Home » NewPages Blog » Blog Items » Page 92

MLA Mid-Year Report on Jobs

From the MLA Office of Research. Probably not much you didn’t already know:

“Through 20 February, the English edition of the MLA Job Information List (JIL) has carried 322 (21.9%) fewer ads this year (2008–09) than last; the foreign language edition is down 270 ads (21.2%). On the basis of the number of jobs announced in the JIL through the April print issue, we project that this year’s totals will drop by 26.1%, to about 1,350 jobs, in the JIL’s English edition and by 27.4%, to about 1,220 jobs, in the foreign language edition. The declines follow a period when the number of jobs advertised in both English and foreign languages increased from fewer than 1,100 in the mid-1990s to 1,826 in English and 1,680 in foreign languages this past year, 2007–08. We are projecting an estimated 480 fewer jobs in English in 2008–09 than a year ago and 460 fewer in foreign languages. These declines mark the biggest one-year drops in the thirty-four-year history of the JIL, both numerically and in percentage terms. Even so, this year’s projected totals are still higher than the historic low numbers to date—1,075 jobs in English and 1,047 jobs in foreign languages—recorded in 1993–94.”

Having graduated with my MA in 1992, I can sympathize with the plight for many graduating into this low swing. I got my first, full-time teaching job in 1999 – yes, that’s seven years of pieced-together part-time teaching and working in jobs not at all related to my degree. So, no whining until you’ve got me beat on that.

Haiku Tea Contest

From the like it or not pile:

ITO EN (North America), INC., the world’s leading purveyor of green tea products and beverages, today announced its call-for-entries for “Haiku Project 2009.” Inspired by the spirit of change in our country today, participants can enter a haiku around the themes of “Change,” “Hope” and “Progress”. ITO EN representatives will evaluate all submissions and select 3 winners of the 2009 Haiku Project on July 20, 2009. The winning contestants will be notified by ITO EN and may be required to sign and return a Submission Release form and their haiku will be printed on bottles of TEA’S TEA in 2010. Submissions will be accepted from March 6, 2009 to July 6, 2009.

New Lit on the Block :: ouroboros review

Jo Hemmant and Christine Swint have begun a poetry and art journal titled ouroboros review. The magazine is currently published online using a service called Issuu, and is also available in print through a print-on-demand service called Magcloud.

Issue 2 has just been released and includes the works of Jay Arr, John Borcherding, Tammy Brewer, Iain Britton, Dustin Brookshire, Julie Buffaloe-Yoder, Kelly Cockerham, Jill Crammond Wickham, Vanessa Daou, Jennifer Delaney, Nikki Devereux, Michael Doyle, Holly Dunlap, Marchell Dyon Jefferson, Andrew Erkkila, Hunter Ewen, Liz Flint-Somerville, Rebecca Gethin, Christopher Hileman, Dick Jones, Collin Kelley, Blake Leland, Chris Major, Rachel Mallino, Michelle McGrane, Joseph Milford, Steven Nash, January O’Neil, Scott Owens, Amy Pence, Allan Peterson, Robin Reagler, Deb Scott, Carolee Sherwood, Hannah Stephenson, Paul Christian Stevens, Amy Unsworth, J Michael Wahlgren, Christian Ward, Angie Werren, Ernest Williamson III, Robert E Wood

ouroboros is now reading for the third issue. The reading period ends Sunday, May 3.

On Newspapers and Journalism

There’s been much to read on this topic, but I found this article in The Nation especially informative for its historical perspective – all the way back to the founding fathers – and including the pre-internet decisions/legislation which actually began this downward spiral. Also included are suggestions for change, which is what I have found lacking in most other editorials and articles on the topic. Check it out:

The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers
By John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney
The Nation (April 6, 2009 ed.)
March 18, 2009

Awards :: Sami Rohr

Sana Krasikov, author of the short story collection One More Year, has won the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for emerging writers of Jewish literature. “The characters who populate Krasikov’s stories are mostly women–some are new to America; some still live in the former Soviet Union, in Georgia or Russia; and some have returned to Russia to find a country they barely recognize and people they no longer understand. Mothers leave children behind; children abandon their parents. Almost all of them look to love to repair their lives, and when love isn’t really there, they attempt to make do with relationships that substitute for love.”

