Find the latest news from literary and alternative magazines including new issues, editorial openings, and much more.
The Arts & Letters Spring Issue is now available for purchase! This issue features the 2020 Unclassifiable Prize winner. Fiction by Stephanie Gangi, Noley Reid, Simone Martel, and Kent Kosack; flash by Dan Kennedy and Matt Greene, and more.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas.
In Volume 33 of The Briar Cliff Review, readers can find a poem that I think most people can relate to after the past year. “Gargoyles” by Sara Wallace describes the empty of feeling of craving someone else’s touch. While the poem does lean toward the romantic side of touch (“No one’s biting your lips, / no one’s tasting you.), it comes at a time when I’m seeing my friends celebrate the ability to hug their loved ones again after, and ends up feeling more general. After being separated from friends and family during the pandemic, who hasn’t missed the intimacy of touch?
Wallace carries the idea of gargoyles through the poem, first as a smoker standing in a doorway of a bodega, and finally as the game “statues, / how when you were tagged // you had to pretend you were stone,” and could only move again when “someone touched you.” I love this thread she carries through from present to past, keeping with that yearning for physical touch.
“Gargoyles” by Sara Wallace. The Briar Cliff Review, 2021.
This month’s Plume featured selection is “Five Contemporary Love Songs edited by Leeya Mehta,” with work by five contemporary Indian poets: Tishani Doshi, Rajiv Mohabir, Jerry Pinto, Arundhathi Subramaniam, and Jeet Thayil. Chelsea Wagenaar reviews Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort. In nonfiction: “The Mind’s Meander: Indirection, Ambiguity, and Association in Poetry” by Rachel Hadas.
Welcome to our second pandemic issue of Hiram Poetry Review. The poems here have one thing in common—we liked them immediately. Work by David Adams, Anthony Aguero, Fred Arroyo, Zulfa Arshad, Enne Baker, Grace Bauer, Demetrius Buckley, Jim Daniels, Edmund Dempsey, Norah Esty, Jess Falkenhagen, Antony Fangary, and more.
A special portfolio of work from Morocco, featuring stories translated from Arabic, and art from the Hindiyeh Museum of Art. Essays on family in India and nature in England, new fiction from Celeste Mohammed and Emma Sloley, and poetry by Peter Filkins, Denise Duhamel, Aleksandar Hemon, and Jose Hernandez Diaz.
In this issue of Cimarron Review: poetry by Ken Autrey, Martha Silano, Sandra McPherson, Daniel Bourne, Erin McIntosh, George Bilgere, Annie Christian, Rebecca Cross, Chloe Hanson, Austen Leah Rose, Millie Tullis, Avra Wing, Amy Bagan, and more; fiction by Jason K. Friedman, Laura Dzubay, David Philip Mullins, and Ashley Clarke; and nonfiction by Brenna Womer, Andrew Johnson, and Lindsay Shen.
Our new issue, ANMLY #32, features a special folio Neighbor Species and Shared Futures curated by Kristine Ong Muslim. Featuring work in various genres from Tilde Acuña, Richard Calayeg Cornelio, Reil Benedict Obinque, Regine Cabato, Pedantic Pedestrians, Melvin Clemente Magsanoc, and more. See what else you can expect to find in this issue at the Anomaly website.
The Spring 2021 issue features Postscript to a Postscript: an interview with Bill Glose, Winner of the 2020 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, interviewed by M. Scott Douglass. Fiction by Abe Aamidor, Allison Daniel, Tony Hozeny, Michele Lovell, Bob Moskowitz, Robert Stone and poetry by Bill Glose, Joan Bauer, Frederick W. Bassett, Joan Bernard, Burt Beckmann, Ace Boggess, Marion Starling Boyer, and more.
Featuring the Robert Watson Literary Prize-winning story, Casey Guerin’s “What Consumes You,” and the Prize-winning poem, Chelsea Harlan’s “Some Sunlight.” Issue 109 also includes an Editor’s Note by Terry L. Kennedy and new work from Rachel Abramowitz, Allyn Bernkopf, and more. Read more at The Greensboro Review website.
