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Submissions: Ballyhoo

Ballyhoo Stories: 50 States Project
Ballyhoo is currently “accepting submissions for all states except California, New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Ohio, and Indiana. Stories should show a strong representation of the people and culture of the particular state. Stories should be no more than 5,000 words and have the state as either the subject or the setting. Please be sure to read one or two of our current stories for an idea of what we are looking for.”

Stop by Ballyhoo for more info: http://www.ballyhoostories.com/

Submissions: New Magazine Feature

War and the Environment: Cause and Effect

The literary anthology, North Atlantic Review, is open to submissions on war and its effect on the environment or the environment and its effects on war. We invite you to write an essay, short story, poem, song, or journal based on personal experience or philosophy. Please keep submissions under 5,000 words. This is a new section of the journal and will be included in future issues.

For more information: North Atlantic Review Submissions

Recess! Funny Times Cartoon Playground

Set aside at least twenty minutes in your day to play on the Funny Times Cartoon Playground where you can create a one- or two-panel comic from preset characters (including a few from the White House), settings, props, and text ballons you fill in yourself. You can then save your masterpiece and allow it to be publicly viewed in the gallery, or keep it private and e-mail it to select recipients.

Just be sure to mind the bell and get back to class on time!

Photography: New Orleans After the Flood

Photography After the Flood
By Nicolaus Mills
Dissent Magazine, Spring 2007

A review and commentary on the photography of Robert Polidori:

“Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans challenge our sense of how the world is supposed to look. Cars stand upside down. Uprooted trees rest on houses. In contrast to the familiar photos of bombed-out Hiroshima, where everything but the walls of a few buildings lies flattened on the ground, Polidori’s post-flood New Orleans is a collage of random disorder. Nothing is where it should be.”

Read the review/commentary and view the photos at Dissent Magazine.

Submissions: Appalachia

“Founded in 1876, Appalachia is the Appalachian Mountain Club’s mountaineering and conservation journal, published twice a year in June and December.

Appalachia welcomes nonfiction submissions on the following topics: hiking; trekking; rock climbing; canoeing and kayaking; nature; mountain history and lore; and conservation. We recommend reading a sample issue before submitting materials.

Writers should submit unsolicited material by December 1 for the June issue, and by June 1 for the December issue.

Original poems about the above topics are also welcome. Shorter poems are preferred. Only eight poems are published per issue, which makes this the most competitive section of the journal; on average, one in 50 submissions is accepted.”

For more information, visit Appalachia online.

Imprisoned Journalist Awarded Golden Pen of Freedom

HRIC Supports Campaign to Free Golden Pen of Freedom Recipient Shi Tao
June 05, 2007

“Human Rights in China (HRIC) congratulates imprisoned Chinese journalist Shi Tao and his family on his receiving the 2007 Golden Pen of Freedom on June 4 at the opening ceremony of the World Newspaper Congress (WNC) and World Editors Forum (WEF).

The Golden Pen of Freedom, established in 1961 and awarded by the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, is an annual award recognizing individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the defense and promotion of press freedom.

Shi Tao’s mother, Gao Qinsheng, accepted the award on her son’s behalf, thanking everyone for not forgetting Shi Tao, and stating that her son had ‘only done what a courageous journalist should do.'”

Read the full article at HRIC.

Artistry & Activism: The Poetry of Irena Klepfisz

By Ursula McTaggart from the May/June 2007 issue of Against the Current

“AS A JEWISH child growing up in Nazi-occupied Poland, Irena Klepfisz had parents who taught her only Polish so that she could pass for Aryan and escape the concentration camps. It wasn’t until after the war that she began to learn Yiddish, the language she would try to maintain and revive in her adult work as a poet.

For Klepfisz, then, language has always been intensely political. As a child, language meant life and death, and today, in her work as a professor at Barnard College in New York, Yiddish is a remnant of pre-Holocaust Jewish culture and a sign of hope for the future. But attuned to the political nature of even the language used for communication, Klepfisz also uses her poetic language to call our attention to urgent political issues in our own lives.”

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/527

Call for Submissions: Current Events Poetry

THE NEW VERSE NEWS covers the news and public affairs with poems on issues, large and small, international and local. It relies on the submission of poems (especially those of a politically progressive bent) by writers from all over the world.

The editors update the website every day or two with the best work received.

See the website at http://www.newversenews.com for guidelines and for examples of the kinds of poems THE NEW VERSE NEWS publishes.

