At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
For readers who enjoy holding print copy in their hands, The Baltimore Review 2024 annual print edition features poems, stories, and creative nonfiction from the Summer 2023, Fall 2023, Winter 2024, and Spring 2024 online issues. Readers are invited to visit the publication’s website to read contributors’ comments and listen to recordings of their work. Founded by Barbara Westwood Diehl in 1996 as a publication of the Baltimore Writers’ Alliance, the journal became an independent nonprofit organization in 2004. Their mission has always been “to showcase the best writing from the Baltimore area and beyond,” as they continue to explore new ways to share the world of writing, writers, and the writing life with their audience.
Katherine Stewart’s latest book,Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, draws connections between the disparate groups and individuals who have spent the last 40-plus years working to turn the US into a theocratic, authoritarian regime. The players include Evangelical/Pentecostal/Catholic churches; men’s rights activists; funders; conservative think tanks, training entities, and organizations; homeschooling and voucher supporters; conspiracy theorists; people who want to erode church-state separation; anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-LGBTQIA “family values” activists; and MAGA-supporting elected officials and jurists at every level of government.
Stewart spent years attending conservative conferences and lectures, reading their materials, and interviewing people on the right. Her eyewitness account is riveting and will terrify anyone who believes in democratic governance. Her conclusion is stark: While the right-wing coalition is fragile, the many groups that comprise its ranks are united by purpose. But they no longer simply want “a seat at the noisy table of American democracy.” Instead, they “want to burn down the house.” Moreover, she writes that the rise of the right intentionally uses obfuscation “to advance its undemocratic agenda by actively promoting division and disinformation.” Ultimately, she concludes, it’s about power.
Lies, Money, and God is a compelling read. At the same time, Stewart stresses that resistance by progressive entities and individuals can defeat the right. She urges the left to think long-term, be strategic, and relentlessly exploit contradictions in conservative unity: “Does it want small government or does it want a government big enough to share your bedroom and your body? …Does it want free speech or does it want to ban books, limit the information doctors are allowed to share with patients, and compel religious speech in public schools?”
Good questions. Stewart argues that “heightening and exposing” these contradictions will benefit both the general public and “supporters of anti-democratic reaction.” It will require hard work, she writes, but if we want to preserve the republic, it’s the only option.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The November 2024 issue of the online journal of poetry and poetics The Lake has new works by Ruth Aylett, Belinda Cooke, Seth Crook, Deborah Diemont, Judy Dinnen, Julian Dobson, Michael Durack, Jeff Gallagher, Rosie Jackson, Sheila Jacob, Charles Rammelkamp, and Hannah Stone. Readers can also discover new poets with a review of John Amen’s collection Dark Souvenirs and the unique feature “One Poem Reviews” in which poets share a single poem from recently published collection. This month, readers can explore new works by Marianne Brems, Mary Gilliland, Tom Kelly, Michael Salcman, and Kirby Michael Wright. Poet Hannah Stone offers a tribute to “grande dame of literature” Fleur Adcock (1934 – 2024).
While the current spate of book bans and censorship attempts by Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have received a great deal of attention, essayist Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality reports that even in less politically-charged times, the books we read, the movies and television shows we watch, and the video games we play, are heavily controlled by market forces, fear of upsetting the status quo, and pressures from both the right and the left to influence our viewpoints and emotional responses.
This tendency, she writes, goes back to Plato, whose Republic warned that when people encounter tales of gods or heroes “behaving badly,” they sometimes emulate their negative traits. The Greeks called such imitation “mimesis” and many joined the famed philosopher to argue that society needed “to cut the heart out of fiction: all vice, all cruelty, anything that might tempt the masses by example.”
As is obvious, this was–and is–a fool’s errand.
Gold’s text is dense, but Dangerous Fictions is a soundly reasoned dive into how fictional representations are used and interpreted. “The problem isn’t that fiction contains the power to mobilize people for good or evil,” she writes, “but the deeper problem is simply power itself: who has it and who doesn’t…In the end, what fiction does, and what it’s capable of doing, is something quite different from political action.”
Take the emergent genre of climate fiction. “Only human beings can take political action: only human beings can dismantle the existent fossil fuel infrastructure and build the new structure of energy and mitigation that will be necessary to cope with temperatures that will keep rising,” she concludes.
Indeed, she’s right: Apocalyptic narratives will not save us. Likewise, while fiction can introduce readers to people and places they’d likely never otherwise encounter, expecting this exposure to eviscerate racism, homophobia, or sexism is unrealistic. In the end, fiction is neither dangerous nor safe. It just is.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
45 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Our brief flash of unseasonably warm weather has ended, and it is back to being more seasonably chilly. Frost is greeting us in the mornings again. A great time to keep to the indoors with your favorite hot beverage of choice and keep writing, editing, and submitting. NewPages is here to help you with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the first full week of November 2024.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our November eLitPak will be hitting inboxes next Wednesday!
Designed to stimulate creative thinking, THEMA challenges writers with a unique premise for each issue. The editors ask contributors to make the premise “an integral part of the plot, not necessarily the central theme but not merely incidental.” The premise for the Autumn 2024 issue is “The Missing Piece of the Puzzle” and features stories, short-shorts, poems, and photographs by Allan Lake, Erica Hoffman, James Scruton, John Savoie, Judith Overmier, Kathleen Gunton, Larry Lefkowitz, Linda Berry, Lora Berg, Lynda Fox, Morgan Carlock Clark, Paul A. Freeman, R.G. Halstead, Robinne Weiss, Sandra Schnakenburg, and Sarah Gay Edwards. THEMA invites contributors to submit theme-related works on the following upcoming premise “The lost sock” with a March 1, 2025 deadline.