The May/June 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review is now available. This issue features stories by María José Candela, Gina Chung, Maureen Langloss, and Katherine Sharpe; and essays by Sophie Beck, Jonathan Gleason, and Amit Majmudar.
The Spring 2021 issue features short stories by and interviews with Sydney Rende, Sam White, Kimm Brockett Stammen, and Caroline Kim. New poetry by Michael Quinn, Ruth Baumann, Will Thomas, and Mureall Hebert and nonfiction by Jory Pomeranz and Christie Tate. Prose & Poetry Contest winners: Mona’a Malik, Ryan Little, and Alisha Acquaye. Read more at the Carve website.
In this issue of The Briar Cliff Review, find poetry by John Blair, Simon Perchik, Twyla M. Hansen, Julie L. Moore, Tony Tracy, Dante Di Stefano, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Ann Hudson, Michael Hill, Jimmie Cumbie, Alyse Knorr, and more.
The May 2021 issue of Poetry features work by Ashlee Haze, Emily Gallacher Viall, Imru Al-Qays, Rebecca Foust, Rachel Jamison Webster, Tarik Dobbs, Courtney Faye Taylor, Rosemary Catacalos, Casey Thayer, and more.
The May issue of The Lake is now online featuring Johanna Boal, Claire Booker, Robert Cooperman, Jenny Hockey, Toby Jackson, Jacqueline Jules, and Rose Lennard.
Issue #19 of Into the Void is by far our biggest issue yet! Containing 12 fiction pieces, 3 creative nonfiction pieces, 15 poems, and 11 beautiful art pieces, Issue #19 is vast, vivid and vibrant. Fiction by Sean Cunningham, Laurel Doud, Mark Foss, Jones Irwin, Chris Neilan, and more.
We’re all masked up and ready to roll out our latest issue! Poetry, videos, music, a dog with a frisbee, Nobel Laureate, art work, photography. Poetry from Anne Pierson Wiese, Tim Suermondt, Samantha DeFlitch, Dawn Potter, Ralph Savarese. See what else is in this issue of Hole In The Head Review.
This milestone issue features some of our favorite prizewinning essays. These curious, beautiful, nuanced stories about everything from surviving lightning strikes to the relief of solving medical mysteries consider the many perils, as well as the tremendous power, of living in a body. See what else the issue has in store for you at the Creative Nonfiction website.
With Issue #37 of The Adroit Journal, we celebrate the extraordinary work of our Gregory Djanikian Scholars—six poets with immense talent who have yet to publish a full-length collection (hello, poetry presses!): Jari Bradley, Donte Collins, Jane Huffman, L. A. Johnson, Nastasha Rao and Brandon Thurman.
“Geographies of Justice,” edited by Alexis Lathem with Richard Cambridge and Charles Coe. An extraordinary testament to extraordinary times: includes poetry from Susan Deer Cloud, Tammy Melody Gomez, Richard Hoffmann, Jacqueline Johnson, Petra Kuppers, and Danielle Wolffe; nonfiction from Teow Lim Goh, Andréana Elise Lefton, David Mura, Nicole Walker, and Catherine Young. Find more contributors at the About Place Journal website.
Guest Post by Adrian Thomson.
Jesse Lee Kercheval’s “The Boy Who Drew Cats” speaks both to our current time and to the necessity of human myth. Confined to a house in Uruguay as her children face quarantine in Japan, Kercheval connects to the hero of a Japanese fable, the titular drawer of cats, in an attempt to find solace within herself through her own artistic ventures.
This connection to cultural myth—and Kercheval does cement her own tale very concretely to the modern as well as the mythical—inspires the author in its assertions of safety, balance, and a sense of stability. The myth helps her recapture her own love of art and facilitates a return to the page where flowers transform into felines. Kercheval does not uphold the myth as a perfect guideline, either—she comments upon it, accepting the good she sees there while acknowledging elements she appears to dislike.
But her inclusion of the fable also speaks to the wider purpose of human myth—as a necessity of the imagination to allow us to “visit” faraway places and to inspire. Kercheval places both within the story to generate trust that the world will get better, as well as trust in her own abilities.
“The Boy Who Drew Cats” by Jesse Lee Kercheval. Brevity, January 2021.
Reviewer bio: Adrian Thomson is a graduate student at Utah State University, currently working toward his MS by way of a thesis in poetry.
Our theme for this issue is LOVE in all its painful, confusing, passionate, and joyous diversity. Featuring fiction by Louise Blalock, Margaret Emma Brandl, Ed Davis, Stefan Kiesbye, and Nick Sweeney; memoir by Jane Boch, Ruth Askew Brelsford, Laura Foxworthy, and Carmela Delia Lanza; and poetry and prose poems by Leonore Hildebrandt, Robert Murray, and Jacalyn Shelley.
This issue features the winners of the Flash Fiction & Geri Digiorno Contests. New flash fiction from Frank X. Christmas, Andrea Eberly, Amina Gautier, Katherine Hubbard, Alana Reynolds, and Nicholas A. White. New poetry by Julia C. Alter, Melissa Boston, Jessica Dionne, Chelsea Harlan, and more. Find more contributors at the Raleigh Review website.
The MacGuffin’s Vol. 37.1 comes at you with an expanded selection of poetry and expanded coverage of our Poet Hunt contest(s) too! We start with Matthew Olzmann’s selections from Poet Hunt 25: Vivian Shipley’s grand prize winning “No Rehearsal” and honorable mention selections from Rita Schweiss and John Jeffire.
Find the 2021 Dogwood Award Winners in this issue. Also featuring work by Padya Paramita, Ellen Graf, Sheree La Puma, Christine Chen, Anne Hampford, Vanessa Haley, S.M. Ellis, Willie Lin, Cristina Baptista, Emily Polk, and more. Read more at the Dogwood website.
Special to this issue of The Bitter Oleander: The Central New York poet Paul B. Roth in dialogue with John Taylor, with a selection of his poetry included. Also in this issue: fiction by William Nuth, Marilee Dahlman, and more; poetry by Andrea Inglese, Patty Pieczka, Lake Angela, Pedro Serrano, Silvia Scheibli, Fabio Pusterla, and more.
Our spring issue features poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction by Cezarija Abartis, Bryana Atkinson, Robert Erle Barham, Melinda Brasher, Laura Todd Carns, Charlie Clark, and more. See a full contributor list at the Mag Stand.
Featuring new fiction by Michael Beadle and Mary Gulino, an essay by Carl Schiffman, and poetry by Linda K. Sienkiewicz, Giovanni Raboni (translated from the Italian by Zack Rogow), Joseph Fasano, James P. Cooper, Katherine Fallon, Barbara Daniels, and Mark Belair. Cover painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. More info at the Apple Valley Review website.
Guest Post by Madeline Thomas.
When a combination of a Catholic upbringing and the unforgettable viewing of a commercial for The Exorcist sends a young girl’s mind to the inevitability of a personal demon possession, the first steps are taken on a path to parental disappointment. Jessica Power Braun’s “Black Alpaca” places readers at the intersection of religion, generational conflict, and closet-Jesus nightmares with sharp humor and unflinching honesty.
The essay, published in Hippocampus Magazine, works through the realities of fear and guilt in the Catholic Church, the slow movement away from your family’s religious identity, and the discovery of a poignant black alpaca painting in the context of Braun’s identities as a mother, wife, and daughter. Humor forms the heart of the piece, but the essay makes no attempt to pull away from what is both painful and real—forming a balance that cultivates both emotional impact and investment for readers.