Dalia Sofer, author of The Septembers of Shiraz, won the $25,000 Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award.

The Sami Rohr Prize is the largest monetary prize for Jewish literature, as well as one of the largest literary prizes globally, with fiction and nonfiction considered in alternating years.

Writer Beware Prevails

From the SFWA re: the work of Writer Beware (a site highly recommended by NewPages!):

Retaliatory lawsuit against Writer Beware staff dismissed
March 26, 2009

CHESTERTOWN, Md. — A Massachusetts Superior Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss, the principal operators of the Writer Beware website, filed by a purported literary agent.

Writer Beware is a publishing industry watchdog group sponsored by Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) which “shines a light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes and pitfalls.”

The suit, initiated by Robert Fletcher and his company, the Literary Agency Group, alleged defamation, loss of business and emotional distress while making claims Fletcher had lost $25,000 per month due to warnings about his business practices posted by Crispin and Strauss.

The suit was dismissed with prejudice March 18 by the Massachusetts Superior Court due to Fletcher’s failure to respond to discovery or otherwise prosecute the lawsuit. Crispin and Strauss, through counsel, intend to file a motion against Fletcher and the Literary Agency Group, Inc., seeking recovery of their legal fees incurred in defending what they believe to be a frivolous lawsuit.

The case dates to February 2008, when Fletcher and his company filed for a temporary restraining order pending a preliminary injunction against Crispin and Strauss in Suffolk County Superior Court in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. During a subsequent hearing Feb. 19, the temporary restraining order was dismissed for improper service (Strauss wasn’t served until 42 minutes after the time of the hearing, and Crispin was not served at all), but the supporting complaint was allowed to proceed.

Currently, Fletcher and his companies remain the subjects of an active investigation by the Florida Attorney General’s Office.

“I’’m very pleased that the case was dismissed. Knowing how hard those involved with Writer Beware work – and how important the work they do is to writers, both within SFWA and outside of it – it’s very good news, indeed,” said SFWA President Russell Davis. “Writer Beware is one of the most important and valuable services SFWA provides, and knowing that this frivolous case was dismissed, and that Mr. Fletcher is now the subject of an investigation in Florida only validates the work done by Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss.”

Crispin and Strauss have volunteered countless hours of their time to advising, educating and warning aspiring and established authors about dubious, questionable and outright criminal business practices on the fringes of the publishing industry. They maintain the Writer Beware website (writerbeware.com) and are major contributors to Writer Beware Blogs! (accrispin.blogspot.com).

Film :: Birmingham Shout Film Fest CFS

The 2009 Birmingham SHOUT Gay + Lesbian Film Festival has announced its Call For Entries for feature-length narratives, documentaries and short film entries. Now in its 4th year, the festival has expanded to include a juried competition! Narrative features, documentary features, and short films will compete in their respective categories for the coveted Best Film and Audience Choice awards.

REGULAR DEADLINE: March 30, 2009

LATE DEADLINE: April 7, 2009

Writer’s Travel Scholarship

From Jonathan Stray’s blog:

The Fifth Annual Equivocality Writer’s Travel Scholarship

This is is a short-form writing contest where the winner gets a round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world. Really.

Naturally, I do see a lot of travel writing submissions, but I’d like to reiterate that this is not about travel writing: it’s about writers traveling. Anything is fair game, as long as it’s prose under 10,000 words. Fiction, non-fiction, memoir, porn, whatever… just make it a good read.

“Why do you do this?” is a frequently-asked-question. So I will repeat (say it with me this time):

I think travel is good. I think writing is good. I think it is important that writers travel.

Applications are open from now until midnight April 30th, 2009. The winner will be announced May 15th.

Sentence Book Award Winner

Sentence has announced Catherine Sasanov the winner of the inaugural Sentence Book Award. Her winning poetry collection Had Slaves will be out in 2009.

