up north” (see the list of booksellers and shops the magazine’s website under the “Where to Find Walloon Writers Review” tab) or armchair explore and order a copy online from most independent bookstores in Michigan, BarnesandNoble.com, Bookshop.com, or Amazon.com.
During the Spanish Inquisition (1492 and 1834), the Catholic Church targeted Jews, Muslims, female herbalists and healers, and, later, Protestants for expulsion from Spain and Portugal. The goal, writes author Barbara Stark-Nemon in her introduction to Isabela’s Way, was the consolidation of power by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.
By all accounts, the Inquisition was brutal, and Stark-Nemon writes that following an expulsion edict issued by Spain in 1492, many Spanish Jews emigrated to Portugal, where for approximately 100 years, “New Christians” — Jewish converts to Catholicism, sometimes called Conversos or Marranos — evaded the Inquisitors. But peace was always tentative.
For 14-year-old Isabela de Castro Nunez, the life she’d known as a Converso ended when, in 1605, the Bubonic Plague hit the small town of Abrantes, Portugal, where she’d grown up. This was because the Church blamed New Christians for the spread of the deadly disease.
It’s a tense setup. Compounding this, Isabela is grappling with her mother’s death and her father’s prolonged absence to promote his business and political interests, leaving her feeling both abandoned and alone. Add in the looming political repression directed at her community, and it is not surprising that Isabela, her friend David, and his sisters listen when advised to flee their homeland for the presumed safety of France.
Stark-Nemon’s recreation of their fictional journey — sometimes traveling together and sometimes traveling separately — is filled with intrigue, violence, love, and the kindness of strangers. Moreover, a beautifully imagined network of clandestine safe houses comes to life, and we see Isabela, already renowned for her intricate embroidery, mature as she embarks on this harrowing journey.
Isabela’s Way is a tale of resilience in which good overcomes evil. All told, the novel is a vivid depiction of resistance and a powerful indictment of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and scapegoating. It’s a damn good story.
Isabela’s Way by Barbara Stark-Nemon. She Writes Press, September 2025.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
When Jonathan Pulphus was a sophomore at St. Louis University (SLU), a private, Jesuit college, 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. It was 2014 and Brown’s death led to months of protests against systemic racism and abuse by law enforcement.
Pulphus was galvanized by the movement and, like other Black students at and beyond SLU, he became immersed in fighting racial discrimination both on campus and off. His own campus was active and alongside a group of peers, he began demanding more diverse course offerings and the recruitment of more faculty and students of color at SLU. The resultant 13-point Clock Tower Accords eventually included a commitment by school administrators to increase funding for African American Studies. The university also promised to increase financial aid for Black undergraduates, establish a Diversity Speaker series, and work on building better relationships with the local community. It was a significant victory — one that Pulphus is proud to have been part of.
With My People, his reflection on the Accords and his role as a campus leader-turned-community-organizer, is as much a history of this historical moment as it is an instruction guide for campus organizers. Filled with concrete lessons and wise commentary, the text lays out tactical mistakes made by the SLU students (and the groups they created, including the still-active Tribe X) and offers clear advice about how best to balance academic progress and activism. Moreover, his message to students who are new to progressive movements covers numerous topics, from how to stay on track to graduate to how to negotiate with administrators and forge intergenerational alliances. Throughout, the tone is practical and strategic.
With My People blends inspiration with political savvy. It’s an important how-to guide for student activists and fledgling organizers. What’s more, its straightforward prose makes it a valuable addition to books about social change, social justice, and sustained antiracist efforts.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Happy Friday! Whether you’re superstitious or skeptical, NewPages has your creative fuel—offering inspiration to jumpstart your writing along with submission opportunities to keep you busy. If Friday the 13th sends a shiver down your spine, maybe hold off on submitting until tomorrow. But today? Perfect for setting your plans in motion.
Writing Prompt: Demystifying 13
In honor of Friday the 13, why not embrace this as our prompt? Is thirteen a symbol of fortune or misfortune?