In a time where I feel the need for constant breaks from the mire of news and the world in general, the humor and tone present in “Black Alpaca” provides needed relief. Braun utilizes her power in storytelling to craft something worth connecting with.
“Black Alpaca” by Jessica Power Braun. Hippocampus Magazine, January 2021.
Reviewer bio: Madeline Thomas is a graduate student and writer at Utah State University.
World Literature Today’s spring issue, “Redreaming Dreamland,” gathers the work of 21 writers and artists reflecting on the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, including Patricia Smith, Joy Harjo, Jewell Parker Rhodes, and Tracy K. Smith. Additional highlights in the issue include a special section on Chinese migrant workers’ literature; an essay on how Giannina Braschi’s work keeps “popping up” in pop culture; fiction from Belarus and Iraq; plus reviews of new books by Najwan Darwish, Cixin Liu, Olga Tokarczuk, and dozens more.
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 16th issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 80,000 readers in 145 countries already know; the finest new writing is here, at your fingertips.
We have a gorgeous spring issue of Months To Years for readers. Thirty-two writers, poets, photographers, and artists have entrusted us with the privilege of sharing their creative work with the world.
In an extraordinary year, writers grapple with current changes and more long-lived concerns and relationships. The works demonstrate profound attention and the fine application of language to lived experience, quotidian and extraordinary. Read more at the Mom Egg Review website.
In this issue of Chinese Literature Today: a selection Coronavirus Poems, “On Being Elsewhere” a feature by Lu Min, “Travel with the Wild Wind” by Xue Yiwei, and paintings by Wang Mansheng. Plus, poetry by Haobo Shen, Bai Lin, Zheng Min, and more, and a short story by Zhang Ning.
The springtime brings a sense of renewal: feeling the sun beginning to heat up and shedding the cocoon of cold winter nights. Spring offers the opportunity to get out and discover something new. At Chestnut Review, we are also experiencing a turn, a closing of our second volume and anticipating our third. This issue features work by Cutter Streeby, Gretchen Rockwell, Rebecca Poynor, Zackary Medlin, Lorette C. Luzajic, Satya Dash, Fatima Malik, and more. See what else can be found in this issue at the Chestnut Review website.
A new issue of Beloit Fiction Journal is out. Contributors to this issue include Sean Williamson, J. T. Townley, Casey McConahay, Andrew Bertaina, Paige Powell, Kathryn Henion, Maura Stanton, Caryn Cardello, Sara Heise Graybeal, Sam Gridley, and more. Read more at the Beloit Fiction Journal website.
In this issue, find special Memoir as Drama feature “Dialogue Box” by Debbie Urbanski. Also in this issue: stories by Emily Mitchell, Elizabeth Stix, Cara Blue Adams, JoAnna Novak, and more; essays by Emma Hine, Catalina Bode, Nicole Graev Lipson, and Josh Shoemake; and poetry by Emily Nason, Rose DeMaris, Dorsey Craft, and others. Find more contributors at the Alaska Quarterly Review website.
Guest Post by Elle Smith.
Michael Keenan Gutierrez explores the meaning of truth and the power of fiction in his essay “Lies I’ll Tell My Son.” Gutierrez starts the reader grounded in fact. His great grandfather, Red, was a bookie: “This is true.” Then the details of Red’s life grow murkier. The story of Red winning a WWI draft card in a poker game sounds dramatic enough it might have come from a movie. Red’s birth certificates and draft cards have different dates and names. Gutierrez’s uncle proclaims, “They were all a bunch of fucking liars.”
Gutierrez has heard that we aren’t supposed to lie to children “except about Santa Claus and death.” But what is the purpose of the lies that build such fantastic family lore? The tales are in contrast to a more recent generation that lived “the standard formula of work, retirement, and death.” The lore of Red paints the world as “more magical than a paycheck and a mortgage.”