The semi-finalists for the Sentence Book Awards are:

WoO, by Renee Angle
Let Me Open You a Swan, by Deborah Bogen
Backwards Rapture, by Cindy Carlson
They Say This is How Death Came Into the World, by Paul Dickey
I am going to clone myself then kill the clone and eat it, by Sam Pink
Post Moxie, by Julia Story
The finalists are:

Some Odd Afternoon, by Sally Ashton
All of Us, by Elisabeth Frost
The Clem System, by Andrew Neuendorf
Dear Editor, by Amy Newman
Aqueduct, by Leanne Tonkin
The Infinite War, by Tom Whalen

MM Images Sought

Daily Immediacy is an online exhibition of mobile media images: “A diary is a daily record of events and experiences. Because of the accessibility and instantaneous nature of camera phones, people are turning into spontaneous photojournalists. They are becoming more aware of their surroundings and more apt to capture aspects of everyday life. From the mundane to the spectacular, images are being inconspicuously captured and transmitted through the wireless infrastructure. These versatile images are an immediate document of daily life and have a unique aesthetic because of their lo-fi/low-resolution quality.”

You are invited to participate in this new online gallery. Please submit your daily mobile images to [email protected]. You can email them directly from your phone as a multimedia message (mms) or email them as jpegs. Selected images will be featured weekly on this site.

ALL image submissions can be viewed on Flickr.

Poetry Outloud

Check out the website for Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest,an event created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. The site includes a daily poet feature with bio and poems, as well as a Best Performances video along with teacher’s guide for classroom use and score sheets for students to be the judge. This year, award-winning actress Tyne Daly, Prairie Home Companion‘s Garrison Keillor, and poet Luis Rodriguez, among others, will judge the fourth annual Poetry Out Loud National Finals on April 28, 2009, in Washington, DC.

PEN’s Online Translation Slam

Inspired by live translation slams that proved to be audience favorites at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, and again at PEN World Voices, PEN’s online Translation Slam aims to showcase the art of translation by juxtaposing in a public forum two “competing” translations of a single work.

For the inaugural installment, they asked translators to test their linguistic mettle on 暮色, a poem by Chinese writer Xi Chuan.

At the live slams, audience members were invited to discuss the choices made by each of the translators and the resulting shifts of emphasis in the translated text. Readers of the online slam are encouraged to participate in the discussion by leaving comments on the site. PEN encourages you to cheer for your favorite translation, compare the two, talk about the poem.

MQR Names New Editor

Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan Professor of English and American Culture, has been named editor of Michigan Quarterly Review, the University of Michigan’s flagship scholarly and literary journal. Professor Freedman holds a B.A. from Northwestern and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University, where he taught before coming to Michigan. He has also taught at Caltech, Oxford University, and the Bread Loaf School of English. He is the author of three books: Professions of Taste (1991), The Temple of Culture (2001), and Klezmer America (2007), and has edited numerous other volumes, including, with Sara Blair, Jewish in America, originally a special issue of MQR. In addition to his previous work with MQR, Freedman was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism and a member of its editorial collective.

MQR is a journal of the humanities, publishing essays, interviews, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and book reviews. Since 1977 MQR has been edited by University of Michigan Professor of English Laurence Goldstein, whose acute literary sensibilities and critical discernment have made the magazine an important venue for new creative work, and whose broad interests have encouraged its interdisciplinary scope.

He instituted the practice of devoting one issue a year to the exploration across disciplines of some topic of special interest, which has ranged from 1979’s “The Moon Landing and Its Aftermath” and 1980-81’s “The Automobile and American Culture” to the recent volumes on “Vietnam: Beyond the Frame,” The Documentary Imagination,” and “China.” In the last two decades MQR has published work by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coles, Carol Gilligan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Barry Lopez, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Rorty, Eric J. Sundquist, John Updike, William Julius Wilson, and other authorities in their fields, as well as some of the finest contemporary fiction and poetry. Work appearing in MQR is often selected for inclusion in anthologies such as the annual Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best American Poetry.

Professor Goldstein will complete his editorship with the Spring 2009 issue of MQR.