The Fall 2024 issue of The Missouri Review is themed “Hard Truths.” As Editor Speer Morgan writes in the Foreword, “Most literature goes beyond period and type and deals with something hard, elusive, or even contradictory. Its power lies in the odd beauty and coherence of this particular engagement with a subject.” Inside, readers will discover powerful works ready to engage: new fiction from Parul Kaushik, Andrew De Silva, and Joe Wilkins; new poetry from Amy Miller, Austen Leah Rose, and Talin Tahajian; and new essays from Shannon Cain, Nancy L. Glass, and Joshua Ritter. Plus an Art Feature on Otto Dix, a Curio Cabinet about Peggy Guggenheim, and a brand-new interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. Cover art: The Death of Icarus, Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889).
According to acclaimed Harvard professor, Howard Gardner, “There is in the United States (and likely elsewhere) an enormous desire to make education uniform, to treat all students in the same way, and to apply the same kinds of one-dimensional metrics to all. This trend is inappropriate on scientific grounds and distasteful on ethical grounds.”
In fact, Gardner writes that by ignoring the “multiple intelligences” of each individual, school systems fail to recognize that people learn in different ways. This not only stifles creativity, but fails to build on student strengths, inclinations, and talents.
Small wonder that so many children hate school.
But alternatives exist. In place of rigid classes where standardized testing is routine, Gardner suggests apprenticeships and project-based learning as a hands-on supplement to didactic instruction. This, he argues, builds on the differing forms of intelligence exhibited by students and allows them to find their footing in whichever intelligence sphere is dominant, whether bodily-kinetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, linguistic, logical, musical, naturalist, or spatial.
Unsurprisingly, Gardner’s definition of intelligence is broad and encompasses “the ability to solve problems and to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings. ” And while he recognizes that the ability to read, write, and calculate remains imperative – and requires rote lessons – he stresses that the time spent on standardized test preparation is ill-spent. Instead, he writes, when teachers know their students, they can easily evaluate progress as part of their daily interactions.
This makes good sense.
Likewise, the 29 essays in The Essential Howard Gardner on Education argue for “individual-centered schools” that allow kids to develop by utilizing their natural affinities. It’s a persuasive, if lofty, vision centered on respect for, and nurturance of, children and the adults they’ll become. Both students and teachers would be better served if schools heeded his wisdom.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The marks the world leaves. The 100th issue of AGNIexemplifies the engagement, nuance, and spirit that are AGNI’s trademark. As Editor William Pierce writes in the introductory essay, “This last year at the magazine has raised more questions about publishing and literature than any other since I started editing. About purpose and scope, meaning and place – about caring for community and actively recognizing how one’s own ideals can clash.” Pierce goes on to examine the role of literary magazines, belles lettres, “the tailings of New Criticism,” the question of merit, and “the radical act.”
This issue’s cover artist, Chitra Ganesh, welcomes readers with a playful visual rendering of “Sultana’s Dream,” a 1905 feminist utopian fiction by Rokeya Hossain. Inside, stories by Colin Winnette, Xueyi Zhou, and Monique Schwitter (translated by Susan Bernofsky) follow women’s subversion of the gaze, into places of throttled emotion. A bounty of poets, including Paisley Rekdal, J. P. Grasser, and janan alexandra, join the formal ingenuities of DeeSoul Carson, Danielle Pierrati, and others to reach a new intimacy with the past. And essayists Wiam El-Tamami, Elvis Bego, and Anna Badkhen bring a rigorous, compassionate seeing to their meditations on loss and conflict. All this and much more, including loads of online content not included in the print issue.
After a brief hiccup, in which an irate dragon must be placated, this MG/YA fantasy begins—as now told by Christie and her new co-author, Marcus A. Dragon.
In the land of Deweydaire, which is ruled by (anthropomorphic) dragons, things are not fair. Humans work while dragons play. Princess Meredith, a dragon, leads others in fighting against the injustice, supporting the human cause. How could she have foreseen that she, like her human friend, young Peter Porter, would fall afoul of her bully cousin, Prince Rupert? Or that he would go to such lengths to silence her voice? Will intrepid Peter and the underrated court-jester Felix be able to help Meredith break the power of an illegal spell? In this Year of the Wood Dragon, The Voice of the Wooden Dragon is an entertaining-yet-inspiring story of transformation and new beginnings.
This is Christie and Lane Waldman’s debut novel as an author-illustrator team. Christie’s stories for children may be read at Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things, Skipping Stones, and East of the Web. Lane is also a writer whose sci-fi/fantasy stories have appeared in Uncanny, Daily Science Fiction, and Capricious, among other places.
The Fall 2024 issue of the Apple Valley Review features flash fiction by Mary Grimm; short stories by Franz Jørgen Neumann and Anna Gáspár-Singer (translated from the Hungarian by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess); a piece of creative nonfiction by Annabel Jankovic; and poetry by Judith Harris, Michael Diebert, Lulu Liu, Susan Johnson, Svetlana Litvinchuk, Zhang Zhihao (translated from the Mandarin by Yuemin He), Triin Paja, Susana H. Case, and Jeff Mock. The cover artwork is by Catalan painter and poet Santiago Rusiñol.