New Lit on the Block

Greatcoat – A biannual publishing poetry, creative non-fiction, interviews, and photography, the editors of Greatcoat, “being of relatively sound mind and possessed of radically different literary tastes, do hereby relinquish any claim to rational thought, free time, and dreams of profit; in short, we have no illusions about what makes a literary journal successful.”

Nano Fiction: A Journal of Short Fiction from the University of Houston, “NANO Fiction is a non-profit literary journal run entirely by undergraduate students at the University of Houston. We plan to publish twice a year, with issues appearing each spring and fall. Our purpose is to share undergraduate work with others in a form that can be easily digested in a short amount of time.”

Poetry in Movies

Thought you recognized those lines tucked into Million Dollar Baby? Now you can know for sure!

Poetry in Movies: A Partial List
Created/Edited by Stacey Harwood

Michigan Quarterly Review is featuring this list “of the appearance of recognizable, often canonical, poems, or excerpts from poems, in mainly American and British sound films. The catalog is necessarily incomplete; readers are invited to submit new entries to the journal at [email protected] or to Stacey Harwood at [email protected]. The filmography will be revised and updated regularly.”

Workshop: Lost Horse Press


Lost Horse Press proudly presents the Dog Days Poetry & Prose Writing Workshops featuring Melissa Kwasny (poetry) and EWU Professor Emeritus, John Keeble (fiction & non) on 10 – 12 August 2007 at Lost Horse Press, 105 Lost Horse Lane, Sandpoint, Idaho. Workshop fee is $150. Classes are limited to 12 studentsd; register early. For additional information or to register, please contact Lost Horse Press at 208.255.4410, email: [email protected].

Brazil Anyone?


Creative Writing in Brazil
Participate in a week-long poetry workshop with Edward Hirsch and a translation class on Brazilian poets Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Joao Cabral de Melo Neto. Discussions on Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and tours of important cultural sites and literary landmarks. Also, casual get togethers with leading contemporary Brazilian poets, editors, writers, translators, and publishers. Workshop is from July 9 to July 16, 2007.

Peabody Props

Check out Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog – Richard Peabody: Mondo Literature – where Ed gives a well-deserved tip of the keyboard to Richard and his life-long dedication “to printing work by unknown poets and fiction writers, as well as seeking out the overlooked or neglected…” publishing “‘name’ writers — sometimes before they were ‘names’.” And recognizing that: “As if being an unparalleled literary impresario and entrepreneur isn’t enough, Rick is also a superb poet and fiction writer.” If you don’t know Gargoyle or Richard or Ed – you can get it all – and then some – in this one read.

Literary Podcasts at Chattahoochee Review

The Chattahoochee Review hosts podcasts from Georgia Perimeter College. A great variety of readings, interviews and lectures. Here’s just naming a few:

Mark Bixler Lecture – author of The Lost Boys of Sudan

Donald Bogle Lecture – two parts lecture by the award winning African-American film historian and media scholar discussing the history of African-Americans in the movies.

William Julius Wilson Lecture – the preeminent sociologist and former advisor to President Clinton discussing his book There Goes The Neighborhood, an examination of race and class issues in Chicago. November 2, 2006.

Leonard Susskind – The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design
Luis Alberto Urrea Interview
Elizabeth Cox Reading
Alistair MacLeod Reading
Several GPC faculty open mic readings

Crazyhorse Winners Announced

Crazyhorse prize judges (Fiction judge: Antonya Nelson, Poetry judge: Marvin Bell) are pleased to announce:

Crazyhorse Fiction Prize Winner: Karen Brown for the story “Galatea”

Fiction finalists: Jacob M. Appel, Kathy Conner, Rick Craig, Diane Greco, and Ann Joslin Williams

Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize Winner: Jude Nutter for the poem “Frank O’Hara in Paradise”

Poetry finalists: Kurt Brown, Colin Cheney, Melody S. Gee, Luisa A. Igloria, John Isles, Joshua Kryah, Gabriella Klein Lindsey, M.B. McLatchey, Xu Smith, and Jared White

The 2007 Crazyhorse Prize Winners receive $2000 each and publication in Crazyhorse Number 72, due out Nov. 1, 2007.

2River View: New Issue Online

2River has just released the 11.4 (Summer 2007) issue of The 2River View,with new poems by Philp Brady, Therese Broderick, Ryan Collins, LydiaCooper, Michael Flanagan, Nancy Henry, Laura McCullough, Karen Pape, PetreStoica, and Sally Van Doren; and art from the Underground Series by MeganKarlen.

