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!
In this memoir, The Longest Race, Kara Goucher, with Mary Pilson, tells the story of how she became a world-class runner, focusing on her time at the Nike Oregon Project. Goucher talks about the mental abuse she endured as a woman, especially the intense scrutiny of her weight and appearance, but also her pregnancy. She was in the program during the doping scandals of the early part of the century, which later led her to testify against her former coach and teammates. She endured sexual harassment and assault on several occasions. Throughout all of this mental and sexual abuse, she was trying to be one of the best runners in America and the world. Goucher’s memoir reveals the realities of what has happened at the top of various sports throughout the past few decades, especially the ways people in power have abused and ignored women. As Pilson writes in the introduction, “If you’ve ever bought a shirt or pair of shoes with a swoosh, you need to know this story. If you’ve ever tuned in to watch an Olympic final, a World Series, a Super Bowl, or any other professional sporting event, you need to know this story.” Even non-runners need to know this story.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
The newest print edition of New England Review (44.1) is on its way to subscribers with prose by Shaan Sachdev, Rebecca van Laer, Herb Harris, Gurmeet Singh, and Suzanne Jackson & Nathaniel Nesmith, and poetry by C. Dale Young, Megan J. Arlett, and El Williams III, translations from Italian, German, Spanish, and Hungarian, artwork by Suzanne Jackson, and much more. To get your own delivered to your door, visit the NER website for subscription information.
Before After by Owen McLeod Saturnalia Books, March 2023
From action figures to alcoholism, mental illness to mortality, devotion to divorce, Before After interrogates yet celebrates the paradoxes of living in a world both beautiful and brutal—a world, according to these poems, in which Jesus texts random emojis from the cross, people suddenly sprout wings, human hearts are replaced by Platonic machines, and caskets are shrunk down to serve as symbolic trinkets. Along this journey through the real and surreal, the works of great poets—Hopkins, Plath, Lowell, and more—are lovingly subverted in the search for novel meanings that match this world. Written by a self-taught and award-winning poet, Before After challenges, with wit and compassion, our distinctions between thinking and feeling, sacred and profane, wellness and madness, before and after.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
55+ Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
It’s officially the last of March in 2023. With the end of a month and the start of a new one, that means old opportunities are gone and fresh ones have arrived. There are tons of March 31 deadlines below, so let’s dive into our weekly roundup of submission opportunities before it’s too late.
Oh, and don’t forget today is the last day to claim a 20% off discount on annual subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. This makes it just $40. Consider subscribing today to get first access to submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site.
With this Spring 2023 issue, The First Line begins its twenty-fifth year (!) with stories from Keith Casto, Dana Hufe, Philip Umbrino, Sayward MacInnis, Morag Allan Campbell, Heather McCoubrey, Ralph Hornbeck, and Christie Cochrell, all starting with the same first line: I am the second Mrs. Roberts. The spring issue also includes an essay from Sandy Kelman about the first line of Marc Hamer’s Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden.
Far From New York State by Matthew Johnson NYQ Books, March 2023
Matthew Johnson’s second poetry volume constructs a space where the rural communities of Upstate, the suburban living of the Lower Hudson Valley, and the metropolitan landscapes of the City are woven together in a mosaic snapshot. A collection of poems where the historical and cultural traditions of New York State meet, the reader is acquainted not only with seminal figures across the cultural channels of literature, music, and sports, such as Washington Irving, Paul Robeson, and the ’86 Mets, but to the author himself. Tender, playful, and meditative, Johnson presents stories that he has lived, and shares others that have been passed down through familial storytelling around the kitchen table and cookout barbecue pit.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Short Reads is a brand-new publication that launches today! Four former Creation Nonfiction employees have banded together to create a free weekly publication delivered every Wednesday morning to subscriber mailboxes. The editors believe in “building a community of writers and readers who believe in the power of true stories to share ideas and experiences, foster empathy, and help make sense of what can happen in a life.” Short Reads will feature original and reprinted flash nonfiction, and while currently not open for submissions (stay tuned!), early contributors include Jaswinder Bolina, Brian Broome, Beth Ann Fennelly, Beth Kephart, Patrick Madden, Deesha Philyaw, and others. Visit their website to sign up today!
Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise by Anthony Madrid Canarium Books, April 2023
In Anthony Madrid’s fourth book, Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, the poet appraises this world “full of ancient things whose shapes and colors have changed,” as his singular, unforgettable and voice resonates in ghazals, rubai, ditties, and “gnomic stanzas.” A polymath and iconoclast, Madrid knows the names of the stars and turns their light into astonishing music.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Sunlight Press is a nonprofit, digital literary magazine that publishes new works on Mondays, Wednesdays, and the occasional Friday.
Work featured during the month of March 2023 includes essays by Caleb Coy and Brett Ann Stanciu; poetry by Denise Alden and Murray Silverstein; fiction by Emma Burnett and Rebecca Field; and photography by Wadzanai Nhongo.
The Sunlight Press will be accepting submissions to their 4th annual no-fee Flash Fiction Contest from April 3 through May 1.
The Shore Issue 17 ushers in the spring with fresh poetry blooming into the world by Jennie E Owen, Pamilerin Jacob, Milica Mijatović, Nike Onwu, Frank Graziano, Samantha DeFlitch, Divyasri Krishnan, Michael Quattrone, Kelly R Samuels, Farai Chaka, Melissa Strilecki, KG Newman, Susannah Lawrence, Melanie McCabe, Ellen Zhang, Crystal Cox, Maggie L Wang, Ben Groner III, Ryleigh Wann, Savannah Cooper, Prosper C Ìféányí, Jill Khoury, Lily Greenberg, Luke Johnson, Jane Newkirk, Jessica Goodfellow, Nicholas Ritter, Jen Karetnick, Christopher Blackman, Laura Grace Weldon, Lindsay Clark, Alex Gurtis, Jill Kitchen, Taylor J Johnson, Letitia Jiju, Meg Kelleher, William G Gillespie, Kai Pretto, Karen Elizabeth Sharpe, John Barr, Arvinder Kaur Johri, Alston Tyer and Vincent Frontero. The issue is also awash with art by Ruby Miller & Kimberly Turner.
The Thalweg. The name comes from the geological term for “the deepest part of a canyon, the primary navigable channel of a waterway, a boundary between two formations where the current is the strongest.” The editors of this annual publication of prose, short essays, poetry, stories, and visual art felt that this term “was a beautiful metaphor for the work we hope to publish, hoping that The Thalweg can be a space to share strange and beautiful things, as a way of contemplating our normative ideas of nature.”
The Thalweg’s masthead speaks to experiences in both literature and nature. Founding Editor and Communications Director Seneca Kristjonsdottir works as a guide on the Salmon and Snake rivers in Idaho and in Arizona’s Grand Canyon. She has lived in a variety of landscapes including Colorado, Idaho, and California, and studied ecology and bee husbandry at Goddard College.
Editor, Social Media Manager, and Visionary Sabs Stein is a Pacific Northwest artist working as a breakfast chef in the Pacific Northwest on occupied Lummi and Nooksack land. Writing led them through a B.A. in Parks, Recreation & Tourism and several years of seasonal outdoor education work and river guiding.
Managing Editor and Creative Director Dory Athey is a communications consultant and river guide having grown up on the whitewater of the American West from a family of river guides. She received her M.A. in Publishing from Portland State University and spent several years in the marketing department of Catapult Book Group. In 2020, she co-founded The Thalweg with Kristjonsdottir.
As Kristjonsdottir tells it, “Dory had just left a career job in book publishing, and I wanted to make a collaborative zine to share the creative work of people who work and live in wild landscapes. The idea was originally inspired by the Boatman’s Quarterly Review, a publication that shares the work of river guides working in the Grand Canyon. We also look up to other publications and creative groups like Fisherpoets, Smoke + Mold, Inverness Almanac, Badlands Zine, and so many others.
“But the foundation of our project is really our friends—river guides, hiking guides, farmers, park rangers, outdoorspeople, folks living in small communities who write poetry and stories, or create visual work that stirs our hearts. These folks are guides, farmers, or fishermen, but they are also creatives, telling beautiful stories about landscapes and experiences that are so dear to us. Being away from urban centers and major cultural institutions is part of what makes these contributions so special—it is a privilege to be a creative home for each contributor who chooses to share their work with us. Since Issue One, our community has expanded far beyond folks we know personally. It has been incredible to work with all kinds of creatives from all over the world.”