Ahead of their 15th anniversary next year, the Amherst College-based, Whiting Award-winning literary magazine The Common presents Issue 28, featuring a portfolio of contemporary writing by Catalan women in translation. Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker says, “So few books published in the US are translations, only about 3%, with works from German, French, and Spanish making up a full 45% of that. We wanted to showcase vibrant stories and poems from a tradition that our readers might be wholly unfamiliar with. These Catalan authors are award-winning, established women, but some have never before been published in English.” This issue marks a continuation of the magazine’s commitment to publishing translated works for English-language readers.
Each spring for the past eight years, The Common has published an Arabic fiction portfolio in translation. The spring 2025 issue will feature work from Amman, Jordan. Beyond the portfolio, Issue 28 contains writing from Disquiet Prize-winning poet Iqra Khan, MacArthur Fellow Brad Leithauser, environmental economist James K. Boyce, and fiction and essay writer Douglas Koziol, among others.
Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Mighty Red, appears to be about a young woman, Kismet, who is in love with Hugo, but marries Gary Geist, who seems to be protected by a guardian angel (or perhaps by his privilege), while also following Kismet’s mother, Crystal, who works driving a truck hauling sugar beets to the plant. There’s also a subplot about Crystal’s husband (though they’re not really married), Martin, who made poor investments for the local Catholic church’s renovation fund, losing everything in the 2008 recession (or embezzling it).
The novel is about those people and the area in North Dakota where they live, and their stories are interesting enough on their own to keep the reader engaged, wondering why Kismet would make the decisions she makes, how Crystal will cope with Martin’s disappearance (and the FBI’s investigation into that disappearance), and what secret Gary is hiding from Kismet.
It’s what characters don’t know or willfully ignore that truly matters, though, as Erdrich shows the effects humanity has on the planet, as well as on each other. Gary’s family signed a contract to raise only genetically-modified sugar beets, ones that will withstand the weedkiller RoundUp, refusing to see the effects that deal will have on their land and themselves. Americans willfully overlook the bailout of the banks, while people lose their houses, as well as church renovation funds. The country has always overlooked the way they treated Indigenous people, taking their land as well as their lives, leaving them with little of either, well into the twenty-first century.
Erdrich uses the sugar beets—and sugar, in general—as a metaphor for what we do to the planet and to each other. What the characters believe will be sweet in the short-term has long-term consequences, while the difficult decisions are the ones that lead to meaningful relationships. And all the while, the Red River runs through their lives, unchanging, ever-flowing, always changing.
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich. HarperCollins, October 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
46 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Spooky season has come to an end! If you are on a sugar high from all of the candy or goodies consumed between last night and today and just want to dive right into writing, editing, and submitting, NewPages has your back with our first weekly roundup of November 2024.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our October 2024 eLitPak is now available!
Writers need to be voracious readers, and there’s no better place to find the freshest works out there than the New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!
Each month, NewPages.com offers readers a round-up of new issues with content blurbs for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
By “digging deep / in [her] bone memory” with “unfailing hands,” Cree poet Rosanna Deerchild offers readers She Falls Again. In her third collection of poems, Deerchild devotes her attention to “cultural storytelling” and “sing[s] honour songs” while “carry[ing] / her broken notes” through “the voices / of [her] mother / her mother and hers.” The songs and stories are “history mementoes”:
“it is written on my mother’s residential school skin it is whispered by my grandmother’s tb ghost it is the lonely grave of my grandfather in your field of honour it is the target on my back”
“[L]ooking madder than a broken treaty,” “the-woman-who-falls-from-the-sky was an indian woman.” But hers is not mental illness; it is the intense rage of a “normal person” in an impossible situation where one person accuses the other of a fault which the accuser bears: “they call us savage / while they ravage // the earth our mother.” To the dominant/mainstream culture, an “indian woman” is “disney porn” and “a body of land conquered.” The “burial mounds // sharp and waiting.”
The poet “gathers all her grief” around Indigenous women who are “not /missing / just not here,” and for whom there is no explanation for “why so many / of just-us go without justice.” On the violence toward Indigenous women, she will “be silent no more.”
Rosanna Deerchild is “the returning voice / from the silence // the telling / story” of the women of her matrilineal line. Their “stories are scars [she] turns to stars / set free in the sky of telling.”
In She Falls Again, women rise up,
“making their way back to the front
making their way to lead”
In her “strong woman song,” Rosanna Deerchild “writes [women] alive.
She Falls Again by Rosanna Deerchild. Coach House Books, October 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Fall is the time to fatten up your reading list. To help you achieve that goal, check out the October 2024 New Books Received. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
In Blue on a Blue Palette, Lynne Thompson sings “Blues got me and gone” to “Say woman,” to claim her voice, her yes, and to say no. To “arrange a resistance,” the poet speaks with candor about the female body, desire, and aging, speaks from “anguish” about male violence against females and police violence against people of color, and, determined not to “fail history,” she claims her role as “a daughter” who has “livedto tell you this” about the “Blue Water” “sorry with our bones.” Dear Reader, “how the choices are few for / those who ignore women in revolution.”
To “forsake the grim, / or shake the shadows,” Thompson “practice[s]” in poems in a variety of forms from abecedarian and villanelle to cento. By my count, there are nine centos in the collection. What the ekphrastic form is to painting, the cento is to poetry. Derived from the Latin word “patchwork,” the cento offers the poet an associative compositional mode and a formal device by which she recontextualizes the writing and accentuates the voices of poets Ai, Wanda Coleman, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, and Sonia Sanchez, among others, as relevant, even essential, in lives “long as this.”