Throughout history, cultures have clashed over the meaning of this number. In Western traditions, it’s often associated with bad luck—especially on a Friday. Some link this superstition to the Last Supper, where Judas became the infamous 13th guest before the crucifixion. Others cite Norse mythology, where Loki disrupted a feast of twelve gods, leading to chaos. The thirteenth card in a Tarot deck is death.
But in many cultures, thirteen marks a positive transformation. Jewish tradition celebrates thirteen as the age of maturity with a bar mitzvah. In Mesoamerican civilizations, thirteen symbolized an important cycle in the sacred calendar, tied to cosmic order and spiritual growth. Even the ancient Egyptians viewed thirteen as a number of ascension in the afterlife.
Are these beliefs simply passed down without question, or do they reflect something deeper? For this prompt, explore how the number thirteen shapes luck, culture, or personal experience. Write about a character who defies superstition, a society built on the sacred power of thirteen, or a twist of fate where thirteen holds unexpected meaning. Write a poem reflecting on the ways thirteen has shaped your fortune—or misfortune. Craft a lyric essay unraveling superstition, questioning beliefs that may crumble under close scrutiny. Or…how about a tongue-in-cheek experiment where you test all things related to 13 and luck that you can and record the results?
Whether thirteen is a blessing or a curse is up to you—so grab your pen and explore! And don’t wait too long—June 15 is right around the corner, and plenty of submission opportunities are ending soon.
Sue Strachan’s The Obituary Cocktail is a spirited dive into New Orleans’s bohemian past, chronicling how this cocktail — made with gin, vermouth, and absinthe — became central to mid-twentieth-century café society before fading temporarily into obscurity. Like a good obituary, this book shares stories about the drink, beginning with its 1940s origins at Café Lafitte, the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the U.S. and the stomping ground for the city’s café society, which included Tennessee Williams, Ella Brennan, and a rich crop of prominent New Orleans visitors. Strachan explores the history of the cocktail’s ingredients, shares recipes for home mixologists, and resurrects the stories of other morbidly monikered drinks.
Natasha Brown’s second novel, Universality, begins with a news story detailing a party at a farm during Covid that goes terribly wrong. The police raid the celebration because it’s violating restrictions put in place because of the pandemic, though they don’t notice that a young man has bludgeoned somebody with a solid gold bar, then run away with it. The writer of the story traces the important people to see their involvement and their motivations. The rest of the novel follows several of those characters — Hannah, the reporter; Richard, the owner of the farm and the gold; and Lenny, the mother of the young man and a writer who specializes in shocking readers with right-wing ideology — from their points of view.
Given the multiple points of view, it quickly becomes clear that each character has a quite different view of the events of that day, as well as their lives and themselves. They each present themselves in a much better light, not surprisingly, but they also present different facts and motivations. By beginning with a news story, a seemingly objective account, Brown upends the readers’ expectations of objectivity, especially in terms of narrative. It’s not only that the characters tell the readers different stories, they’re telling themselves different stories about their lives and the world itself.
Given Brown’s historical context — she references the 2008 financial crisis, as Richard is in that industry, as well as Covid — she’s also exploring the larger narratives countries and cultures tell. The connection of that background with the personal stories ties into her title, as each character seems motivated not only by justifying their view of the world, which serves only to further separate people, moving them away from unity, but also by greed. That desire manifests itself differently for each character — with Richard, it’s more obvious, but Hannah wants to move up in social class, while Lenny has a disdain for everybody, it seems, so she seeks power above all else — but that seems to be the universal trait they share. Brown encourages readers to question her characters’ narratives, but also their own, as they tell themselves — we tell ourselves — that we’re different.
Universality by Natasha Brown. Random House, 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
Red Tree Review Issue Five online is a stellar collection of fine poetry from many talented voices, some seasoned and some emerging: Ron Riekki, Martha Zweig, Robert S. King, Glen Armstrong, Dan Sicoli, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Kenton K. Yee, Kimberly White, Jason Fraley, Dan Raphael, Lynn Domina, Austin Allen James, Peter Mladinic, Jacqueline H. Harris, and Elizabeth Girdharry. As always, the selected works deliver moments of surprise, harrowing urgency, and sheer awe that brings us, if only for a second, outside of our small selves.
Happy Tuesday! Our latest newsletter went out yesterday, packed with literary discoveries—new magazines, books, reviews, bookstore updates, and a fresh writing prompt to spark your creativity.
This week’s newsletter (Issue 184) digs into the rarely used language of flowers—an ancient form of communication hidden in petals and stems.
✍️ Writing Prompt: Flower Language
Once upon a time, flowers weren’t just decorations—they carried messages, secrets, and spells. A red rose whispered love, lavender offered calm, and marigolds warned of grief or jealousy.
But as time passed, the language of flowers faded into myth. What if someone rediscovered it? What if a florist’s arrangements could influence emotions—or fate?
Your Creative Challenge:
💐 Fiction Prompt: Write a story where the language of flowers resurfaces in a powerful way. Who still knows it? Who needs to learn it? What happens when the flowers begin to speak again?
🌼 Poetry Prompt: Use flowers to express emotions too hard to say aloud. What truths bloom in silence?
🌍 Cross-Cultural Essay Prompt: Explore how different cultures have used flowers to communicate—from Chinese plum blossoms to Victorian bouquets.
🎨 Mixed Media Prompt: Create a visual piece that captures the symbolic power of flowers. Use real petals, digital art, or photography to tell a story beyond words.
Want more inspiration like this? Subscribe to the NewPages Newsletter for weekly writing prompts, book reviews, literary news, and more—straight to your inbox! Paying subscribers get early access to submission opportunities before they go live on our site, too!
In Laila Lalami’s latest novel, The Dream Hotel, Sara Hussein is living in a near-future version of the United States that seems both entirely predictable and terrifying. The novel opens as authorities detain Sara, a Moroccan-American, at the airport because her risk score has risen too high. The company that produces the risk scores draws on a wealth of information to determine people’s potential risk, including their dreams, thanks to Dreamsaver Inc.’s implant that helps people have enough rest to function the next day, even on only a few hours’ sleep. Of course, the user agreement that people sign enables DI to sell their data to companies, such as the one producing the risk scores. The algorithm behind the risk scores is intellectual property, so Sara and her lawyer are unable to use it in trying to free her from the retention center the government sends her to because of the interaction at the airport.
While much of the novel centers around this dystopic premise, Lalami goes beyond exploring the ways tech corporations have monetized users’ data, as she explores issues of race and gender, as well. Though the other female residents’ races aren’t clear in most of the descriptions, the ones that are usually match the races that dominate the U.S.’s current prison system. Similarly, Sara realizes that the observation at the retention center is little more than an amplification of the observations women encounter every day of their lives.
There are also wildfires raging, as the retention center is in California, though it is far from the only place in the U.S. experiencing the severe effects of climate change. In one scene, the residents (nobody refers to them as prisoners, though they are not free to leave) joke about having their release hearings rescheduled due to another wildfire or hurricane or earthquake. Any of those seems as likely as the other.
What holds the entire novel together is Lalami’s critique of the role of money in each of these areas. The companies that run the retention centers use those who are there for cheap labor through their contracts with various outside companies. The technology companies benefit from the data they gather through the wide array of devices each character used when they were free, but they also collect data on the residents, even sending one of their employees in under cover to perform an experiment around product placement in dreams. In fact, Sara ultimately realizes that it’s in corporations’ best interests to keep extending their stay, fabricating infractions to prevent their release, which helps her begin to rebel against such systems. She also realizes that she needs help to fight back against corporations with much more power and money than she has, a message that becomes more and more relevant every day.
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. Pantheon Books, March 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