Dueling Austen Scholars

From The Observer, Sunday 15 March 2009, by Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent:

Oxford academic and Austen authority Professor Kathryn Sutherland is claiming that a new book by award-winning biographer Claire Harman has copied her own radical ideas about the novelist, pulled together over 10 years of research and published by her in 2005…According to Sutherland, the two former friends met in her home shortly after the publication of her own book, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives, from Aeschylus to Bollywood, in 2005. She says she let Harman read the book and was distressed to learn later that her friend was working on a popular version of its theories…Nick Davies, Harman’s editor at pub

New Lit on the Block :: Ozone Park

Ozone Park is a biannual online journal (also available PDF) of new writing publishing Fiction, Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Plays and Translation from emerging and established writers. Ozone Park is edited and designed by graduate students in the Queens College MFA program in Creative Writing and Translation. Ozone Park accepts online submissions from October 15th through June 15th.

Contributors to the first issue include: Oscar Bermeo, Donna Brook, Robert Calero, Christie Casher, Cyrus Cassells, Eric Darton, Mary Christine Delea, Deborah Di Bari, Judy Gerbin, Robert Hershon, Ry Kincaid, Cathy McArthur, Lynne Martens, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Michael Morical, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Rena J. Mosteirin, Susan O’Doherty, Lisa Romeo, Thaddeus Rutkowski, and Diane Shakar.

Annual Prairie Schooner Writing Prizes

Prairie Schooner, the quarterly literary magazine published at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for 83 years has given eighteen writing prizes for work published in its 2008 volume. Thanks to generous supporters, total prize money awarded was $8,500, with the highest individual prize worth $1,500. (Read more about the writers on the PS Blog.)

The Lawrence Foundation Award of $1,000 was won by Paul Eggers for the story “Won’t You Stay?” from the Winter issue.

The $1,500 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award was won by Marilyn Chin for her “Fables” published in the Summer issue.

Paula Peterson won the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing of $1,000 for her story “Shelter” from the Spring issue.

Bradford Tice is awarded the Edward Stanley Award of $1,000 for his three poems from the Winter issue.

The Bernice Slote Award of $500 for the best work by a beginning writer was won by James Crews for his four poems published in the Fall issue.

The Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award of $500 goes to Christianne Balk for her poems from the Fall issue.

The Jane Geske Award of $250 is awarded to Adrienne Su for three poems from the Summer issue.

Nicholas Rinaldi wins the Hugh J. Luke Award of $250 for his story, “An Insanity, a Madness, a Furor,” from the Summer issue.

There were ten winners of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards of $250 each. These awards are made possible through the generosity of Glenna Luschei.

Mitch Wieland for his story, “Swan’s Home,” in the Fall issue
Allison Amend for her story, “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing,” in the Summer issue
Colette Sartor for her short story, “Lamb,” in the Spring issue
Maggie Anderson for her poem, “Black Overcoat,” in the Summer issue
Ander Monson for five poems in the Spring issue
Valerie Sayers, for her story, “Age of Infidelity,” in the Summer issue
Todd Boss for three poems in the Spring issue
Asako Serizawa for her story, “Luna,” in the Summer issue
Annie Boutelle for her poem, “Hypothesis,” in the Fall issue
Erinn Batykefer for her seven poems in the Fall issue.

NewPages Updates :: Literary Magazines :: March 2009

The following have recently been added to NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines:

Twelve Stories – fiction
nanomajority – literature, art
shaking like a mountain – creative non-fiction, fiction, poetry
Fogged Clarity – fiction, poetry, essay, art, music
Stone’s Throw Magazine– poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art
Zoland Poetry – poetry
The Meadow – poetry, fiction, screenplay, nonfiction, artwork, graphic design, comics, photography

ReLit on the Block :: New CollAge

In 1964, Professor A. McA. Miller founded New CollAge magazine, housed on the New College of Florida campus, and welcomed “submissions of poetry from anyone, anywhere.” When Professor Miller retired in 2005, so did New CollAge.

Today, a group of New College undergraduates plunge headfirst into the literary conversation to resurrect a magazine and discover – to steal a line from Mark Strand – “the blaze of promise everywhere.”

