“Cultural Landscape,” the cover image by Jakub Geltner that kicks off Issue Three: Threat, is a special kind of eye-catcher. A slice of pizza hangs precariously over a table’s edge, its cheese replaced by grass, its toppings swapped for uprooted trees and tumbling cars caught up in some unfamiliar landslide, slipping toward an undefined kind of doom.
NewPages Blog
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!
2017 Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers Winners
The Kenyon Review Nov/Dec 2017 issue features winners of the 2017 Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers. This award “recognizes outstanding young poets and is open to high school sophomores and juniors throughout the world. The contest winner receives a full scholarship to the Kenyon Review Young Writers workshop.” Winning entries can also be read online here.
First Prize
Eileen Huang: “Movie Scene on a Highway Shoulder”
Runners Up
Daniel Blokh: “Family Portrait with Lost Map”
Isabella Victoria: “Clemente Curls”
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The Malahat Review 50th Anniversary
Publishing since 1967 from the University of Victoria, The Malahat Review is one of Canada’s leading literary journals. Editors since its inception have included Robin Skelton, John Peter, Constance Rooke, Derk Wynand, Marlene Cookshaw, and currently John Barton (since 2004).
Originally subtitled “An International Magazine of Life and Letters,” The Malahat Review now focuses on Canadian and international poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The publication’s website also features book reviews, interviews, contests, podcasts, and publishing tips – a bimontly guest column in which authors share how to improve professionals skills: “from the writing of cover letters, to what house style means, to choosing a rhyming dictionary, to having an author photo (as opposed to a selfie) shot.”
Happy Anniversary Malahat! Here’s hoping for another great half-century to come!
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New Lit on the Block :: The Indianapolis Review
The Indianapolis Review is a new online quarterly of poetry and visual art supporting the growth of new voices in the literary scene in Indianapolis and beyond. Founder and Editor in Chief Natalie Solmer and Associate Editor Rachel Sahaidachny started the publication “to give back to the poetry and art world by curating a platform to showcase poets and artists. We desire to create connections among writers and artists in our community and around the globe. In our own publishing experiences, we’ve seen there is always a need for venues to publish new work.”
Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: The Indianapolis Review”
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Books :: 2017 University of Iowa Press Fiction Award Winners
The University of Iowa Press published the winners of the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award and the 2017 John Simmons Short Fiction Award last month.
Matthew Lansburgh’s Outside is the Ocean, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, was chosen by Andre Dubus III, who calls the linked collection “mesmerizing” as it “explores, among other things, the tenuous tie between mother and son, between the Old World and the New, between what was and what is.”
Winner of the John Simons Short Fiction Award, What Counts as Love by Marian Crotty, is “sensual, brave, and wonderfully evocative” as Crotty examines“the seemingly tattered nature of love, taking us deeply into the varied lives of her characters and making us care for them all.” The nine stories follow people—most often young women—searching for human connection, their stories touching on themes of addiction, class, sexuality, and gender.
Stop by the University of Iowa Press website to learn more about the awards and winning titles.
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Glimmer Train 2017 July/August Very Short Fiction Award Winners
Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their July/August Very Short Fiction Award. This competition is held twice a year and is open to all writers for stories with a word count under 3000. The next Very Short Fiction competition will take place in March. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.
1st place goes to Chase Burke of Tuscaloosa, AL [pictured], who wins $2000 for “That’s That.” His story will be published in Issue 101 of Glimmer Train Stories. This will be his first major print publication.
2nd place goes to Brian Yansky of Austin, TX, for “The Curse.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories, increasing his prize from $500 to $700.
3rd place goes to Ajit Dhillon of Singapore, for “Waiting.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories, increasing his prize from $300 to $700.
A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.
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Books :: October 2017 Book Award Winners
October offered more treats than just candy this year. Readers, a handful of prize-winning books hit bookshelves last month, and if you haven’t already gotten your hands on them, now is your chance!
The grand finalist of the Vine Leaves Vignette Collection Award, The Walmart Book of the Dead by Lucy Biederman, draws inspiration from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Biederman’s version includes shoplifters, grifters, drifters, and hustlers as they wander Walmart unknowingly consigned to their afterlives.