“Say history. Claim. Say wild.” As resistance engenders insistence, the poems of Blue on a Blue Palette “praise” survival, suggesting Lucille Clifton’s lines: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” Like Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” among other poems, Thompson’s poems express strength of self.
Celebrating her identity as woman and poet of color, acknowledging the “unnumbered regrets” of history, and honoring the friendship of poets in life and on the page, Blue on a Blue Palette is Lynne Thompson’s “praise-song.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 29th 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 150,000 readers in 150 countries, and over 1,000 contributors from 52 countries, already know; the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
When Auburn State Prison opened in 1816, prisoners were forced to do unpaid work in several for-profit industries: making furniture or manufacturing carpets, combs, carriage lamps, or animal harnesses. Harvard history professor Robin Bernstein calls it “penal capitalism,” and her riveting book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, tells the story of inmate William Freeman, a free-born Black teenager who was incarcerated from 1840-1845 for stealing a horse, a crime he denied.
From the start, Freeman bristled at having to labor without pay and opposed the prison’s nighttime solitary confinement, enforced silence, beatings, and water torture for worksite infractions. His resistance escalated after a guard battered Freeman so severely that his eardrum shattered and his temporal bone was damaged. This left him deaf and intellectually impaired – but still so enraged that he sued the prison for unlawful imprisonment and back wages after he was released. The lawsuit failed. Likewise, his attempts to find gainful employment.
Frustrated, Freeman began collecting weapons and in March 1846, he entered the home of George and Mary Van Nest, white people he barely knew, and killed both adults and a child. He then went to another home and killed again. Although Freeman subsequently tried to escape, he was quickly apprehended.
Freeman’s trial pitted those who favored execution against those who favored life imprisonment and prompted a slew of racially charged arguments about Black moral depravity and inferiority. Moreover, whether Freeman was insane, inherently criminal, or a victim of anti-Black prejudice took center stage. Freeman never testified. Although he was sentenced to hang, he died of tubercular phthisis at age 22.
Bernstein masterfully transports contemporary readers to the 19th century and details how popular culture sensationalized the murders and trial. She also depicts the city of Auburn’s development and charts the benefits of the prison economy for local townspeople.
Two hundred-plus years later, prisons continue to benefit. Auburn is now the oldest continually operating maximum-security prison in the US; today’s inmates earn just 65 cents per hour for their labor.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
In the expanded edition of Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023, Mojdeh Bahar has selected and translated the poetry by one hundred and four Persian women poets born after September 1941. The bilingual Persian and English anthology features poems that have not previously appeared in a book and include classical Persian poetic forms such as ghazals, do-beti (couplets), and robai’i (quatrains), though most of the poems have been written in free verse’s open form.
Here, an arresting quatrain by Fariba Arabnia:
“I am fine. Just like a farm Its crops razed by locusts No longer worried about sickles.”
An ethos of connection characterizes the spirit of the anthology. The poets connect to their feelings, to contemporary women poets from Iran and the Iranian diaspora, to the Persian literary tradition, and to literary and social themes through the triumvirate lens of history, ideology, and geography.
These women poets, “citizen[s] of the state of wandering” (Nahid Bagheri Goldschmeid), have traveled “inconsolable borders” (Pegah Ahmadi) with “bloody hands / in their pockets” (Shabnam Azar) and the “scent of petroleum” (Roja Chamankar) in the air, have “survived many storms” (Mana Aghaee) to claim their dignity, imploring “Let me be a woman” (Razieh Bahrami Khoshnood).
Here, a candid excerpt from Mahshid Naghashpour:
“Women strive for equality with men What a futile and ill-defined effort Equality with men who have caused chaos and war in the world! And who hold the detonator in their hand It can’t go on like this We must think of something! Maybe it would be better for men to strive for equality with women”
Writing against oppression, censorship, and exile, and “with dream / Hope / Anticipation” (Niki Firoozkoohi), these women poets take refuge in language, “writing… in order to live” (Maryam Jafari Azarmani).
Poem by poem, Song of the Ground Jay introduces Anglophones to the “vertigoes” of Persian women poets’ fierce hearts beyond the borders of their “shackled” lives. Like the Iranian Ground Jay (Podoces pleskei), the anthology’s sand-colored, black-throated mascot, adapts to dry habitats so too have Persian women poets adapted to their “battle with words” (Sanaz Zaresani). Despite “the lump in a throat” (Neda Abkari) the “razor-sharp tongue[s]” of these poems “shine” and offer readers trilling cries and melodic notes as they “kill with poetry” (Zahra Zaman)!
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
44 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to the final roundup of submission opportunities for October 2024! Hard to believe it will officially be November next Friday. With October ending and November starting, that means there are a lot of upcoming deadlines! NewPages is here to help so you don’t miss out.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our October 2024 eLitPak is now available!
The world is all we know, claims the philosopher Wittgenstein. But Professor Dean Kirby is painfully learning this is not so, for his new neighbor in the mid-state swamps of Florida has turned his wife into a zombie, has turned him into something taunted by a darkly evil alter ego, and she has driven his son into suicidal insanity. On top of this, she’s opened a cavern that leads to the primal murderer Cain on her creepy, statue-filled property.
Rumors persist those statues stalk the swamps nightly, and that they could have been involved in the sacrificial murder of a child. When the police prove to be no help, a strange airline attendant and her beguiling daughter with the oddest interest in ancient Egyptian mummification arrive, but even they might be too late to help Professor Kirby and his family.
Joel Edward Goza, a white professor of ethics at Simmons College, believes that the United States cannot become a truly interracial democracy unless white people find ways to “repent, repay, and repair” the damage caused by slavery, Jim Crow, and the continued economic and social subjugation of Black Americans.
In Rebirth of a Nation, Goza makes his case, delving into history to find the ideological underpinnings that continue to classify Black people as intellectually and morally inferior to whites. The policies and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are parsed and each man’s complicity “in creating and perpetuating a nation divided along racial lines” is highlighted. But Goza does not let contemporary political leaders off the hook and the coded language of law-and-order, “welfare queens,” and personal responsibility is analyzed for its ongoing impact on policy and personal relationships.
Likewise, popular culture. Goza writes that notions of Black sloth, sexual deviance, intellectual inferiority, and irresponsibility popularized by eugenicist Madison Grant (1864-1937) and Baptist minister-turned-novelist Thomas Dixon (1865-1946), have had long-lasting resonance – leading to still-segregated and unequal public schools and still-festering white fear of miscegenation and Black power among many white Americans.
These realities, Goza argues, need to be reckoned with. In fact, he writes, it is high time for white people to grapple with the legacy of white supremacy and racism and excise both.
While this is an admittedly tall order, Goza is an optimist who believes that white folks will eventually support reparations, including monetary payments, an end to the school-to-prison pipeline, and the over-policing of underresourced and neglected Black communities. He also believes they’ll support changing the tax codes so that wealthy Americans of all races will be required to pay their fair share.
Rebirth of a Nation presents these necessities as both a challenge and an inspiration. It’s a powerful injunction.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
“Writing is important because of the voices represented through its art,” says DisLit Youth Literary Magazine Founder and Editor-in-Chief Miley Weiner. “Writing is a way that people, for centuries, have been able to communicate with one another and express themselves. Even in times long ago when people were separated from their loved ones, writing brought them closer together again. Writing can act as a bridge in people’s lives in whatever form that may be, and because of that, the power of words cannot be denied.”
Providing a new open access online platform to share that power, DisLit is a magazine with a mission to empower youth with disabilities or mental/physical illness. “We believe that teens with these conditions should not be stigmatized,” Weiner asserts. “We have created our magazine to be a safe space for them to express themselves through their writing.”
DisLit currently accepts all genres of writing with new content published daily with plans to accept art/visual submissions soon.
This week is one of our special weeks where all subscribers to the NewPages Newsletter have full access to the submission opportunities and upcoming events, not just paid subscribers! If you are not a current subscriber and want to take a gander, you can access the entirety of Issue 150 online via Substack.
The NewPages Newsletter is a weekly update of new issues of literary magazines, new and forthcoming releases from indie and university presses, book reviews, writing inspiration, and, for paying subscribers, an early look at submission opportunities and upcoming events before they are posted to our website.
All subscribers also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter featuring even more submission opportunities, upcoming events, new titles, and graduate writing program information.
Robert Colman’s Ghost Work joins recent fatherhood-focused poetry collections, including James Lindsay’s Only Insistence (2023), Bruce Snider’s Fruit (2020), and Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day (2019). While these other collections engage fatherhood by meditating on having a child or being childless, Colman’s Ghost Work offers readers a sober and heartbreaking meditation on the gradual loss of his father from dementia. The “father/son equation / now recognizably finite,” he asks, “What gain / to argue facts with him…?” “Is it his memory, or a ghost of mine?”
Throughout the collection, in what feels like close to real time, the poet-son seeks the “right words / to contain” what is disappearing, “‘Father’ in every sentence” and “‘Father’ like a sentence.” Words contain, sentences contain, and so does poetic form. The poet uses the received forms of the ghazal, pantoum, sonnet, and triolet to hold his grief and “stake the way.” Yet despite all attempts to avert loss, “We’ve lost the ear to identify the bird. / We’ve lost the language of the hollow / to find it.”
In Ghost Work, Robert Colman traces the evolution of loss and generously includes the reader in a most primal, personal time of grief. These poems face “death in facts” with dignity and love all the way through to their final breaths.
Ghost Work, by Robert Colman. Palimpsest Press, February 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timeline by Dave Birkett Reedy Press, October 2024
In Detroit Lions, An Illustrated Timeline, award-winning reporter Dave Birkett vividly recounts the most important people, games and moments of the franchise’s first 90 seasons, from the early days of Earl “Dutch” Clark, the team’s first superstar, to the 10 Hall-of-Famers who played for the team in the ‘50s, to the spine-tingling performances of Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson and the team’s resurrection under beloved head coach Dan Campbell.
The story Professor and Journalist Carrie N. Baker tells in Abortion Pills: US History and Politics takes place at the intersection of public health and political posturing. Players include feminists, doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug Administration, Congress, state lawmakers, and anti-abortion actors who, for four decades, have grappled over protocols for pill distribution and use, a battle that largely sidesteps the fact that abortion medication has been used to safely end unwanted pregnancies in 96 countries.
But overly-cautious US lawmakers aside, Baker reports that the pills – called mifepristone and misoprostol – are typically taken within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and now account for 63 percent of abortions that are arranged via telemedicine or by visiting US health centers or contacting online clinics.
It’s a remarkable figure, and Baker writes that she expects it to grow.
Moreover, the rapid development of informal pill distribution networks, largely promoted on the internet, presently help an untold number of people acquire pills. According to Baker, these efforts began to skyrocket after the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center (which upended legal protections for abortion.) “The overturn of Roe removed abortion pills from the medical system in many states and spurred the development of informal networks of pill distribution and support for using them,” she reports. “Rather than moving patients to providers, advocates worked to move pills to people.” The upshot is that people have become increasingly aware that pills can be easily purchased and used at home.
That said, Baker acknowledges that abortion medication is not a panacea and recognizes that abortion surgery will sometimes be necessary; she also cautions readers that people have been arrested and convicted for acquiring pills unlawfully. Still, despite legal risks, Abortion Pills celebrates the determined feminists and public health activists who have put abortion medication directly into women’s hands.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
“The first step is admitting it,” opens Barbara Tran’s debut Precedented Parroting. The “it” is either something the speaker wishes to forget or is the speaker “admitting” to being a “willful forgetter.” The speaker has “taken this step many times.” To remember poses risks. Memories represent something “that plagues” and cause the speaker to “become stranded”; the memories at the fore, those specific and unique to a Vietnamese family, their immigration, and the anti-Asian sentiments and violence they survive/d. Throughout the collection, the reader witnesses the struggle between forgetting, “admitting,” and “sharing.” In the poem “Blue from a Distance,” the poet writes, “There is a phrase / in Vietnamese chia buồn / sharing sadness.”
From poem to poem, Tran turns the pages of a family photo album, “slicing / open” or “framing” a “moment” of her memory within her family’s life. The poet defines trauma as the nesting of a smaller figure inside a larger figure — “each loss / encompasses smaller / losses” like a bird’s “feather each barb / holds smaller / barbs.”
A cacophony of birds flock Tran’s poems. In the first poem alone, a raven, drongo, kingfisher, kite, cormorant, heron, egret, and sandpipers appear. As the title suggests, the parrot takes precedent. Parrots, readers are told in the title poem, respond to trauma in ways similar to humans: “They rock themselves to comfort / themselves They scream and suffer / from insomnia and nightmares.” But birds also have the ability to “let go their contact / with the earth and water.”
These “poem[s] are a road map / writ” “in measured layers, offering facts withholding / crucial details” by a speaker who “comes from a family / of unreliable narrators.” That is because it is “really difficult / to learn / how to live,” “to find / [one’s] own feather.” The poems in Precedented Parroting mark a beginning “telling,” and in this beginning, Barbara Tran sings as birds do.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
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Deadline: December 1, 2024 Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to the Fall Black Fox Prize with theme: Fragments of Time! Deadline: December 1, 2024! We are also accepting free submissions for our winter 2025 print issue. Free subs close on November 30, 2024! View our flyer for more info and a link to submit.
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Deadline: November 1, 2024 Submit individual poems via Submittable ($10 for two poems, 40 lines or fewer). Winner and two runners-up will have broadsides designed and printed ($250 and 50 copies to winner; 25 copies for runners-up). No particular aesthetic; we just want great poems. Winning broadsides will be designed by poet/artist Lindsay Lusby. View flyer for more information and a link to submit.
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Caesura Poetry Workshop aims to support, inspire, and energize poets and writers through a wide variety of affordable Zoom workshops hosted by award-winning poet, editor, teacher John Sibley Williams. Most workshops include poem analysis, active group discussion, and writing prompts. Some are even self-paced! Reference NewPages and get 50% off your first workshop. View flyer for more info and a link to our website. Register via email.
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Deadline: November 1, 2024 December Magazineseeks submissions for the 2025 Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize. Maggie Smith will Judge. Prizes: $1,500 & publication (winner); $500 & publication (honorable mention). All finalists will be published in the 2025 Spring/Summer Awards issue. Submit up to 3 poems per entry. $20 entry fee includes a copy of the awards issue. Submit September 1 to November 1, 2024. For more information and a link to our guidelines, please view our flyer.
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Submissions open for the Futurist Debut Book Award for debut books ($1,000 prize), the Front Range Book Prize for books by Colorado authors or about Colorado ($1,000 prize), the Luminaire Prose Award for short stories ($100 prize), and book-length nonfiction and poetry manuscripts! See what’s closing at the end of October! View our flyer for more information and links to submit.
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Application deadline: December 15 (priority); January 15 (final) UNC Greensboro’s MFA is a two-year residency program offering fully funded assistantships with stipends. Students work closely with faculty in one-on-one tutorials, developing their craft in a lifelong community of writers. UNCG offers courses in poetry, fiction, publishing, and creative nonfiction, plus teaching opportunities and editorial work for The Greensboro Review. Note our 12/15 priority consideration deadline! View our flyer for more information and a link to our website.
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43 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
October is half over with and submission opportunities are starting to roll in for the last few months of the year and into the next already! NewPages is here to help you out with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the week of October 18, 2024, so you don’t miss out.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our October 2024 eLitPak is now available!
The New York Times Book Review used to have a question in their weekly interview with authors where they would ask that author what book the President should read. The answers were often rather enlightening, but they became more political when Donald Trump was in the White House, which is when, I believe, the newspaper stopped asking the question. Matthew Desmond’s book would be a good answer, no matter who the President is, so I’m sorry that question isn’t there any longer.
Desmond lays out a solid argument that the poverty in America isn’t accidental, and it isn’t a result of laziness on the part of those who are poor. Instead, poverty is due to a concerted effort by politicians and corporations. The policies in the U.S. create poverty and keep people in that situation under the guise of a scarcity of resources. Similarly, corporations claim they cannot afford to pay workers more or they will have to charge consumers more for their products, all while recording record profits and bonuses for CEOs.
Desmond doesn’t let the average reader—white and at least middle class—off the hook, either. He points out that many government benefits actually make life better for people who are not poor—whether that be the ability to write off mortgage interest or zoning laws that drive up housing prices—not those who need the most help.
Thus, he calls on readers to vote and act in such a way to help alleviate poverty, especially by supporting companies that actually pay their employees a living wage (he doesn’t name particularly egregious businesses, such as Amazon, but they readily come to mind). However, real change has to come at the policy level, as poverty is, in fact, by design, so the solutions will need to be, as well.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
In Stedfast, his third collection of poetry, Ali Blythe responds to John Keats’s last sonnet, which opens with the line: “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—” As if cutting a key from the past, Blythe disassembles Keats’s poem, by a full line, half line, or word at a time, then reassembles it across the titles of Stedfast’s poems. For instance, the first three poems in Stedfast are titled “Bright Star,” “Would I were stedfast,” and “As thou art.”
The poems of Stedfast are love poems in the romantic tradition, delivered in couplets and by “lyric address” from a speaker who whispers “disquieting thoughts” to a lover “asleep.” “And so on down the page” the “export is memory,” “the same old stories” by a “ghostwriter.” Via “astral projection” and “delicate revolutions,” Blythe reconceives and transforms Keats’s single sonnet into a book-length nocturne.
Taking place over “one night,” the collection meditates on the idea of steadfastness in romantic relationships, and by extension, in romantic poetry. As “one myth” dissolves “within / another, risking / our own nihility,” the poet grapples with the tension between “allusions” and illusions, illusions and reality, a romantic past and a fragile future.
In Stedfast, Ali Blythe’s poems constitute a “path / of devotion” to other and poetry, and they “seize what shines.”
Stedfast by Ali Blythe. icehouse poetry, September 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
About Place Journal October 2024 issue is titled, Shaping Destiny: Election Season, Before, During and After, with contents that respond to the realities of the most important election of our times. Democracy or dictatorship: these are the stakes. Through poetry, prose, and graphics, Shaping Destiny explores the current national and international situation, focusing on ways in which social and environmental justice are created or destroyed, and relating these—as is the focus of the Black Earth Institute—to matters of the spirit. Many rights have been lost or are threatened, as is the integrity of the election. It is our hope that Shaping Destiny will inspire you to do the work that is in front of all of us.
The Whole Catastrophe by Jami Macarty Vallum, September 2024
In her aptly titled fourth chapbook, The Whole Catastrophe, Jami Macarty takes readers on a road trip to the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico while reflecting on fragility of life, greed of corporations, and the disasters we must withstand, from plastics pollution to toxic feedlots to carbon monoxide poisoning. Mourning the death of a dear friend and threats of fragile ecologies are reasons for despair but not to disengage. In The Whole Catastrophe, resisting destruction means caring for the interdependent parts of wonder, annotating birds on their migratory course, waving hello to grief, and knowing catastrophe like a constellation above.
Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
The premise of Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, sounds like it could be the basis for a Hollywood comedy: people often confuse Naomi Klein, author of books that attack corporations and climate change, with Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, but now turned right-wing conspiracy theorist. There’s even a moment where Klein talks about earlier confusions with Naomi Campbell, a Black British model who does not, in fact, write books about corporate power or the climate crisis.
However, given that Naomi Klein wrote this book, it is not a comedy. Instead, Klein uses the confusion with Wolf to talk about the mirror world of the title, the one that Wolf now lives in, creating and perpetuating a reality that is similar to the real world, but different in dangerous ways. Klein talks about how she and Wolf have fairly similar concerns: the rise of technology and the companies that monitor and misuse their creations; global organizations that make decisions that overrule the concerns of people within independent nations; governments who use crises and catastrophes to change policies their citizens would never support otherwise. Wolf, though, takes those ideas and produces conspiracy theories with no basis in fact, sharing them online and on Steve Bannon’s productions.
Klein makes it clear that the primary difference between her work and Wolf’s work is the diligent research and fact-checking that goes into what Klein produces. That approach means that Klein is open to information that can change her mind, unlike Wolf and those like her. While Klein doesn’t spend as much time on former President Trump as she could, it’s clear that he and his supporters are who she’s trying to explain, through the lens of Wolf. Ultimately, Klein argues that all of the mirroring that goes on prevents people from seeing themselves and others clearly. Her book tries to cut through that to help readers understand a world they would never experience otherwise.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
38 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
With colder temperatures finally settling in the Midwest at least, now is a great time to dig out your favorite sweaters and cardigans, grab a cup of steaming hot cider, and write, edit, and submit. NewPages is back with our weekly submissions roundup to help you find a home for your work!
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our next eLitPak will be hitting inboxes on Wednesday, October 16.
If you’re looking for writing that’s playful and unconventional (maybe even a little mysterious), truly new works that stay with you long after you’ve read the final line, and a publication that makes you excited for each next issue, then click on over to Jelly Squid. Publishing three online issues per year, Jelly Squid Magazine accepts all types of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and artwork, as well as all hybrid forms in between. “We really like to see – and would like to see more of – work that’s unique and experimental,” says Editor Mo Buckley Brown.
Even the name is reflective of this mission. “‘Jelly’ and ‘squid’ are both words that aren’t terribly uncommon,” Brown says, “but they have unique sounds individually, and together, they form a playful combination that felt a little unconventional. We thought this name captured our hopes for what the magazine would be – playful and unconventional, and maybe even a little mysterious.”
The October 2024 issue of The Lake, an online journal of poetry and poetics, is now available and features works by Carol Casey, Judy Brackett Crowe, J. H. Hill, Mary Makofske, Lauren K. Nixon, Kenneth Pobo, Lex Runciman, Fiona Sinclair, Susan Stiles, Tuyet Van Do. This issue also includes reviews of Eileen Carney Hulme’s Somewhere a Tree Waits for an Angel or a Butterfly, Dennis Hinrichsen’s, Dominion and Selected Poems, and Harry Man’s Popular Song. “One Poem Reviews” is a special treat for readers, offering a one-poem sample from a recently published collections. This month highlights poems from Judy Brackett Crowe, Clive Donovan, Helen Finney, Mahua Sen, and Ram Krishna Singh.
Hot off the press, a beautiful new Issue of Jewish Fiction! Issue 37 contains 18 stories, originally written in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English and, for the first time, Ukrainian. In honor of the upcoming holidays, there is a story set in between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. And since, in between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur this year, Jewish Fiction will commemorate the first anniversary of October 7th, Issue 37 includes 4 stories about that. We hope the stories in our new issue fascinate and delight you.
In Tangled in Vow & Beseech, Jill McCabe Johnson tangles with self as daughter, sister, mother, survivor, and poet; with an “unpredictable series / of geometries” in relationship with an intimate partner; with the “the weight / of weep and want and regret” of the most pressing socio-political issues of our contemporary time. The poet allows her speaker to get real about “another mass / moment” of gun violence, those “who fell in the path / of xenophobia,” “the silencing of women,” and the dangers of “indifference.”
While the poet “sit[s] with” the consequential and holds others to account, she assumes her ethical responsibilities as a citizen and an artist, insisting that the personal includes the public. Perhaps this collective of “all-too-human / foibles” accounts for McCabe Johnson’s poems being “leashed to form.”
In some cases, the poet determines form by the poem’s content. For instance, the poem “Boxed In” uses vertical lines to erect walls around horizontal textual lines, thereby boxing in the text: “| if I typed with an eye | toward balance | maybe each poem could carve a window | or box.” Received forms, such as the abecedarian, acrostic, apostrophe, elegy, epistle, and nocturne, claim space among poems that act as a “Travel Journal” and press release. The handful of contrapuntal poems, scattered throughout the book, offer readers multiple meaning combinations. The gesture of multiple possibilities of meaning makes sense because, throughout the collection, McCabe Johnson reaches beyond the unary and binary.
With her “eye | toward balance” and inclusion, Jill McCabe Johnson “breaks the bones of what we know. Resets them” to offer readers Tangled in Vow & Beseech, a book of both the “jurisdiction of the past” and an “edict of hope” for the future.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence by Nicole Bedera University of California Press, October 2024
The debate over campus sexual violence is more heated than ever, but hardly anyone knows what actually happens inside Title IX offices. On the Wrong Side by sociologist Nicole Bedera provides the first comprehensive account of the inner workings of the secretive Title IX system. Drawing on a yearlong study of survivors, perpetrators, and the administrators who oversaw their cases, Bedera exposes the structures that predictably punish survivors who come forward in the service of protecting—or even rewarding—their perpetrators. In doing so, she reveals that the system tasked with ending gender inequality on campus only intensifies it, upending survivors’ lives and threatening the degrees that brought them to college in the first place.
Dr. Nicole Bedera is a sociologist and cofounder of the antiviolence consulting practice Beyond Compliance. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and has spent more than a decade studying sexual violence and advocating for survivors in media outlets including the New York Times, NPR, and Harper’s BAZAAR.
Southern Humanities Review issue 57.3 features the 2024 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize winner, Erika Jing, and her poem “Follow.” Judge Victoria Chang also selected Andrew Hemmert, Wesley Rothman, and Felicia Zamora as runners-up. Honorable mentions include Gregory Emilio, Jenny Qi, Geneva Toland, and Shahryar Eskandari Zanjani.
The rest of the issue is filled with nonfiction by Christine Hale and Nell Smith; fiction by Olivia Clare Friedman, Samantha Kathryn O’Brien, Lisa Clay Shanahan, and Lauren D. Woods; with cover art by William Gropper.
On October 3, 2024, Southern Humanities Review celebrated the eleventh year of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize at an event presented by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art with the judge and winner in conversation.
A publication of Santi Arts, the Still Point Arts Quarterly Fall 2024 issue is themed “Walking,” as Editor Christine Brooks Cote writes, “I’ve walked to be in the moment, to let go of whatever difficulties and confusions occupied my mind, to feel the physicality of the experience, to absorb the natural world, to seek and find pure pleasure.”
Sharing in this joy of walking are writers and artists Kevin Browne, J. R. Solonche, Nancy Buonaccorsi, Kit Carlson, Daniel Thomas, Andrea Lani, Suzanne Doerge, Barbara Sapienza, Rebecca Ring, Katherine January, Paul Hilding, Brian T. Duncan, Jane Salisbury, Erin Jamieson, David Macauley, Amy Boyd, AD West, Molly Murfee, and Susan Currie.