Gutierrez resolves to tell his son the tales of his family and “shade the truth in fiction.” What about the hard truths about life and death? Well, Gutierrez explains: “I’ll let him figure out heaven on his own.”
“Lies I’ll Tell My Son” by Michael Keenan Gutierrez. 805 Lit + Art, February 2021.
Reviewer bio: Elle Smith is a graduate student at Utah State University.
Guest Post by Mark Smeltzer.
“We don’t know much about Mr. Otomatsu Wada of Unit B in Barrack 14 in Block 63 of the Gila River Relocation Center,” Eric L. Muller admits at the start of his essay, “The Desert Was His Home.” This lack of knowledge does not deter Muller from examining the pain and power of absence, as well as how deep research becomes an avenue for creative discovery.
Throughout this essay, Muller lays out the facts about this one Japanese-American, among many, held prisoner in the U.S. during World War II. Muller uses what little is known of this man to sketch out a rough but potent portrait of his life. Most notable was Wada’s “two-year-old mystery” marked by the refrain “We don’t know” that Muller uses until Wada’s fate is revealed.
This essay demonstrates how seamlessly and naturally a story can incorporate the many don’t knows and can’t knows inevitable in research. It is even possible, as “The Desert” shows us, how the gaps in a subject’s life can become the story. This piece can be found in Issue 74 of Creative Nonfiction.
“The Desert Was His Home” by Eric L. Muller. Creative Nonfiction, Winter 2021.
Reviewer bio: Mark Smeltzer is a graduate student in Utah State University’s English Department. His area of specialization is in poetry.
Willow Springs 87 features prose and poetry from Joseph Millar, Ramona Ausubel, Jessica Lee Richardson, Andrew Furman, Lawrence Lenhart. Plus, John-Michael Bloomquist, Todd Davis, and others.
The Spring 2021 issue includes a special feature with work by Jim Kacian. In this section, John Zheng also interviews the poet. New prose by Ted McCormack, Sierra Tribbett-Collins, Khem K. Aryal, and DC Berry. Poetry by K. S. Hardy, and more.
From the editors: In the face of the immense grief that surrounds us, for this issue Ruminate Magazine editors decided to explore What Remains. “Everything is held together with stories,” writes the acclaimed author Barry Lopez, who died this past year, a few months after the Holiday Farm Fire destroyed his house and archives. “That is all that is holding us together. Stories and compassion.” This issue features the winners of our 2020 Broadside Poetry Prize: Michael Dechane and S. Yarberry.
With the publication of this 2021 issue comes the fifth anniversary of Presence Journal. Enjoy art by Reginald Baylor and work by featured poet Joseph A. Brown, S.J. Ashaq Hussain Parray translates work by Rehman Rahi and Shahnaz Rasheed. Barbara Crooker, Dante Di Stefano, Linda Nemec Foster, and Mary Ladany celebrate the lives of others in the “In Memoriam” section.
In the latest issue of The Gettysburg Review: essays by Kate Lebo, Chad Davidson, Michele Battiste, Jen Silverman, and Maya Jewell Zeller; fiction by David Crouse, Lilly Schneider, and Melanie Ritzenthaler; and poetry by John Sibley Williams, Alice Friman, Kathryn Smith, and others.
Guest Post by Holly Vasic.
In the 35th-anniversary edition of the San Francisco-based literary magazine ZYZZYVA, Lauren Markham’s essay, “Cathedrals of Hope,” reminisces on the women’s suffrage movement. This piece is timely as 2020 America marked the centennial anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. Markham not only reflects on the women who sacrificed their freedom and endured abuse so that women can vote today but also discusses populations forgotten in the 1920s: men and women of color.
Markham weaves her own narrative into the larger historical picture, describing how her first-time voting was marked with devastation when George Bush Jr. won—again. Markham takes a unique look at where we as Americans are in regard to democracy while commentating on where we came from. Markham writes, “How easy human beings can forget the people who came before us, and the debts we owe.”