Take a few moments to stop by 2River and read or print the issue, available as PDF.

Get Your Vote In: storySouth Million Writer Awards

Votes are now being counted (yes, there are places in this great nation of ours where votes really still do count) for storySouth Million Writer Award for Fiction 2007. The top ten online stories have been selected and readers will choose the winner. To read the top ten stories and cast you vote, as well as read more about the award and the Notable Stories 2006 from which they were selected, visit storySouth.

Voting will run through June 30, 2007.

New Lit on the Block

Memoir (and)
Autobiography, Peotry, Essay, Graphics, Lies and More…
“Memoir (and) is a nonprofit literary journal born with these ideas in mind. Our mission is to publish traditional as well as non-traditional forms of nonfiction allied with memoir. This includes, but is not limited to, autobiography, diary, personal and critical essay, memoir, reportage, autobiographical fiction, alternative histories, journalistic accounts, ‘flash memoir,’ narrative poetry or ‘poemoir’ (it’s okay to groan, we did) and graphic memoir. No submission is too unusual—postmodern, modern or hypermodern—for us to consider. We look forward to the ways you will surprise, delight and perhaps shock us.”

Quay
A Journal of the Arts from Six Bad Apples Press
“Symmetry with error. A pattern you would think is incomplete but is not.”
Publishing literature and art three times a year online and in print.
CALL FOR SUBMISSION – open May 1 – June 30.

Call for Submissions: No Record Press Short Story Anthology

Once a year, No Record publishes an anthology of short literary fiction by previously-unpublished writers. Last year’s anthology included 14 stories, which ranged between 500 and 11,000 words, and included work from a former Yale divinity professor, a 15 year-old high school student, an actor from Milwaukee, a congressional staff member, and a professional guitarist.

No Record Press is currently taking submissions for next year’s anthology, which they hope to publish in early 2008.

More info here: No Records Press Short Story Anthology Guidelines.

Writing Programs – a new guide in NewPages.com

When we were in Atlanta at the AWP conference, we asked writers, teachers and students what we might add to NewPages that would be helpful. Many times we heard: “Add a list of writing programs.”

So we did.

The NewPages Guide to Writing Programs has just been posted, and we have a lot of work yet to do on it. Right now it is basically links to MFA/Creative Writing programs and English departments organized by state.

We will be adding descriptive content to the various programs in the upcoming weeks. Hope to have it in pretty good shape by fall. You can help:

What information would be most useful to you in this new guide? What might save you a bit (or a lot) of time in your research?

We certainly can’t include everything you’d find by going directly to the writing program’s website (and that is not our goal), but we want to provide the critical info that would help you best identify whether you want to go to a program’s website.

Bill Moyers: Call to Action

Stamp Out the Rate Hike: Stop the Post OfficeThe May 18, 2007 blog entry from Bill Moyers is a call to action to help small press publications. Large publishing firms (Time Warner at the forefront) have lobbied for substantial media mail postal rate increases with built-in discounts for those who send large amounts of mail. Small press publications would not receive these discounts.

In our work with NewPages, we are already hearing from literary magazines who fear they will need to cease publication if the rates go into effect because they simply cannot afford a 25-30% postal increase on their already tight budgets.

There is the link on Bill Moyers’s blog to the Free Press, where you can read more about this issue and how to take action – a sample letter to send to those making this decision is included.

New Lit Mag: Yellow Medicine Review

Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought

“The title Yellow Medicine Review is significant in that it incorporates the name of a river in Southwest Minnesota. The Dakota dug the yellow root of the moonseed plant for medicinal purposes, for healing. Such is the spirit of Yellow Medicine Review.

“At this time, we encourage submissions from indigenous perspectives in the area of fiction, poetry, scholarly essays, and art. We define indigenous universally as representative of all pre-colonial peoples.”

Crazyhorse/Tupelo Press Publishing Institute

June 4 – June 30, 2007
Application deadline: May 15, 2007

The first Annual Crazyhorse/Tupelo Press Publishing Institute was founded to provide training in the theory and practice of literary publishing and editing to prepare for successful careers as publishers and editors.

Earn six hours of graduate credit working with Crazyhorse Editors Carol Ann Davis and Garrett Doherty, and Tupelo Press Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Levine.

The institute combines an intensive, four-week course that chronicles the choosing of the winner in the annual Tupelo Press First Book Prize (judged collaboratively by Crazyhorse and Tupelo Press editors) with opportunities to intern at Crazyhorse.