The reborn New CollAge magazine is seeking your poetry submissions for a late spring printing and a spiffy new website! Deadline April 15

Independents :: Survival and Rescue

Hirsh Sawhney is not only hopeful for the survival of independent publishing in these trying times, he’s practical in his understanding of just how independents may be the ones to save literature: “Could literary culture really be breathing its last? Should readers and writers be running for cover? Of course not. But what, then, will save literature from economic disaster? Simple: independent publishing. Yes, independents – the ones who struggle to sell enough books to make payroll – will ensure that engaging, challenging books continue to be produced and consumed. It’s they who’ll safeguard literature through the dark economic days ahead.” [read the rest here]

Poems About Radio

Local public radio station wants to feature poems about radio experiences of any kind and/or fundraising to be read by area poets during the final day of pledge drive, April 4, in the afternoon. Station streams on internet so you can hear your poem. If you have anything, please mail to [mme642-at-yahoo.com] WMUK (Kalamazoo, Michigan) is the station. Humor good. Sentiment good. No cussin’. (Elizabeth Kerlikowske)

Awards :: Glimmer Train Family Matters – 2009

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their January Family Matters competition. This quarterly competition is open to all writers for stories about family, with a word count range of 500-12,000.

First place: Jeremiah Chamberlin of Ann Arbor, MI, wins $1200 for “What We Can”. His story will be published in the Summer 2010 issue of Glimmer Train Stories, out in May 2010.

Second place: Yuval Zalkow of Portland, OR, wins $500 for “God and Buses”. His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories, increasing his prize to $700.

Third place: Adam Rensch of Bronxville, NY, wins $300 for “Everything in Its Right Place”. His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories, increasing his prize to $700.

A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.

Also: Fiction Open competition (deadline soon approaching! March 31)

Man Booker Prize Judge’s List Announced

The Man Booker International Prize
14 authors from 12 countries make it on to Judges’ List

The Man Booker International Prize differs from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights one writer’s continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. It is awarded every two years.

The winner of this year’s Man Booker International Prize will be announced in May 2009, and the winner will be presented with their award at a ceremony in Dublin on 25 June 2009. Seven of the authors are writers in translation. They are:

Peter Carey (Australia)
Evan S. Connell (USA)
Mahasweta Devi (India)
E.L. Doctorow (USA)
James Kelman (UK)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Arnošt Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
Alice Munro (Canada)
V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
Ngugi Wa Thiong’O (Kenya)
Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

CW Residency :: Lyon College

Creative Writing Residency
Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas, a highly selective four-year liberal arts college, seeks a distinguished writer of fiction for its 4th biennial Visiting Fellowship in Creative Writing, a semester-long residency scheduled during the autumn 2009 semester. April 1, 2009 deadline.

Zissner on On Writing Well

“Visions and Revisions” follows the 35-year history of multiple editions of William Zissner’s best-selling book On Writing Well. From its inception (“”You should write a book about how to write,’ my wife said in June of 1974 when I was complaining to her, as I often did, that I had run out of things to write about.”), Zissner discusses each of the subsequent editions and their changes:

“By 1990, however, America had changed considerably. On Writing Well was a child of the 1970s. I knew that its principles were still valid. But what about its references and its tone? Would it strike a new generation of readers as an old man’s book? I took a closer look and saw that my 14-year-old product was slowly slipping out of touch. Without a major overhaul it would wither and die.

“Most obviously, much of the nonfiction I now admired was written by women. Yet my excerpted passages were still mostly by men—the graybeards who had been models for my generation of journalists, now gray-bearded ourselves. The language was also lopsidedly male; he and him were still the prevailing pronouns, though women readers had chided me for referring to the reader as he, pointing out that they did much of the nation’s reading and resented having to picture themselves as men….”

Read the rest on American Scholar.

Just When You Thought Canada Was Better

Literary publishers protest cuts
Malahat Review among smaller periodicals facing loss of funding
By Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service
March 11, 2009

“The new Canada Periodical Fund, announced last month by Heritage Minister James Moore and still being designed by government officials, would deny certain federal grants to most publications with annual sales of fewer than 5,000 copies. ‘The government is improving the way it does business to meet the changing needs of Canadians,’ Moore said when the program was announced in February. ‘The way in which support to Canadian periodicals is delivered will be reformed to maximize value for money and to seize opportunities in today’s global, technological environment.'” [read the rest here]

New Literary Magazine Reviews

Visit NewPages Literary Magazine Reviews to read thoughtful commentaries on the following print publications and online publications – 20×20 :: Amarillo Bay :: Antigonish Review :: Boston Review :: Hudson Review :: Isotope :: Main Street Rag :: MiPOesias :: Ninth Letter :: The Normal School :: One Story :: Underground Voices :: Waccamaw :: Washington Square.