“Cathedrals of Hope” by Lauren Markham. ZYZZYVA, 2020.
Reviewer bio: Holly Vasic is a Graduate Instructor seeking a Master’s in Folklore at Utah State University with an undergrad in Journalism.
Guest Post by Andrew Romriell.
In “White Witchery,” from Guernica, Elissa Washuta offers fierce insight into the varied and complex ways whiteness has plundered Indigenous bodies and beliefs. Here, Washuta offers difficult truths surrounding colonialism and settler violence alongside the strength of her own perseverance.
Growing up in a “heavily Catholic, forest-and-farmland slice of New Jersey,” Washuta found a sincere desire to make magic, to be a witch who “brings change to the seen world using unseen forces.” To Washuta, magic became a way of finding stability within the uncontrollable world surrounding Native women in America, an America where, Washuta describes, “[colonizers whisper] that I’m not wanted here, not worthy of protection, nothing but a body to be pummeled and played with and threatened into submission.” Yet, through magic, her own tenacity, and the communal strength she finds in a women’s spiritual circle, Washuta says, “ My whole body is a fire” and “I have not died yet.”
“White Witchery” grants a rare and vulnerable insight into the capitalistic industry of the United States, the pop-culture surrounding self-care and self-healing, and the internal struggle of surviving a colonized America as a Native woman, a woman with “nothing now but my big aura, my fistful of keys, and my throat that still knows how to scream because no man has succeeded in closing it.” Though the journey Washuta takes us on is not an easy one, it is one of the most compelling, vulnerable, and important ones we can take.
“White Witchery” by Elissa Washuta. Guernica, February 2019.
Reviewer bio: Andrew Romriell is an avid writer, teacher, and student who is passionate about experimental forms, research-based writing, and intersections of genre. Learn more at ajromriell.com.
Guest Post by Kelsie Peterson.
Catherine Young’s essay, “In That River I Saw Him Again,” published online in November 2020 by Hippocampus Magazine, reads like a coal train passing by you. It is full of glimpses of beauty and wonder, as well as the past, with a poetic through line that moves like the “shadows” Young describes. Using the imagery of coal trains from her childhood, photographs, and early motion pictures, Young’s essay wonders at the idea of memory, of life, and of those lost in her childhood.
The central question running through this essay is, “What can the heart remember?” Young invites readers to discover an answer with her as moving pictures first allow her father to come alive once more, and then ultimately, her uncle. Young’s writing offers a unique and engaging perspective on the life of memory.
What engaged me most as a reader was this piece’s inventive use of engaging imagery and repetition of poetic meditations. The reading experience mirrored that of a train passing or of the flicker of the early motion picture. The flashes of ideas flowed together in a truly unforgettable piece.
“In That River I Saw Him Again” by Catherine Young. Hippocampus Magazine, November 2020.
Reviewer bio: Kelsie Peterson is completing her last semester at Utah State University and will graduate with her MS in English.
In this issue : new flash fiction by Michael Kozart, Carol McGill, Anne Anthony, James W. Davidson Jr., Jess Koch, Lorette C. Luzajic, V.J. Hamilton, Andrew Hughes, and Charline Poirier. Find out more at the Brilliant Flash Fiction website.
Welcome to the Spring 2021 issue of Cleaver featuring a visual narrative by Jennifer Hayden; flash by Rebecca Entel, David Galef, Gabby Capone, and others; poetry by Ann de Forest, Laura Tanenbaum, Valerie Loveland, James Miller, and Kate Peterson.
The long-awaited Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Humana Obscura is here! This latest issue is packed full of incredible work from 96 different contributors from around the world.
The Best Young Writers Age 14-24. These young writers and artists are deeply engaged—both with timeless themes and with their contemporary iterations and manifestations. Fiction by Michaela Crawford, Mac Bowers, Jonah Bradenday, Jacob C. Connerly, and Alexa Bocek. Nonfiction by Jessica Baker. Find more contributors at the Bridge website.