For more information and for downloadable application forms, please visit the website at: http://crazyhorse.cofc.edu/pubinstitute and/or email Carol Ann Davis at [email protected].

Lummox Journal Now Online

After eleven years in print and a hiatus of a few months, the Lummox Journal is now online!

This inaugural issue features two interviews that present ‘a sort of Ying and Yang view of modern poetry’: Billy Jones (Caboolture, AUS) and Hugh Fox (Madison, WI). Also of interest: an essay by Todd Moore on the poetics of American poetry, an article by Charles Ries on a poetry reading in Santa Cruz, CA, several reviews and some great poetry.

Read the inaugural issue here: Lummox Journal

Poetry

Donald Hall: an advocate for the understanding of poetry. “A book of poems by a well-known poet used to get a print run of 1,000 copies, and you’d be lucky if you sold out,” says Mr. Hall. “Now more publishers are printing 8,000 to 10,000 copies for a first edition.” He also notes that many literary magazines are being published, and when you add their modest circulations together, the result is a large readership.

What the LitBlog crew will be reading…

The LitBlog Co-op announces Spring 2007 Read This! selection.

Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead is a collection of short stories that combines the fantastic with the prosaic. A woman walks into a Quik-Mart and winds up on a hillside, surrounded by swords and scimitars. A tedious post-college job isn’t quite as boring as it seems. And girls and boys flirt and touch and fly off buildings and escape Byzantine soldiers and pirouette and fall. Each time I thought I had these stories figured, they came around a corner to surprise me anew.

Spring 2007 Noneuclidean Caf

Volume 2, Issue 3 – Spring 2007
All Free – All Online

Including:
A Word from the Editor, James Swingle
Articles by Femke Stuut and Kerry Hughes
Interviews with Judith DeLozier and Dr. Michael Shermer
Poetry Kristine Ong Muslim, Zachary C. Bush, Ken Head, Noel Slobada
Fiction by Ralph Greco, Jr., Daniel Ausema, Tesssa Johnstone, Tom Leveen, Mark Fewell, and Craig Pirrall
And book reviews

Noneuclidean Caf

Writers Festival

The Arts in the Heart of Augusta festival invites Southern authors to join our Literary Village in 2007. During the annual three-day event, tens of thousands of people celebrate all that is the cultural arts in the Southeast, including our deep literary tradition. The Literary Village is a gathering of writers from all walks of life and from all publishing methods who sell their work, stage readings and network with other authors in a fun, casual and creative environment. The festival will run Sept. 14-16, 2007. Visit www.artsintheheart.com.

What the puck?

Hey. I was reading lit blogs and a hockey game broke out. The litboys are flailing away. (I think it’s mostly a litboy thing. Correct me if I’m wrong.) The fight is over something like this: These guys, Gessen and Roth from N+1 (a hefty print lit mag), think blogs suck. For the most part anyway. (Have I got that right?) Several blogger dudes have, for some reason, taken offense to this. And it goes on and on, linked through posts in various blogs. Like these things get to do in blogs. So if you feel like you’re missing out on all the fun, start here at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading. He’ll shoot you over to Dan Green’s The Reading Experience. Follow it further if your favorite part of a hockey game is when the gloves go flying and the punches are thrown.

Writers’ Conferences

Antioch Writers’ Workshop
Fiction * Nonfiction * Poetry * Memoir * Scriptwriting
Yellow Springs, OH
July 7-13, 2007

Rustbelt Roethke Writers’ Retreat
A professional-level retreat and peer workshop with a comfortable, egalitarian atmosphere.
Saginaw Valley State University and The Roethke House, MI
July 15-21, 2007

Writing and the Medical Experience
An intensive week-long program in the literature of illness and recovery.
Sarah Lawrence College and The Foundation for Humanities in Medicine
Bronxville, NY
July 8-14, 2007

Bookstores :: Bookmarks Bookshop

I guess the struggle of independent bookstores is very much the same no matter which side of the pond they are on.

Bookmarks bookshop battles the giants with solidarity appeal.

“Independent bookstores in central London are being hit by two things – the property boom that is driving up rents, and developments in the book trade aimed at chasing profits,” says Mark Thomas, manager of Bookmarks.

This situation was highlighted last week by the announcement that Gay’s The Word, Britain’s last surviving specialist lesbian and gay bookshop, faces closure unless it raises enough cash to pay its soaring rent bill.

High streets across Britain are becoming more homogenous, says Mark, with ever larger retail chains dominating the market and driving out smaller independent competitors.”

Writers conference

Conversations and Connections will feature over 30 editors from the most respected literary magazines on the market today. This is a special opportunity for Washington, DC area writers who want to take the next step in independent publishing, literary magazines, online publishing, comic books, poetry, and more. The $35 registration fee includes the full day conference, face-to-face “speed dating” with editors, and a subscription to a literary magazine of choice. To register, please visit http://www.writersconnectconference.com.

Publishing

Holy Cow! It’s 30 years old! “If you had to name the home of the oldest literary presses in Minnesota, you’d probably say the Twin Cities. But to be correct, you’d also have to mention Duluth. It’s home to Holy Cow! Press, which is celebrating its third decade.”

Million Poems Show NYC

“The next episode of The Million Poems Show is this Monday, March 26, at 6:30 p.m. at the Bowery Poetry Club (1st & Bowery, NYC). Buck Downs, author of Marijuana Soft Drink, Recreational Vehicle, and many other fundamentally unstoppably brilliant collections of poems, will be taking the stage. As will Nicole Renaud, the singer the New York Times describes as an “ethereal soprano,” and whom the New Yorker says “earns the overused descriptor ethereal.” Franklin Bruno sings the theme song, banters, collaborates, and if you’re good, he takes us out with a song. And as for me [Jordan Davis], I try to make it so you almost forget you’re at a poetry event. The Million Poems Show is free. What’s more, it coincides with happy hour — come by Monday, have a couple drinks. The words will do things you don’t see coming.”

Comic Books


Two new offerings from Nick Threndyle, artist and poet out of Victoria, BC – Gringo and Burn All Stations. Sample pages can be viewed on his website. Not new to zines/graphic fiction, Threndyle’s work, Golden Eyes on the Ocean Floor had previously been reviewed in the NewPages Zine Rack.


Also in the mail, Street Pizza #1 from Undercore Comix hand-drawn and inked by underground cartoonist Andy P., creator of Tromatic Tendencies: The Story of Lloyd Kaufman.

Words

Why Sexist Language Matters, by Sherryl Kleinman, AlterNet. “Gendered words and phrases like ‘you guys’ may seem small compared to issues like violence against women, but changing our language is an easy way to begin overcoming gender inequality.”

Books :: LibriVox

LibriVox free audio books from LibrarianActivist.org: “LibriVox is a volunteer project with the goal of making pubilc domain works available as audio books. There’s a plethora of goodies here for bibliophiles. Not only is the available of classic works a beautiful thing, but access to audio books is a boon to those who benefit from having access to books through alternative mediums … coming to mind: people who self-identify as LD, ADHD, or visually impaired…”

Books :: God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Congratulations, Christopher Hitchens! But Why Won’t You Bring The Funny? From the Huffington Post. “…his upcoming book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (May 1, 2007), sounds like a laugh riot. Check out this sample line: ‘Monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.’ Try the veal! Remember to tip your waitress!

Libraries

New Progressive Librarians Guild chapter at Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The purpose of PLG is to foster discussion and action related to librarianship and social responsibility. We believe that the vital role of the library in a democratic society requires a politically and socially engaged profession.” Includes links to other chapters.

Book Review

Poets in full bloom. Leslie Adrienne Miller, Deborah Keenan and Diane Glancy — longtime Minnesota English professors — are at the height of their poetic powers in these three new collections. Reviews by Andrea Hoag, Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Scene New: Lit Mags

One of the benefits of attending AWP is getting to meet and discover “new” lit mags on the scene. As saddened as we so often are to hear of magazines folding under economic or other life constraints, it is at the same time with great joy that we see new mags crop up, with invigorated, often “youthful” labor, and somehow enough change in their pockets (or foraging skills) to get the publication started. Who knows where these fresh starts may end up; no doubt some of the long-standing lit mags have staff who remember their start-up days — before they went glossy, before they went 501c(3), before the .com, before finding a comfortable hold within academic walls, or perhaps after leaving academia behind… A smattering of new mags offering an infusion of hope include:

Alehouse, San Francisco, CA. Editor Jay Rubin, Contributing Editors Edward A. Dougherty, Kake Huck, and Gary Lessing.

Cannibal, Brooklyn, NY. Editors Matthew Henriksen (also of TYPO) and Katy Henriksen.

Cave Wall, Greensboro, NC. Editor Rhett Iseman.

New Ohio Review or /nor, Ohio University, Athens, OH. Managing Editor John Bullock.

Short Story, Columbia, SC. Editor Caroline Lord.

We wish these newbies the best in their endeavors, and hope to see them continue to grace our pages.