The result has become an annual publication, first available in print on a sliding scale donation. “Once we sell through our limited print run of each issue,” Kristjonsdottir explains, “the work is published online and available to read and browse on our website.”
For readers, The Thalweg features 12-15 writers and artists in each issue, most of which share a small collection of their work, and specifically featuring poets, storytellers, photographers, painters, illustrators, and other artists who live, work, or reflect on wild landscapes. Some recent contributors include Wyatt Hersey, Fumie Hiromitsu, Elise Otto, Bri Dostie, m.t. samuel, Leah Marvin-Riley, Sam Rush, Drew Austin, Steve Kenney, Bronco, Hannah Stevens, Colin Andrews, Abbey Gordon, and Melanie Margarita Kirby.
For writers looking to submit, Kristjonsdottir explains, “Our submissions are handled through Submittable. We have an open submissions period of a few months in-between issues. After this, the three of us review and select a first round of submissions. Those submissions then go on to a second round of external contributing editors. The contributing editor team changes for each issue and are usually past contributors or community members selected to represent a wide range of interests. After this external round of review, we narrow it down to our final list of 12-15 folks for each issue.”
Looking back on their first few years, Kristjonsdottir shares, “We have been overwhelmed by the way our little project has been received. We regularly receive more than enough submissions, more beautiful work than we have the resources to publish, and we always sell through our limited print runs. Our largest challenges are always our financial and energetic capacity to grow or maintain the project. The three of us work hard to publish one issue each year, and it always feels like there is more we could and want to be doing. In the end, as a passion project that all of us volunteer our time for, we can only move as fast as the constraints of the rest of our lives let us. We move slow, but are patient, putting one foot in front of the other and always focusing on producing something we are proud of before rushing to make something that feels half done.”
That kind of care and commitment has helped the publication and its crew stand the test of time already. Looking to the future, Kristjonsdottir says, “We have lots of dreams at The Thalweg. In our next issue, we are hoping to include a sticker sheet! We are working with some of our contributors to make shirts, or other soft goods as ways to make some extra money for them and get their work into the world. We are going to be releasing a series of chapbooks, featuring past contributors who want to share a larger body of their work. In the far future we dream of running an artist residency, or maybe being financially stable enough to pay our contributors ahead of time.”
Tess Gunty’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is so weird and wild, with characters that can strike readers as so unlikable, I’m worried people won’t stick with it, which they definitely should, if for no other reason than her astonishing comparisons. Gunty’s title refers to a public housing unit where several of the main characters live, but it also refers to people whom society has put in a small cage, specifically people society has damaged in some way. For example, Blandine (originally Tiffany) has grown up in the foster care system and ends up living with three boys who have come up in similar circumstances, all of whom suffer from a lack of meaningful relationships. Moses and his mother—a woman who became famous as a child star on a TV sitcom—also have no real relationship, leaving Moses adrift as an adult, taking petty vengeance on those who hurt him. The novel sounds dark, and it is, overall, but not in a gratuitous manner. Instead, Gunty spends most of the book setting up the darkness—not just the characters’ immediate conditions, but also the realities of climate change and urban development—only to reveal a select few moments of light, just enough to remind readers of what is still good in the world and what can continue to be good, if only they work to make it so.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Whether crisp and understated or capacious and kinetic, the poems in Lee Upton’s seventh collection are lyrically dexterous and reverberant. Shrewd, formally ambitious, excavating cultural myths and contradictions, these poems allow the ordinary and the supernatural to inhabit one another. The poems are often attentive to suffering: torture as it persists through centuries, the extinction of species, and the agonies of illness, grief, and the blasting of innocence are meditated upon. At the same time, in this book of mysteries, the cultivation of the redemptive energy of wit, in favor of the sensual and tender, performs as a means to resist violence.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Rattle Poetry Chapbook Prize Winner, The Fight Journal by John W. Evans is a heartsick elegy for a failed marriage. Written in couplets that mirror the back-and-forth of two parties alternately warring with each other and struggling to hold a family together, Evans explores the depths of longing, bitterness, resignation, and hope that humanize the struggle to live and parent during and after divorce. As much a story of resolve as it is vulnerability, The Fight Journal is a bittersweet account of the complexities of connection, the power of sympathy, and the many forms that love takes in lives that continue. This chapbook currently comes free with all spring-issue subscriptions to Rattle poetry magazine. Subscribers receive four issues of Rattle and four chapbooks for $25. See their website for more information.
Two extraordinary North American poets have come together in this shared book of poetry that exemplifies the depth to which the natural world and our place in it is perceived. Whether it’s Silvia Scheibli’s ability to connect with a Latin American culture that has been so influential on her own work, or Patty Dickson Pieczka’s wanderings through the dream-like reality of her ever-deepening world, these are all poems from poets who have not only earned their words but lived them as well.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
pH of Au by Vanessa Couto Johnson Parlor Press, January 2023
Through chemistry, alchemy, citizenship, and social connections, the speaker of pH of Au navigates location and displacement, physical and otherwise. A Brazilian, a Texan, a granddaughter, a periodically long-distance partner—through her various identities, some properties of gold manifest.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Mare by Seth Christian Martel is a graphic novel that takes readers on a paranormal adventure with Indigo, a post-senior-year teen whose next steps are uncertain due to her rocky home life. As with any good YA story, Indigo has a best friend who is both a sidekick and a guide. Kasia is the steady rock with a summer internship and plans to go to medical school, a foil to Indigo’s widowed and now divorced alcoholic father whose need for caretaking causes Indigo to lose her job. All of these could be contributors to Indigo’s strange nightmares in which she is possessed by some ethereal being. Concern for Indigo’s health due to lack of sleep leads the two teens to explore remedies for her nightmares, or a “Mare” as they learn from a book – “the spirit of someone wronged that saps its victim’s energy at night.”
The images throughout are black and white with graywash and bold outlines that add a sense of 3-D. Blue enters as highlights in Indigo’s hair and as she transitions into her sleep-induced possessions. The full blue hue wash with white electric scribbles creates the eerie effect of paranormal embodiment. The pacing drives readers through several well-connected layers of development: teen summers, angst over outfits, indie band concerts, and crushes, but also the mystery of The Mare and Indigo’s finally coming to solve it.
My only criticism is that I wished the story was longer and more developed. There were details left unexplored that would have helped connect readers more to the main characters and repulsed us from others. The psychopathology related to The Mare is present but also underdeveloped, especially for as serious a topic as it is in our society.
This could also certainly leave room for a sequel or series. There were enough dropped clues and lesser-developed content to make The Mare a solid premier to connect with subsequent storylines, and Indigo is endearing enough to create a following.
The Mare by Seth Christian Martel. graphic mundi, March 2023.
Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.
The Exhausted Dream by Joshua Edwards Marfa Books, March 2023
Also known as A Monthly Account of the Year Leading Up to the End of the World, by AGONISTES, Prophet and Fulfiller, this is Joshua Edwards’ longish poem in iambic pentameter about Love, Television, Philosophy, Prophecy, and the transience of Worlds. It’s also about the swiftness of iambic time, as the reader’s experience of the book’s nominal subjects is secondary to their experience of time as structured in this way. Sitcoms, French restaurants, favorite museums, incense, Atlas, and Caspar David Friedrich are all grains of sand in this small, though finely shaped hourglass.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Failures of the Poets by Anthony Robinson Canarium Books, April 2023
After more than 20 years of publishing poems in magazines and chapbook, Anthony Robinson has brought together an incredible collection for his long-awaited first full-length book, Failures of the Poets. Full of beauty, heartbreak, humor, pain, absurdity, sorrow, friendship, and love, as well as bridges, family, lakes, God, feathers, and food, this is a book brimming over with thinking and with things, as Robinson’s intense attention collides with the world. “All winter we waited / For the sun and now he’s here but will / He make it through another year?”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Spring 2023 issue of The Kenyon Review includes a folio of literature in translation guest edited by award-winning translators Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Jeremy Tiang. The issue also includes poetry by Kwame Dawes, Timothy Donnelly, K. Iver, and Danusha Lameris; fiction by Sam J. Miller, Michael Tod Powers, J. T. Sutlive, and Lindsay Turner; nonfiction by A. J. Bermudez; and the winner of the 2022 Short Fiction Contest, judged by Karen Russell. The cover art is by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.
Taking its name from a line in Rilke’s second Duino Elegy, “For our own heart always exceeds us,” at its core, this is a book about new love and underlying illness. A lyric pursuit of our existence among the natural world, these poems keep in mind that existence is transient. They straddle reality lines, often stepping over into dream spaces or pushing against a linear world. But they are solidly of this world, its ground and various bodies of water, where a boy can become a field and a girl can drown in the rivers of her own body. At once intimate—“I would know you in someone else’s life, someone else’s storm cellar”—and expansive—“We rape the landscape / we can see, start with what covers the light”—Osowski is a poet of language, of notice, and of inquiry. Rilke writes, “Wasn’t love and departure placed so gently on shoulders that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?” Exceeds Us is interested in that substance and the notion that our lives are not singular. These poems exceed the pair at their center, they exceed the one life we’re granted, and they are not bound to the laws of our earth. “Prove how weather is not a god and I’ll believe in you.”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Spring has officially sprung and while weather has been a little less winter-like in our neck of the woods, it’s still not the warmest. If you’re weather forecast is just as fickle as ours, here are some great submission opportunities to use as an excuse to stay put and indoors this weekend.
Next Friday is the deadline to enjoy a 20% off discount on annual subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. This makes it just $40. Consider subscribing today to get first access to submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site.
Let’s dive into our weekly roundup of submission opportunities without further ado.
NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Literary Magazines and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay the most up-to-date on all things literary!
American Poetry Review, March/April 2023 Arkansas Review, December 2022 The Baltimore Review, Winter 2023 Bennington Review, 11 Blink-Ink, 51 Bomb, Spring 2023 Booth, 18 Catamaran, Spring 2023 Chinese Literature and Thought Today, 53.3-4 Colorado Review, Spring 2023 Communities, Spring 2023 Copper Nickel, Spring 2023 Cutleaf, 3.4 & 3.5 ecotone, Fall/Winter 2022 EVENT, 51.3 Feminist Studies, 48.3 Gay & Lesbian Review, March/April 2023 Georgia Review, Spring 2023 The Gettysburg Review, 34.2
Fittingly, I read Saving Time by Jenny Odell during my Spring Break and during the shift to Daylight Savings Time. The latter exemplifies Odell’s critique of time as a construct, especially one that portrays time as a series of boxes to fill. She sees such approaches to time as problematic in two ways: 1) they help create the idea that there is an inexorable future coming; 2) they reinforce systems of control. Odell draws from a variety of subjects—apocalyptic language, incarceration, productivity, climate change, and geography, for example—to reveal how those in power use time to reinforce hierarchies, often based on race, ability, or gender, but especially socioeconomics. Odell questions the assumptions embedded in such systems, such as whether one person’s hour is actually equal to another person’s, an idea that seems to be logically true, but that Odell shows to be nothing but another construct. During my Spring Break, Odell might be pleased to see, I’m not using my time productively, at least not as typical Western societies see productivity. Instead, I’m engaging in creativity for its own sake, including writing this review. Her book isn’t self-help or time management, so readers shouldn’t expect tips for living, but they should expect Odell to help them see time—and, thus, the world—differently.
Saving Time by Jenny Odell. Random House, March 2023.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
The London Revolution 1640–1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England chronicles England’s history through the revolution in 1641–1642, which toppled the feudal political system, and its aftermath. It explores how the growing capitalist economy fundamentally conflicted with decaying feudal society, causing tensions and dislocations that affected all social classes in the early modern period. In contrast with most other works, this book posits that the fundamental driving force of the revolution was the militant Puritan movement supported by the class of petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers, instead of the moderate gentry in the House of Commons. This is a peer-reviewed publication.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
General Release from the Beginning of the World by Donna Spruijt-Metz Parlor Press, January 2023
In General Release from the Beginning of the World, Donna Spruijt-Metz attempts to reconcile the death of the father, the lies of the mother, a hidden half-sister, and the love for a daughter – with the impossible desire to banish the past from the present. She examines shifting relationships with the holy, referred to in the book only as ‘YOU.’ She asks: “Do YOU hear / a whisper / in YOUR // constant night / -and then listen?” She breaks her own heart to touch yours.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The online literary magazine Tint Journal Spring 2023 includes 25 new stories and poems by authors from 23 different countries who choose to write in English as their non-native, or second language. Tint Journal‘s issues are not themed, yet – reflecting the state of the current world – most texts in this particular issue deal with relationships, to place, history, teachers, students, relatives, neighbors and with the relationship to oneself. Tint also just relaunched their entire website. Now, visitors can find an interactive worldmap on the landing page, showing the geographical backgrounds of almost 200 authors that the magazine has assembled to date.
Authors in Tint Spring ’23: Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò, Isabella Cruz Pantoja, Italo Ferrante, Jee Ann Marie E. Guibone, Douglas Jern, Yael Kastel, Caroline Kuba, Daniel Loebl, Gershom Gerneth Mabaquiao, Ethel Maqeda, Jael Montellano, George Nevgodovskyy, Adriana Oniță, Mandira Pattnaik, Karolina Pawlik, Ranjiet, Neha Rayamajhi, Philipp Scheiber, Oindri Sengupta, Leyla Shukurova, Bianca Skrinyar, Leah Soeiro Nentis, Wambui Waldhauser, J.M. Wong, Huina Zheng.
Each text contribution was published with a visual artwork by international artists (curated by Vanesa Erjavec) and a short interview with the author. Many of the texts can also be heard as audio clips, read by the writers themselves.
Artists in Tint Spring ’23: Angelica Atzin Garcia, Suresh Babu, Lena Baloch, Leslie Benigni, Jack Bordnick, Michaela Caskova, Nathan Cho, Kate Choi, Suzette Dushi, Vanesa Erjavec, Gianluca Fascetto, Karen Fitzgerald, Diamante Lavendar, Serge Lecomte, Anton Mandych, Adriano Marinazzo, Megan Markham, Alexiane Montpetit, Adriana Oniță, Linnea Ryshke, Virgil Suárez, Claire Townsend, Rebecca Unz.
EVENT’s latest Notes on Writing Issue, 51.3, features notes by Aimee Wall, Sydney Hegele, and Brandi Bird, along with nearly 70 pages of poetry by 23 poets, fiction by Ben Lof, and M.C. Schmidt, and reviews by Sadie Graham, gillian harding-russell, and Michael Lake. Cover art Hello Yellow! by Catherine Babault, 2022.
Explorers Kristen and Ville Jokinen met and fell in love while scuba diving in Vietnam. Ville then left his native Finland to join Kristen in Oregon and together they embarked on a life-changing two-year cycling adventure covering 18,000 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. Despite never having cycled further than around the block, they persevered unrelenting, punishing rain and wind, altitude sickness, dog attacks, bike accidents, and countless flat tires to cycle between the ends of the earth. Kristen and Ville believe that kindness connects us to our shared humanity. They held babies, attended quinceañeras, drank pulque, played soccer, and visited schools. People in Mexico, Central America, and South America invited them into their hearts and homes, allowed them to camp in their fields and farms, and acted as personal tour guides. Kristen and Ville are love on wheels, and who doesn’t need a little more love in their lives?
Readers and writers will be delighted to discover Arboreal Literary Magazine, a quarterly of poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art available for purchase in print or free online. For the purchase of the print, or “Dead Tree” edition, the publication is donating a portion of the proceeds to One Tree Planted, a nonprofit that promises to plant one new tree for every dollar raised.
The name, from the Latin arboreus, the editors explain, “initially didn’t have any deeper meaning beyond the lyrical beauty of the word and its relevance to our names (Crabtree and Woods). Yet, after long discussion, we realized it is the perfect title for a publication committed to long-term artistic growth and a ‘big picture’ mission to help our readers, our contributors, and ourselves ‘see the forest for the trees.’”
The newest issue of Room(46.1) is themed “Around the Table: Asian Voices.” Editor Michelle Ha introduces the volume, “When we first sent out the call for this issue, we invited Asians from all different backgrounds, ethnicities, and communities to come sit around the table with us and share their stories. The name ‘Around the Table’ came from the realisation that for a lot of Asian cultures many moments, activities, and memories are done and made around the table. In this sense, I wanted this issue to feel similar to that. The dream for 46.1 has always been about supporting and uplifting the voices of Asian writers and artists, as well as to curate this issue as a platform to showcase the vastness that is the Asian collective. As the issue progressed, it became more than that. ‘Around the Table’ became a home to these incredibly wonderful, joyful, and vulnerable pieces that share individual experiences for the collective.”
The cover art, Protect Asian Lives by Paige Jung, “was created in response to the eight lives – six of them belonging to Aisan women – that were unjustly taken on March 16, 2021, during the Atlanta spa shootings. Five portraits, of different ages and backgrounds, are depicted to put faces to the Asian diaspora and call attention to our safety that is being threatened due to racism, fetishization, and discrimination. The piece offer an ironic justaposition of joyful, bright colors with fierce and burdened expressions. It is a cry for justice and for solidarity.”