For information on having your publication considered for review, please visit the NewPages FAQ page.

CFP :: Split this Rock Poetry Festival

“Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2010 invites poets, writers, and activists to Washington, DC, for poetry, community building, and creative transformation as our country continues to grapple with a crippling economic crisis and other social and environmental ills. The festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism – opportunities to imagine a way forward, hone our activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. We invite you to send proposals for panel discussions, group readings, roundtable discussions, workshops, and small-scale performances on a range of topics at the intersection of poetry and social change. Possibilities are endless. Challenge us.” The deadline is May 30, 2009.

2009 Poetry Contest Deadline Extended to March 23!
The deadline for the 2nd annual Split This Rock poetry contest, to be judged by poet and National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith, has been extended.

Pitch Black Makes Top Ten

I am happy to see Pitch Black by Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton (Cinco Puntos Press) made the 2009 Top Ten Graphic Novels for Teens named by the Young Adult Library Services Association. Landowne and Horton’s work, which at the start of reading I thought might be “too dark” for teens, is indeed dark, but in a realistically compelling manner of story, character, and style. It’s the kind of graphic story teens can read and be informed and educated in a way that they’ll feel is subversive to their 8-4 schoolwork, while being completely acceptable to adults who want teens to know “the truths” that exist in life.

Others on the top ten list (and visit the site for even more complete lists):

Life Sucks
Jessica Abel, Gabriel Soria and Warren Pleece
First Second, 2008

Sand Chronicles, v. 1 – 3
Hinako Ashihara
VIZ, 2008

Atomic Robo: Atomic Robo and the Fightin’ Scientists of Tesladyne
Brian Clevinger and Steve Wegener
Red Five Comics.

TakeReal, v. 1 & 2
hiko Inoue
VIZ

Uzumaki, v.1.
Junki Ito
VIZ

Japan Ai: A Tall Girl’s Adventures in Japan
Aimee Major Steinberger
Go Comi

Skim
Mariko Tamaki and Jilliam Tamaki
Groundwood Books

Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite
Gerard Wayand Gabriel Ba
Dark Horse

Cairo
G. Willow Wilson and M. K. Perker
Vertigo

Detroit Poet Kim Hunter

Eating from the skull of the fallen angel
Music, myth and the spiritual in the poetry of Kim Hunter
Detroit Metro Times
By Norene Smith

Detroiter Kim Hunter’s new collection of poems, edge of the time zone, is a winding road lined with imagery, political thought and courageous dreaming. That beautiful stretch of imagination parallels a real-life journey. As much as it represents his own growth as a poet and an advocate of poetry, it charts changes and realities he’s observed in the world around him, especially in the realms of politics, media and race.

“I’m obsessed with the interplay between capitalism and media,” he says. “And the dehumanization that can happen when those two things cross.”

Read the rest.

The Prose Poem Online

The Digital Commons @ Providence makes use of Institutional Repositories, which bring together all of a University’s research under one umbrella, with an aim to preserve and provide access to that research. “IRs are an excellent vehicle for working papers or copies of published articles and conference papers. Presentations, senior theses, and other works not published elsewhere can also be published in the IR.”

Currently available: The Prose Poem: An International Journal

Children’s Book Writers

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, formed in 1971 by a group of Los Angeles based writers for children, is the only international organization to offer a variety of services to people who write, illustrate, or share a vital interest in children’s literature. The SCBWI acts as a network for the exchange of knowledge between writers, illustrators, editors, publishers, agents, librarians, educators, booksellers and others involved with literature for young people. There are currently more than 19,000 members worldwide, in over 70 regions, making it the largest children’s writing organization in the world.

