Tom Lombardo is now Poetry Editor at Press 53. Last year (2008), Tom edited and published After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books), which features 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 countries. Tom is a widely published and respected poet and is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. His mission is to bring 4-6 poetry collections to Press 53 each year and to be the preliminary judge for Poetry in the Press 53 Open Awards.

Essayist Karen D. Culley offers an overview of black authors in American literature: African-American Writers: Legends of Literature

For anyone who has never attended the AWP conference and would like an overview persepective on it, check out Robert Gray’s post on Fresh Eyes Now. Here’s an excerpt:

“All those headlines declaring the book is dead and readers are an endangered species seemed to have little effect on the 8,000 writers, give or take a few hundred, who inundated the Hilton Chicago last week for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference. . . Was everyone attending the conference carrying a manuscript in their back pocket? Probably. Was the possibility high that few of those books would ever see the light of publication? No doubt. Did it matter? Not so much, at least not last week.”

Canadian author Margaret Atwood has pulled out of an international Dubai literary festival after organizers banned a novel by a British author because it contains references to homosexuality.

In a letter addressed to the festival’s director, Atwood said she could not attend Dubai’s inaugural International Festival of Literature next week because of the “regrettable turn of events surrounding” the book “The Gulf Between Us.”

Read more here.

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their December Fiction Open competition.

First place: Cary Groner of Tucson, AZ, wins $2000 for “Elaborate Preparations for Departure”. His story will be published in the Summer 2010 issue of Glimmer Train Stories, out in May 2010.

Second place: Aaron Carmichael of Broomfield, CO, wins $1000 for “Driver Yu’s Penance”. His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories.

Third place: Aaron Cutler of New York, NY, wins $600 for “15 Shots”.

A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here. This quarterly competition is open to all writers and all themes, with a word count range of 2000-20,000. Click here for guidelines

Also: Very Short Fiction Award competition (deadline February 28)

Glimmer Train hosts this competition twice a year, and first place is $1200 and publication in the journal. It’s open to all writers, no theme restrictions. Word count must not exceed 3000. Click here for complete guidelines.

J.S. Tonutre, a designer for survival games for the newly fledged “aggression arcades” industry, gives his perspectic on AWP for Agni Online. Here’s an excerpt:

[WARNING: Do not drink hot liquid while reading, for any number of reasons as to why you might spill it on yourself!]

In AWP Convention Game regulations, a salutation, an exchange such as the above, between people who already know each other, technically counts for nothing. It must either be truncated—for economical use of time is vital—or else parlayed, turned to advantage. The point of play, if I haven’t made this clear enough yet, is to trade up, to advance the avatar, and the only way this can happen is when someone with a higher-stratum position (more publications, better publications, more ascertainable connections) sees you, and with that certification promotes you along the board. This is hardly arbitrary. For as everyone knows, being seen from a higher position only happens when there is something to be seen, though of course the appearance of being seen has value insofar as you might be seen being seen, and therefore score second-order points (described in game book) whether or not there is genuine substance behind the encounter. The calculus is very tricky, and point scoring is often hotly contested…[read the rest on Agni].

Provided by Amnesty International, this “Activist Toolkit” most definitely can be appreciated by anyone working with community and/or student activist groups. Provided fully online are helpful resources: starting a group, running a group, planning events and activities, and promotion. Each of these sections is loaded with separate and specific resources, such as how to recruit and keep members, how to run a meeting, how to lobby congress, etc. An absolute wealth of information, whether the goal is creating an Amnesty International group or any other activist group.

Narrative has expanded their current “Third Person” contest to include entries written from any point of view – first, second, limited third, or omniscient. The contest is open to all fiction and nonfiction writer: short shorts, short stories, essays, memoirs, all forms of literary nonfiction, and excerpts from longer works of both fiction and nonfiction.

The Southern Review announces an opening for a Postdoctoral Researcher (The Southern Review Resident Scholar). This is a two-year, non-renewable twelve-month appointment and carries a salary of $32,000 and benefits (pending final administrative approval). Preferred start date is August 1, 2009. Founded in 1935 by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, The Southern Review is published four times a year on the campus of Louisiana State University. For more information, please check The Southern Review website.

AWP 2009 has come to a close, and NewPages is exhausted and recharged all at the same time!

What great energy we give and receive during those chaotic three days of sessions, bookfair, readings, and dinner talks. And what a difference this year was from five years ago, when NewPages first began rolling the aisles among the journals and publishers, trying to explain our work and hearing: “New what? You do what?” to this year, hearing random shout-outs from people in the halls, “I love NewPages!” and overhearing one magazine editor say to another, “You’re on NewPages, right?”

Thanks to ALL of you. It can really be lonely work sitting here behind the computer all year, plugging away at links and trying to make the best selections for the site, hoping readers are finding the site useful and usable. Three days at AWP really helps us to connect and know that we’re on the right track here, and not just because of what we do, but because of what so many other people are doing.

As I said time and again when editors thank us for what we do, we thank them right back. NewPages could not do what it does without the great efforts of so many other people who love to read and write, and, like me, who love to help make those connections between readers and writers.

And this year seemed especially upbeat, even given the downward spiral in the economy. More so than last year’s AWP, I heard journal staff say they had gained subscribers – SO IMPORTANT – and publishers say they had sold out of books or at the very least were actually making sales this time. Not that anyone who goes to the AWP bookfair will regain their costs to go (at least none I know of!), but to know that there is support, there is interest, this is all very promising for the future of literature and of reading we have so often heard bemoaned.

I think it was a wonderful AWP, and I’m already looking forward to next year, Denver, Colorado, where I’d like to see this famed midwest hospitality continued and even surpassed.

More on AWP later. For now, a bit of R&R – rest and reading.

The day before the inauguration 100 Poems, 100 Days sent out a call to poets they admire to write poems that respond, however loosely, to the presidency, the nation, the government or the current political climate. More than one hundred American poets responded immediately. The first 100 poets were each assigned one of President Obama’s first hundred days in office, and each will write a poem reflecting on the state of the nation and the world on that day. A new poem is posted every day.

Ruth Lilly Fellowships
Five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships in the amount of  $15,000 will be awarded to young poets through a national competition sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry. Established in 1989 by the Indianapolis philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the fellowships are intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry. Applicants must be us citizens between the age of twenty-one and thirty-one as of  March 31, 2009. Applications must be postmarked during the month of March 2009.

A recent AP post reports: “Officials at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh are upset that best-selling author John Grisham mentions the school in connection with a fictional gang rape in his latest novel. Grisham’s The Associate deals with a character who attended the private Catholic college and was involved in a drunken rape scene in an off-campus apartment in 2003. Duquesne University spokeswoman Rose Ravasio said it’s unfortunate Grisham ‘chose to use our name and associate it with a fictional incident of this nature.’ Grisham told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he chose the school because he saw it once, and has been to Pittsburgh for Steelers and Pirates games. The novel contains several other references to Pittsburgh.”

Should writers not use the real names of places in their writing? Making up names of things isn’t new to any genre of literature (see Wikipedia’s Index: Lists of Fictional Things). How might it matter one way or another?

In its last issue (108 – reviewed here on NP), The New Quarterly introduced a new feature: “Magazine as Muse,” in which writers are asked to tell about magazines that have influenced them. In this issue Billeh Nickerson and Mark Callahan take the opportunity to discuss their “muses.”

How many magazines have made the plea to those who submit to read their publication and, better yet, subscribe to it? And how many times at conferences have I heard speakers charge writers with the same – support your lit mags! This new feature in TNQ provides a much more creative approach: show readers the influence of publications on writers.

It would be nice to see similarly styled features of “role modeling” included in more publications!

University of Montevallo Assistant or Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing. The Department of English & Foreign Languages invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professorship in creative writing (fiction). Jim Murphy, Chair, Creative Writing Search Committee.

Mount Vernon Nazarene University is seeking to hire a qualified instructional faculty member for creative writing and literature. Dr. Henry W. Spaulding II Vice President for Academic Affairs and Academic Dean.

Yes, we will be in Chicago this year!

We’re tabled in Southwest Hall – #624.

We don’t really plan to be at the table much this year, as we will be attending sessions and hitting the floor to say hello to as many of our friends as possible. But do feel free to stop by, say hello, leave a card, a postcard, a book, a lit mag, a beer, etc.

We’ll be sharing a table with Jessica Powers of Catalyst Press Books.

The Seventh Annual ukiaHaiku Festival is an afternoon devoted to the Haiku form of poetry. Keynote speaker: Theresa Whitehill

Sunday, April 26, 2009
2 pm to 4 pm at the City Conference Center
200 School Street in Ukiah, California

The festival will also include awards for their Haiku contest, which is a no-fee contest for all age groups *except* the Contemporary Adult Category (3/$5). Deadline March 13