Stephanie Carpenter brought home the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction with Missing Persons. Selected by Press 53 Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Kevin Morgan Watson, the collection contains stories that are “diverse in setting, conflict, and style,” and it rose above over 230 other manuscripts to claim the prize.
Pleaides Press awards the Editors Prize for Poetry each spring. The 2016 winner, A Lesser Love by E. J. Koh, was published this month. “Love, war and recovered testimony from Korea’s unhealed border inform the formal and imaginative boundaries” within the debut collection, according to D. A. Powell’s advance praise. Learn more about the collection at the press’s website.
In Set to Music a Wildfire, Ruth Awad’s homage to her father “explores the violence of living, the guilt of surviving, the loneliness of faith, and the impossible task of belonging.” Winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, Awad writes of family, country, and the Lebanese Civil War.
Be sure to stop by each press’s website listed above to learn more about the award-winning books published last month.
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Gargoyle 40th Anniversary
Edited and published by Richard Peabody, along with the work of Associate Editor Lucinda Ebersole, Gargoyle celebrates 40 years of publishing with a ‘two-sided’ issue: Issue 65 – Side 1 and Issue 66 – Side 2. Sadly, Lucinda passed away March 20, 2017, as Peabody notes, “I’m heartbroken that my literary partner in crime has passed away. My plan is to shepherd her short story manuscripts and novel into print over the next few years. She was one of a kind and the funniest human I have ever known.”
Gargoyle‘s impression on the literary landscape is vast, and it’s with great hope and support for Richard and his staff that they will continue well into the future. In celebration, from the Gargoyle website:
In our first 40 years, Gargoyle has published work by:
10 Acker Award winners,
6 National Book Award-winning authors,
3 PEN/Faulkner winners,
4 Pulitzer Prize winners,
2 MacArthur Fellows,
2 Nebula Award winners,
2 Yale Younger Poets,
1 Hugo Award winner,
1 Poet Laureate,
6 Iowa Short Fiction Award winners,
6 Flannery O’Connor Award winners,
3 James Laughlin Award winners,
2 Lamont Poetry Selection winners,
2 William Carlos Williams Award winners,
8 National Poetry Series winners,
5 Orange Prize Long List writers,
2 Orange Prize Short List writers,
2 National Book Critics Circle Award winners,
6 Lambda Literary Award winners,
1 Gertrude Stein Award winner, and
3 Firecracker Alternative Book Award winners, among others.
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Saranac Review Seeks Visceral Response
In her Editor’s Notes to Issue 13 of Saranac Review, Elizabeth Cohen begins by quoting Emily Dickinson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Cohen writes, “We are sometimes asked at Saranac Review how we select the work we publish, and I think Dickinson’s words are applicable. Of course we seek work that has strong voice, craft and originality, but in the end, it is the visceral response that probably most informs our choices. We choose poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and plays that make us feel and evoke in us a response that physically affects us, while simultaneously reminding us why we read in the first place. If you could read our notes to one another on Submittable, you would see a lot of this: ‘Made me tingle,’ ‘heart stopping,’ ‘took my breath away.'”
With such discerning criteria, writers have got to meet that bar, providing readers much to look forward to in each issue of Saranac Review.
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American Life in Poetry :: Wesley McNair
American Life in Poetry: Column 657
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
I was deeply moved by this week’s poem, which shows us the courage of a person struggling with a disability, one that threatens the way in which she wishes to present herself. It illustrates the fierce dignity that many of us have observed in elderly people. Wesley McNair served five years as poet laureate of Maine, and his most recent book is The Unfastening, published by David R. Godine.
My Mother’s Penmanship Lessons
In her last notes, when her hand began
to tremble, my mother tried to teach it
the penmanship she was known for,
how to make the slanted stems
of the p’s and d’s, the descending
roundness of the capital m’s, the long
loops of the f’s crossed at the center,
sending it back again and again
until each message was the same:
a record of her insistence that the hand
return her to the way she was before,
and of all the ways the hand had disobeyed.