If you don’t know about literary magazine The First Line, it is a quarterly print publication in which all pieces start with the same opening line. They also have The Last Line in which all pieces must end with the same line. You can learn more about them here.
They have announced their line-up of first and last lines for 2023. There is no fee to submit. Fiction and nonfiction only. You are not allowed to alter the first or last lines in any way.
Summer 2023 First Line
All the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays.
Due date: May 1, 2023
Fall 2023 First Line
As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor.
Due date: August 1, 2023
Winter 2023 First Line
It was the farthest north they had ever been.
Due date: November 1, 2023
The Last Line for 2023
Samir was never one to back down from a challenge.
Eleanor Catton’s title, Birman Wood, should immediately make the reader think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; however, Catton isn’t writing a contemporary retelling. That said, Catton’s characters have ambition and are willing to do what they need to do to achieve those ambitions, but the characters are more nuanced than in a typical tragedy. Mira has created Birnam Wood, a collective that legally (and not) plants crops in undeveloped areas, but is struggling to stay afloat and might suffer because of Mira’s ego. She meets Robert Lemoine—an American billionaire who has created the persona of a doomsday prepper to purchase land in New Zealand for which he has other, even-less-savory plans—and he agrees to help Mira fund a development on the land he has not quite purchased. Tony used to be a member of Birnam Wood, but he has been teaching overseas for the past several years and now wants a career in investigative journalism, so he sees a career-propelling story in Lemoine’s plans. Shelley has been working with Mira since Tony left, but she’s now considering leaving Birnam Wood, tired of Mira and of living on the margins. While the clearest tragedy in the novel is climate change—the moving of woods, in a different sense—there will be others, and, as in a Shakespearean drama, perhaps nobody is innocent.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, March 2023.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either? A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Emily Lee Luan is the author of I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
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Down to the Bone: A Leukemia Story by Catherine Pioli, trans. J.T. Mahany graphic mundi, December 2022
When Catherine is diagnosed with acute leukemia, a deadly form of cancer that attacks the immune system, her life is turned upside down. Young and previously healthy, she now finds herself catapulted into the world of the seriously ill—constantly testing and waiting for results, undergoing endless medical treatments, learning to accept a changing body, communicating with a medical team, and relying on the support of her partner, family, and friends. A professional illustrator, Catherine decides to tell the story of her disease in this graphic novel, and she does so with great sincerity, humor, and rare lucidity. We accompany her through the waiting, the doubts, the fears, and the tears—but also the laughter, the love, and the strong will to live.
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In Springtime, Sarah Blake’s epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals. Something brought them to the woods that nearly killed them, and they’re not sure they want to live through this experience either. But the world surprises them again and again with beauty and intrigue. They come to meet a pregnant horse, a curious mouse, and a dead bird, who is set on haunting them all. Blake examines what makes us human when removed from the human world, what identity means where it is a useless thing, and how loss shapes us. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all—just the strangeness of the woods. Includes an art portfolio by Nicky Arscott.
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The Mare by Seth Christian Martel graphic mundi, March 2023
Everyone else may be enjoying the summer, but Indigo’s life isn’t going so well. Her dad’s marriage just ended in a very public divorce, and now he’s drinking again. Indy barely graduated from high school, she just lost her job, and she doesn’t know what to do with her life. The stress is causing her nightmarish sleep paralysis—or so she thinks. Indy confides in her best friend, Kasia, who blames “The Mare” for her troubles—the spirit of someone wronged that saps its victim’s energy at night. It sounds crazy to Indy, but is it? Steeped in the nostalgia of lazy summers and mixtapes, concert tickets, and coffee, The Mare is a story about friends, family, and finding one’s way—with a touch of the supernatural and a powerful, surprising twist.
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& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love by Aby Kaupang Parlor Press, February 2023
Aby Kaupang’s & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love invokes life’s relentless suffusion of “&,” forging a conjunctive body in which an inevitable landscape of contemporary crisis, suicide, disability, failed promises & the quotidian accrue. In the Sisyphean challenge of day after day, how does one helm stone? Through the page’s shattered frame, & in formally audacious exchanges, Kaupang risks recombinatory possibilities arising not as recovery, per se, but as endurance, awe, & possibly joy. Inflorescence is cyclic, turns towards fodder, feeds the day, recedes. The poems are beautifully complemented by images of James Sullivan’s sculptures, one of which adorns the book’s cover.
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Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author’s stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family’s experiences in searching for answers, Lunday interrogates the broader cultural and conceptual responses to the phenomenon of missingness by connecting his stepfather’s case to other true-life disappearances as well as those portrayed in fiction, poetry, and film. In doing so Disequilibria explores the transience in modern life, considering the military-dependent experience, the corrosive effects of war, and the struggle to find closure and comfort as time goes by without answers.
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Deadline: March 27, 2023 Until March 27, Sans. PRESS is looking for stories for our fifth anthology! Passageway is for stories that dare to experiment, that cross further than they have ever been before, and that encounter whatever may come with hope and open arms. All genres welcome, as long as they explore a story of crossing over to the unknown. Visit website and view flyer for more information.
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Registration Deadline: April 30, 2023 Sure, you know the world’s Emily… But do you know our Emily? Find inspiration and delight by immersing yourself in Emily Dickinson’s life, poems and obsessions. In this “active retreat,” we’ll explore her surroundings and her obsessions, and write work acknowledging that shared poetic DNA. This retreat includes time to think, explore, and enjoy the company of kindred spirits. Visit website or view flyer to learn more.
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Exile Editions publishes literary and speculative fiction, indigenous fiction, nonfiction, poetry – and our annual fiction and poetry competitions have awarded over $125K the past decade. Visit website and view flyer to learn more about upcoming submission opportunities.
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Deadline: April 15, 2023 South 85 Journal is open for submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction until April 15, 2023, for our summer issue. As the literary journal for the Converse University Low-Residency MFA program, we are entering our 11th year of publication. Our editorial staff is comprised of experienced readers, writers, and editors who carefully consider every work of writing they receive. Visit website and view flyer for more information.
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The Wilson College MFA program is designed for working professionals with a low-residency schedule tailored to meet the needs of artists allowing them to reach the next level in their field. Visit website and view flyer to learn more.
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Minimalist Wisdom is the theme of the spring 2023 issue of Still Point Arts Quarterly, featuring art and photography, fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. Widely praised for its rich and valuable content and splendid presentation. Intended for artists, writers, nature lovers, seekers, and enthusiasts of all types.
Deadline: May 25, 2023 Livingston Press is pleased to announce its new annual writing contest: the Changing Light Prize for a Novel-in-Verse. There is no fee to enter. $500, publication, and 20 copies awarded to winner. View our flyer for more information.
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CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS announces a 357-page anthology of poetry and prose devoted to the climate crisis featuring work by Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, J. Drew Lanham, Linda Hogan, Luis Alberto Urrea, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Patricia Spears Jones, Lidia Yuknavich, Cynthia Hogue, Jesse Tsinijinnie Maloney, Alice Zheng, Richard Jackson and more. Purchase at our website. Profits donated to Endangered Species Preservation.
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From March 1 to May 31 Flying South 2023 will be accepting entries for this year’s contest. There will be three categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. In each of the three categories, the awards will be $400 for First Place, $200 for Second Place, and $100 for Third Place. Finalists will be awarded publication in Flying South. Visit website and view flyer for more information.
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Registration Deadline:May 7, 2023 NYWW Workshops (fiction, poetry, cnf, translation, travel), panels, readings, excursions in Mexico City with Kim Addonizio, Ravi Shankar, and Tim Tomlinson. Workshops M/W/F mornings, T/Th/S afternoons. Readings, panels, events on four evenings. In Vallodolid, four late afternoon gatherings for talks, panel discussions, consultations, readings. Other events include visits to cenotes and the Mayan Ek Balam ruin. ¡Danny Caron provides music! Visit website or view flyer to learn more.
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Come to beautiful Taos, New Mexico to attend the 7th Annual Taos Writers Conference 7/7/23-7/9/23. Our keynote speaker, Tommy Orange, author of There There will be joined by twenty other faculty members offering workshops in every genre including poetry, fiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Noted faculty include Ariel Gore, Jamie Figueroa, and Valerie Martinez. FMI: visit website or call 575-758-0081.
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