The SCBWI sponsors two annual International Conferences on Writing and Illustrating for Children as well as dozens of regional conferences and events throughout the world. It also publishes a bi-monthly newsletter, offers awards and grants for works in progress, and provides many informational publications on the art and business of writing and selling written, illustrated, and electronic material. The SCBWI also presents the annual Golden Kite Award for the best fiction and nonfiction books and the Sid Fleischman Humor Award.

River Teeth Celebrates 10 in Quiet Style

Without the usual fanfare I’ve seen on lit mag covers and PR, River Teeth celebrates its 10th year of publication with a fabulously packed double issue. I was surprised at the size, which is what led me to the Editors’ Notes (mind you even seeing “Volume 10” didn’t set off any anniversary alarms). As quietly and as calmly as their publication has always presented itself (same gorgeous blue-tinted cover), Editors Joe Mackall and Daniel W. Lehman make no grand statements about a decade of publishing creative non-fiction. Instead, and as always, they defer to the efforts of their writer’s and to their ever-important readership:

“Ten years ago we penned the first editors’ notes to our readers. At this point ten years later, we should be writing at length about our humble beginnings and singing of the heights we’ve reached. Our words should reveal just the right amount of nostalgia, pride, and just a hint of self-congratulation. But there is no time for that; or rather, no space.

“We have to keep this note short. In the ten years River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative has been around, we have received over twenty thousand submissions, and we’ve published about three hundred of those twenty thousand. Most of what we reject is the work of fine writers. And now we’ve had to reject the work of writers whose work we’ve previously accepted. Worse than that – we’ve had to reject the very same pieces we once accepted! We had to choose the best forty or so pieces of the three hundred we’ve published. To make matters worse, we’ve had to divide the pieces up into four categories: Essay, Memoir, Literary Journalism, and Craft and Criticism. If there were no space concerns, we’d write a few sentences about how difficult it can be to say, for instance, where memoir ends and a kind of literary journalism begins, and how much we like pieces that flirt with those boundaries. If we had more space, we’d brag about our Pushcart Prize and our Best American Essays. We’d love to pat ourselves on the back and tell you how many Pulitzer Prize winners we’ve published — and with even more pride — shine a light on the people whose River Teeth publication was their first.

“Saying no to our own writers was the hardest thing we’ve had to do as editors. We hate to reject a piece we love because there’s simply no more space. So the best thing we can do right now is to shut up, and thank you for reading.”

Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program

The Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program will open for submissions on April 27, 2009. Designed to encourage and reward writing about contemporary art that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent and precise, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts. The program’s renewal signals the continued commitment of Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation to these goals.

Who’s a Sad Bastard?

Well now here’s something to take advantage of from Marginalia: “Nobody likes rejection, but every rejection gets you one step closer to publication—we mean it! For a limited time, Marginalia is offering a Sad Bastard discount: send us ANY 10 of your rejection slips and a dollar, and we’ll mail you an issue of Marginalia for your perusal. Read Marginalia, know Marginalia, get published by Marginalia.”

Classic Lit Studies? What For?

Earlier, I linked to an article re: the educational shift (perhaps) away from classics such as Milton. Now a recent article, New Curriculum Becomes A SpringBoard For Teacher Criticism, Marilyn Brown reports on one Tampa school district’s shift away from traditional language arts classes (world, American, and Brit lit) to themed studies, such as “Culture” (world lit = Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and Soviet Nobel literature prize-winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writings, “Cinderella” and clips from “I Love Lucy”), “The American Dream” (American Lit = Arthur Miller’s play about witchcraft, “The Crucible,” clips from the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”), and “How Perception Changes Reality” (Brit Lit = media reports of the 1991 Waco massacre, the contemporary novel “My Sister’s Keeper,” and clips from “Forrest Gump”).

This new math and language arts curriculum in middle and high schools is called SpringBoard, and it has met with mixed reviews from educators, especially as it concerns college prep: “All classical literature is gone,” said Lee Rich, a Sickles High School language arts teacher in her 24th year. “They’re going to go to college with no classical literature and limited poetry instruction.”

Is this limitation, or shifting expectations?

Read more here.