We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2016 by Wesley McNair, “My Mother’s Penmanship Lessons,” from The Unfastening, (David R. Godine, 2017). Poem reprinted by permission of Wesley McNair and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2017 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
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The Missing Girl
You soon may be the missing girl, you have taken the missing girl, you fantasize about the missing girl, you are the missing girl. In Jacqueline Doyle’s aptly-named The Missing Girl, we briefly take on all the roles before shucking the skin we’re in and donning a new one. Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition through Black Lawrence Press, The Missing Girl draws us into the seedy darkness of everyday life in small bursts of haunting prose as Doyle forces us to consider being both the hunter and the hunted. Regardless of which position she leads us to, none is a comfortable role to be in.
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The Doll’s Alphabet
Camilla Grudova’s first collection, The Doll’s Alphabet, is causing a literary stir. It has been compared to the writing of Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, and Franz Kafka—one of the authorial inspirations for the collection. Grudova’s stories inhabit a time and space that is unclear to the reader, but never so far off to be unbelievable. Her writing is haunting and humorous, and the attention to gender dynamics adds a layer of truth to these dark tales.
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Beautiful Flesh
The essays in Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays make up, collectively, a body, each essay on a single body part and so, moving from head to foot, the essays tell stories of the body, one that is multi-gendered, multi-ethnic, and multi-abled. The whole collection is, for me, summed up in a middle passage from Hester Kaplan’s essay “The Private Life of Skin,” a tale about her battle with psoriasis: “The heart beats faster when we’re scared, the chest clenches as we dial 911, the stomach flips with remorse, the head pounds with indecisions, the mouth waters for a kiss; we are our bodies.”
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In the Language of My Captor
When I began reading Shane McCrae’s In the Language of my Captor, an 86-page book of poems and prose highlighting racial prejudice in both historical and present contexts, I was not the least familiar with the story of Jim Limber, an octoroon (1/8 African ancestry) orphan taken in by Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, from 1864 to 1865. Growing up in the American north during the 80s and 90s, I learned Civil War history from a northern grade school perspective that celebrated the greatness of leaders like Abraham Lincoln, the importance of the Union, and that highlighted the incredible progresses made toward racial justice then and since. Limber was not part of that learned history.
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The Other Side of Violet
I figure most people who read book reviews are also writers. So let’s dig right into David Lawton’s interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding, featured in a new anthology called The Other Side of Violet. Harding endured rejections with his first novel, Tinkers, but five years later it was published by a literary press. He was teaching at the time and happened to look online to see who won the Pulitzer. “Honestly, I sort of half fainted—‘swooned’ would not be inaccurate—onto the floor of the crummy grad student apartment I was staying in. Totally surreal,” he says.
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Planet Grim
Alex Behr has a wide-ranging resume which has served her well over the years, providing a cornucopia of material to feed her writing. During the 1990s, she contributed to underground zines while performing in bands. She moved up the West Coast from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon in 2003, and published all the while as she did stints in comedy.
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Brevity Celebrates 20 Years!
“Twenty years ago,” writes Brevity Editor Dinty W. Moore, “I had an idea for a magazine that combined the swift impact of flash fiction with the true storytelling of memoir, and Brevity was born. To be honest, I expected it to last a year.”
Instead, Brevity has aged into the most well-known publication of its kind, with a rich history of publishing new authors who have become some of the most respected in the genre, and guiding writers as they learn and practice their craft.
In celebration, Brevity reached out to authors who have appeared multiple times in Brevity over the years and commissioned their submissions for an anniversary issue. Authors includes Lee Martin, Diane Seuss, Brenda Miller, Sue William Silverman, Rebecca McClanahan, and Ira Sukrungruang. Moore notes that readers “may detect a common theme (or at least a common word)” among the works.
Read Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction as well as book reviews and craft essays online here.
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Court Green is Back!
After publishing 12 print issues from 2004-2015 in association with Columbia College Chicago, and a brief hiatus, Court Green is back with issue 13, “the first in its new incarnation as an independent online journal” edited by Tony Trigilio and David Trinidad.
Featured in this revival issue are poems by Matthew Burgess, Chris Green, Ginger Ko, Robert Siek, Kimiko Hahn, George Kalamaras, Annah Browning, Kimberly Lyons, Hafizah Geter, Megan Fernandes, Diane Seuss, Lynn Crosbie, Harlee Logan Kelly, Kenyatta Rogers, and C. Russell Price.
A special bonus features: “Robert Siek: 13 Instagram Photos”; Peter K. Steinberg, “‘A Fetish Somehow’: A Sylvia Plath Bookmark”; and “Radio Free Albion: Interview with George Kalamaras.”
Welcome back Court Green!
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Glimmer Train 2017 July/August Fiction Open Winners
Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their July/August Fiction Open competition. This competition is held twice a year and is open to all writers. Stories generally range from 3000-6000 words, though up to 20,000 is fine. The next Fiction Open will take place in March. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.
First place: Arianna Reiche, of London, England, wins $3000 for “Archive Warden.” Her story will be published in Issue 101 of Glimmer Train Stories. [Photo Credit: Laura Gallant.]
Second place: Randolph Thomas, of Baton Rouge, LA, wins $1000 for “Heir Apparent.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue.
Third place: Sharon Solwitz, of Chicago, IL, wins $600 for “We Enter History.”
A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.
Deadline soon approaching! Short Story Award for New Writers: October 31
This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5000. No theme restrictions. Most submissions to this category run 1000-5000 words, but can go up to 12,000. First place prize wins $2500 and publication in Glimmer Train Stories. Second/third: $500/$300 and consideration for publication. Click here for complete guidelines.
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2017 Raymond Carver Contest Winners
The fall issue of Carve Magazine features the winners of the 2017 Raymond Carver Contest as selected by Guest Judge Pinckney Benedict:
First Place
“Richard” by David J. Wingrave in Warsaw, Poland
Second Place
“Laughing and Turning Away” by Patrick Holloway in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Third Place
“Homecoming” by Zachary Lunn in Raleigh, NC
Editor’s Choice
“The Anatomy of Todd Melkin” by Catherine Malcynsky in Chester, CT
“Windfall” by Edward Hamlin in Boulder, CO
Read these winning stories online here. For a full list of semifinalists and information about the contest, visit Carve online.
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Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week
The cover image for issue 19 of Cleaver Magazine online is mixed media/map entitled “He had an Awkward Relationship With The Truth” by Emily Steinberg.
Photographs by street photographer J. Ray Paradiso are featured on the cover screen for the online Foliate Oak Literary Magazine.
Catherine Heard’s work can be found on the cover of Hamilton Arts & Letters Magazine 10.1 as well as featured in an online portfolio. Her work “work interrogates the histories of science, medicine and the museum. Simultaneously attractive and repulsive, her works delve into primal anxieties about the body.”
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Hayden’s Ferry Review Seeks Senior Editor
The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing is seeking a Senior Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, a semi-annual international literary journal edited by the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.
In addition to general management and editorial duties, the Senior Editor will also be responsible for directing a special translation project and academic database using literature previously published in Hayden’s Ferry Review.
Applicants should have a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism or a related field and five years related experience; an MFA in Creative Writing, bilingualism, and experience working in a university setting and web development are preferred.
Salary range $41,976 – $50,000 DOE.
To view the full job description and apply, visit http://bit.ly/2hNxTGU or search openings at https://cfo.asu.edu/applicant by job title “Senior Editor” or requisition number “36507BR”. A pdf of the job description is also available at http://bit.ly/2fRlVLQ.
Individuals with any questions should contact the Piper Center at 480.965.6018 or pipercenter.info-at-asu.edu.
The position will close Wednesday, November 1st, 2017.
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Apple Valley Review – Fall 2017
Looking at the cover of the Fall 2017 issue of Apple Valley Review, I had the chills. A photo by Nicholas A. Tonelli of a town corner in winter, sun setting, and ice lining the road greets readers at the Apple Valley Review website, foreshadowing the Michigan winter waiting for me around the corner.
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TriQuarterly – Summer/Fall 2017
TriQuarterly’s Summer/Fall 2017 issue is rife with writing of a high literary caliber. The pieces in this issue are all exciting in their own way, and I found myself quite taken by a number of them. Many of the fiction pieces in this issue are stellar. Though the stories range in style from straight-up literary realism to magical realism with a touch of the surreal, the one thing they share in common is a strong emotional core.
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Brevity – September 2017
Celebrating their 20th anniversary, Brevity is a staple in both concise writing, and skillful nonfiction. An assignment in my first creative nonfiction class years ago was to browse the online journal’s website and pick out pieces we admired, and since then, Brevity is a magazine I revisit often, knowing I will never be disappointed by what I find there. As one might expect out of an anniversary issue, the September 2017 edition contains masterful nonfiction, exemplary of the quality work readers have come to expect.
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The Southampton Review – Summer/Fall 2017
When is a treat too rich? The Summer/Fall 2017 issue of The Southampton Review is an overwhelming collection of multi-genre pieces, and it is definitely no exaggeration that it is hard to find a starting point. This tenth anniversary edition is a fine tribute to the vision and efforts of its editors.
Continue reading “The Southampton Review – Summer/Fall 2017”
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The Arkansas International – Spring 2017
The second issue of The Arkansas International contains an impressive range of eclectic writing. But what caught my eye first was the collection of six-panel comics excerpt from the Notes Mésopotamiennes by French comic book writer François Ayroles, translated by Edward Gauvin.
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Tin House – Fall 2017
Volume 19 Number 1 is the “True Crime” issue of Tin House, designed, according to Editor Rob Spillman, “as a way to engage our country’s voyeuristic obsession with rogues and outlaws.” While vintage scraps of American morbidity do feature in this issue—the Starkweather murders, the Kansas village made famous by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—social justice and the criminal state share equal billing. In the latter poems and stories, black and brown lives are pulled apart by oppressive forces emboldened by a complicit public. The gateway to the issue, Sean Lewis’s portrait of record producer Phil Spector, is dark and almost whimsical, a perfect point of entry. Lewis replaces Spector’s head with tangled tape, evoking a wig worn at his trial, as well as the “confused mind” that would lead him to murder actress Lana Clarkson in 2003.
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Post Road – 2017
Post Road Number 32 is a complex mix of storytelling that bobs and weaves, delights, and, in some moments, disappoints. The cover piece, a bland, semi-abstract digital drawing by Henry Samelson, is one such low moment, contrasted, incredibly, by the remarkable work of Charles McGill, which sits just inside the issue, seventeen pages away. McGill, who repurposes vintage golf bags to critique class inequality and racial injustice, exhibits a powerful aesthetic that would have made for a much stronger point of entry.
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Boulevard Emerging Writers Short Fiction Contest Winner
Anastasi Selby’s story was selected as the winning entry for the 2016 Boulevard Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers. “Certain Fires” appears in the fall issue (#97). The story focuses “on fighting wildfires in California and the sexual tensions of mixed-gender crews.” Selby worked as a firefighter on three hotshot crews for the USFS in California and Colorado as well as a helicopter crew member for the Park Service in Alaska. She began her fire career in 1999, in Eugene, Oregon, and ended it in 2010, in Fairbanks, Alaska. (From jaselby.com)
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Broadsides Fundraiser :: Puerto Rico en Mi Corazon
Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon is a collection of broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets, in English and in Spanish. Edited by Raquel Salas Rivera and Erica Mena, published by Anomalous Press, 100% of sales will be donated directly to Taller Salud to assist Puerto Rico in recovering from Hurricane Maria. Including poems by Yara Liceaga, Raquel Albarrán, Luis Diaz (Intifada), Gaddiel Francisco Ruis Rivera, Nicole Delgado, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kadiri Vaquer Fernández, Martín Espada, Hermes Ayala, Ricardo Maldonado, Gegman Lee Ríos, Kenyatta JP García, Claritza Maldonado, Lara Mimosa Montes, Vincent Toro, Cindy Jimenez Vera, Luis Othoniel, Erica Mena, Abdiel Echevarria, and others.
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Powers to the Power of Two to Write YA Series
I can’t imagine having one successful author in the family, let alone two, and then the two of them writing – not one book together, but a series? J.L. Powers and M.A. Powers, brother and sister, have embarked on just such a journey together with the release of the first in a series of supernaturally themed YA novels. Broken Circle published by Akashic Books’ YA and middle-grade imprint, Black Sheep. I have long been a fan and follower of Jessica Powers, her previous YA publications reflecting her wide range of interests as well as abilities: The Confessional (Knopf, 2007), This Thing Called the Future (Cinco Puntos, 2011), Amina (Allen & Unwin, 2013), Colors of the Wind – a children’s picture book about Blind Artist and Champion Runner Geroge Mendoza with artwork by Mendoza (Purple House, 2014). This is her first venture into the supernatural, which Claire Kirsch of Publisher’s Weekly describes as “a mix of contemporary characters and setting with a mythological world.”
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Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose
Picking up Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose for the first time, I was immediately surprised. The title alone is enough to catch the eye and make you wonder: What does it mean? How serious can this be? How literal?
Continue reading “Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose”
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Come & Eat
I was really excited to read Bri McKoy’s Come & Eat, because as a Christian who loves to eat and feed other people, a whole book about using your table as a way to “celebrate . . . love and grace” seemed like just the sort of thing I wanted.
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Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past
Years ago, a hot air balloon landed directly outside my house. I don’t remember the circumstances, but the resulting fascination with them has never left me, so I was delighted to read Kathryn Nuernberger’s opening essays in Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past about ballooning’s forgotten women.
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Soviet Daughter
On August 11, Lola met Kyril, the self-professed love of her life. He proposed on the 15th, moved in on the 17th, and they married. This could be a modern love story, except it took place in the late 1930s in Eastern Europe when Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler were tossing lives into disarray. The story of Lola and Kyril is just one episode in Julia Alekseyeva’s richly-illustrated memoir Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution.
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Unruly Creatures
Unruly Creatures is aptly named, and it is as unusual and wild as the title forebears. Jennifer Caloyeras colors outside the lines in in this collection. The stories are at once beautiful and tragic, comedic and full of sorrow, as well as strange and telling. Each story is wildly original, and seamlessly comments on current events. Caloyeras’s talent shines through the pages of this collection, latching on to the reader and refusing to be put down.
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Liars
Are you happy? What is the source of your happiness? Would you say it’s love? Steven Gillis provides us with a few different answers to these questions in his new novel Liars. His characters find themselves either concretely sure of themselves, or questioning everything they know in this thrilling, somber story of a man trying to understand love.
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Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week
Halloween, detail by Bo Bartlett, is seasonally appropriate for the Autumn 2017 cover of The Gettysburg Review. More of Bartlett’s work is also featured in a full-color portfolio inside the publication.
“Finding Home: Family & Connections” is the theme of Bellvue Literary Review‘s Fall 2017 issue, with cover art and internal portfolio by father and son Paul and John Paul Caponigro.
The Massachusetts Review “back-to-school” fall 2017 issue features “He Who Is as if Death Were Not,” an archival pigment print on German etching paper from Ayana V Jackson‘s series To Kill or Allow to Live in the issue.
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Boulevard Symposium Confronts Campus Demonstrations
Boulevard‘s fall symposium on campus protests includes essays by Jim Craig, Megan Giddings, Ena Selimovic, Andrew Weinstein, and Robert Zaller responding to the question: “Have the recent campus protests – ranging from demonstrations to the use of safety spaces – against mainly right-wing speakers contributed to a dumbing down of American colleges, or are they effective and necessary?”
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Alaska Quarterly Review Calls for Redoubled Efforts
Celebrating its 35th Anniversary, Alaska Quarterly Review Editor-in-Chief Ronald Spatz, while marking the milestone with gratitude, considers this passage of time and what AQR, like many literary publications, has witnessed. “In the past we counted on artists, scholars, scientists, and journalists as reliable firewalls against ignorance. But increasingly there are powerful efforts to silence or marginalize these agents of understanding and change . . . as writers, poets, editors, and publishers, we must redouble our efforts to seek truth in all of its parts while creating every possible opportunity for compassion and empathy. In our view, the role of the arts has simply never been more crucial.”
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New England Review on the Violence that Surrounds Us
New England Review Editor Carolyn Kuebler writes in the 38.3 Editor’s Note that, while the twenty-three pieces in issue 38.3 (2017) were not chosen for nor do they have a focused message or singular theme, “. . . it surprised me to see how frequently the shadow of war—to take one obvious example of a culture of violence—darkened the edges of these disparate writings. With the world always in the throes of some violence or other, it’s no wonder; whether we’re civilians or soldiers or doctors, we all become part of it. Born during the Vietnam War, finishing college at the start of the Gulf War, and then becoming a parent during the War on Terror, I’ve learned that being in a state of war doesn’t always have a clear beginning and end, and now it’s not even always clear where the war is actually happening and who’s fighting it. It’s not just in this magazine or in this moment in time that writers are contending with such themes; it’s always.”
Read the full editorial here and access full-text of several works from this issue, including Louise Aronson’s “Necessary Violence.”
Cover: Warfare by Sabra Field
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New Lit on the Block :: Virga
Virga is the name for the cloud streaks that stream hazily down from the sky, snow or rain precipitation that evaporates before having a chance to reach the ground. Virga can often fool radar into recording precipitation while the ground remains dry. Perhaps in this same way, poetic and hybrid forms can be as elusive as nature herself, and why Virga is an appropriate name for new online literary biannual dedicated to poetry and hybrid writing. Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Virga”
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Still Point Arts Quarterly – Fall 2017
Still Point Arts Quarterly recently announced their switch from print issues to free, online issues delivered directly to readers’ email inboxes. The Fall 2017 issue is the first readers can access online, the current exhibition feature containing works based on “The Art of Structure.”
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Lime Hawk – August 2017
Connecticut-based, online Lime Hawk provides readers with “creative works that muse on environment, culture, and sustainability.” Issue 12 contains 15 pieces of poetry, prose, art, and filmography, and the website has a calm and quiet theme, gray text boxes floating over a mountain scene, which further sets the mood for the new work.
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Basalt – 2017
“Dark-colored, fine-grained,” reads the subtitle to basalt, the Oregonian journal named after the volcanic rock with those same dark, fine properties. Basalt is formed from surface lava cooling, and the poetry and art within the 2017 issue mimics its namesake, rising up as a strong finished product built from an eruption of words.
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Into the Void – Summer 2017
Published out of Dublin, Ireland, Into the Void pushes the boundaries of comfort and vulnerability. Nothing is safe or simple. Through fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and art, this issue doesn’t try to clean up the rough edges of literature. Into the Void refuses to apologize for the imperfections, and vulnerabilities.
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BOMB Magazine – Summer 2017
BOMB puts artists in conversation with each other. In the Summer 2017 issue, art is broadly defined and equally celebrated: poets and directors and architects, all are welcome at the table to open up the discussion on art, its legacy, history, and future. Particularly through reviews and interviews, BOMB lays bare artists’ inspiration, where creators and their creations speak to each other across time.
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Nimrod International Journal – Spring/Summer 2017
In this issue of Nimrod International Journal, the theme of “Leaving Home, Finding Home” pulled at my heart strings, reminding me of homes I have found and homes I have left. I spent days pouring over the pages of this journal, unwilling to set it down, each piece reaching out to me in happiness or in sadness, painting stories I could dive into.
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Books :: September 2017 Prize Winners
September is a busy month for award-winning book releases. Here is just a sampling of small press and university press titles readers can look for this month.
At the beginning of September, Southeast Missouri State University Press published the winner of the 2015 Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel: Pie Man by John Surowiecki. The debut novel is told through a series of reminiscences by the titular character’s family, friends, and teachers, and explores the story of a boy, Adam Olszewski, who on his seven birthday tries to leave his family house but can’t. Soon after, the boy believes the house is alive and an inseparable part of him. Pie Man is a vivid exploration of what it means to be normal.
A Brief Alphabet of Torture: Stories by Vi Khi Nao, winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, is also out this month. A Brief Alphabet of Torture is made of many modes and genres—poetry, essay fiction, drama—and almost constitutes a novel of a different kind. Each tale is a chapter that captures the concerns that pervade life.
In poetry, readers can pick up a copy of To Whitey & the Crackerjack by May Yang (Hauntie), winner of the 2016 Robert Dana Anhinga Prize, selected by Evie Schockley. Shockley says of her selection: “May Yang’s poetry pierces the silence in which the history of Hmong women has been blanketed, with indecorous wordplay, unruly rhymes, and evocative, unequivocal images. This book begins by naming names (America, global capitalism) and ends by revivifying the poetic epigram.”
Check out the publishers’ websites to learn more about these newly-releaed, award-winning titles.