Teaching Place via Elsewhere

In Volume 2 Issue 1 of Elsewhere, Editor J.D. Schraffenberger comments: “Very early on, we imagined Elsewhere as a journal that might also be used as a teaching tool and a forum for educators interested in exploring place as a theme in their classrooms.” Check out this incredible collection of essays on the theme “Teaching Place,” which can be found – wholly accessible via the publications online pdf format:

“Why Read for Place? Can Place Writing Matter?” by Casey Clabough
“Pastoral Science Fiction: The Landscape of Ray Bradbury’s Midwestern Stories” by Patricia Kennedy Bostian
“Teaching Sense of Place in Environmental Studies: From Cooperative Learning to Critical Thinking” by Keely Maxwell
“The Rhetorics of Place / Teaching Place as Text” by Matt Low
“Creation by Disruption: Regionalist Approaches to Contemporary Canadian and American Literature” by Julie W. O’Connor
“Using Houses to Teach Place” by Anastasia L. Pratt
“Literature and Journalism of the West: The Study of Regionalism in a Capstone Course” by Jan Whitt
“Taking Education to the Streets, Parks, and Malls: Field Study to Teach Place” by James Guignard
“Multi-modal Explorations of Place in an Interdisciplinary Course” by Mary Newell
“Writing the Place You Know” by James Engelhardt
“Open Letter to the SUNY Brockport College Community” by William Heyen
“Layers of Place” by SueEllen Campbell
“Academic Treatise or Personal Essay? Reflecting on Rival (?) Discursive Modes for Place and Nature” by Peter Hay

Comics as Lit

In addition to Gerry Canavan’s “Comics as Literature” summer course, there’s a whole list of cool special topics classes being offered through Duke this summer. (Gerry adds: “I’ve recently found out that UNC student can take for UNC tuition. Tell everyone.”)

Check out some of these others (seriously, where were cool classes like this when I was in school?):

Black Feminist Interventions and Black Women Writers
The New Middle Class in China
The Politics of Religion in the Twenty-first Century
Education through Film
Cyberpunk and Technofiction
Inquisition and Society in the Early Modern World
Nostalgia for the 1950s
Fashion, Literature and the Avant-Garde
Contemporary Detective Fiction: The Politics of Writing about “Crime”
Imagined Islands
Human Development in Literature
Mass Media and Mental Illness
Atheists, Libertines and Machiavels
The Extremes of Horror
The Ghost in the Machine: Approaches to Self-Control
Migrant Women

Catch a Narwhal

New from Cannibal Books: Narwhal, a compendium of seven chapbooks, 180 pages, hand-sewn in signatures, screen-printed cover, limited edition of 100 for $20.

Four Cities by Kazim Ali
Luminal Equation by Maureen Alsop
House by Sommer Browning
Into the Eyes of Lost Storms by Karla Kelsey
Sycorax’s Retinue by Laura Goode
You do damage by Kate Schapira
Yellowcake by Jared White

Lit Mag Covers Matter

Can I just say how happy I am with the new Chattahoochee Review covers? Okay, I will. Not that traditionally-styled lit mag covers don’t have their place, but with the concern about lit mags being able to survive these days, and the more “image-driven” culture in which we live, it does become more important (perhaps critical) for publications to be able to “catch” new readers. Covers are the place we all begin, like it or not: we do judge our reading material by this to some degree. Funny enough, you can’t even find an image of CR‘s old cover on their website. Erased from memory. Perhaps they’ll end up as collector’s editions on ebay.

Happy 10k+ Birthday to I, Two, and Three

‘Oldest English words’ identified
BBC News

Medieval manuscripts give linguists clues about more recent changes
Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.

Reading University researchers claim “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct – citing “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as probable first casualties.

Queer Film Classics from Arsenel Pulp Press

Arsenal Pulp Press is pleased to introduce Queer Film Classics, a new series of books on classics of LGBT cinema from around the world written by leading LGBT film writers and scholars. Under the new imprint, edited by award-winning Arsenal authors Thomas Waugh (Out/Lines, Lust Unearthed) and Matthew Hays (The View from Here), there will be three new titles per year, beginning in the fall of 2009 with books on Paul Morrissey’s Trash, Pedro Almodovar’s Law of Desire, and Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters.