Spring has sprung at Cleveland State University Poetry Center with freshly published titles added to their spring catalog, including the Editor’s Choice for the 2015 First Poetry Competition, Residuum by Martin Rock; the winner of the 2016 First Book Poetry Competition selected by Eileen Myles, My Fault by Leora Fridman; the winner of the 2015 Open Book Poetry Competition selected by Lesle Lewis, Shane McCrae, and Wendy Xu, The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo Kwa Mei-En; and the winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition selected by Wayne Koestenbaum, A Bestiary by Lily Hoang.
Readers can learn more about the individual titles (all four of them decked out in beautiful cover art) at the CSU Poetry Center website where links to interviews, past works, and author websites can also be found.
I normally try to focus my blog notes on one “something” per lit mag per post, but the newest issue of The Georgia Review has several somethings worth note. First, congratulations to the Review for achieving 70 years of continuous quarterly publication! Congratulations to Emily Van Kley whose poem “Dear Skull” won the 2015 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and is featured as the first work in the issue. Editor Stephen Corey’s “To Our Readers” takes a fun trouncing on the form when he declares: “I hearby announce the invention and likely demise of the ‘braided editorial,’ an offshoot from the ‘braided essay’ that has been rather de rigueur in recent years in some literary circles – to such an extent that people teach how-to classes, and anthologies of such works are probably imminent.” Also worth note: William Walsh’s interview with and inclusion of several poems by Rita Dove. And this among so much else to recommend.
The New Issues Poetry Prize is awarded annually for a first book of poems, and was awarded to Sawnie Morris in 2015 for her collection Her, Infinite. The annual Green Rose Prize is awarded to an established poet with Bruce Cohen as the 2015 winner with his collection Imminent Disappearances, Impossible Numbers & Panoramic X-Rays. Both the winning books were published last month.
“Ill Met by Moonlight” is the theme of Hamilton Arts & Letters Magazine issue 8.2, which features a collage of works from artists featured in the issue, including “Steve” by Lisa Wöhrle from the portfolio “Then and Now: The (Young) Contemporaries.”
“Crow Chief” by Geri Digiorno is also a collage which invites readers in to the spring 2016 issue of Raleigh Review Literary & Arts Magazine. The publication’s new, larger format provides a spacious canvas for this work.
It helps to see the full spread on this cover art for the spring issue of Arroyo Literary Magazine: “Fiori Bacio (Lovers)” by ALE + ALE.
The Borrowed World by Emily Leithauser is forthcoming this July from Able Muse Press. Winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award, the poetry award presented annually, The Borrowed World is Leithauser’s first book. 
New Letters (v82 n2) features the winners of their 2015 Literary Awards:
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press awards the Miller Williams Poetry Prize to four authors: one winner and three finalists, all of which are published with the winner receiving $5,000 in cash. 
Black Lawrence Press annually awards The Hudson Prize for an unpublished collection of poems or short stories. In 2014, Matthew Cheney brought home the prize with his story collection Blood. 
New England Review v37 n1 includes a literary criticism section entitled The Mind at the End of the Palm: Wallace Stevens Thinking. In a series of five essays, “five poet-critics consider Wallace Stevens, with a focus on Stevens as a ‘philosophical’ poet (or not). The first four were presented as a symposium at the AWP Conference in 2014 [by David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly], then gathered by David Baker and edited for print; the final essay, by Carol Frost, came to NER serendipitously, at about the same time. They all look closely at Stevens’s poetry and why it continues to engage us so deeply, more than a hundred years after he published his first poems.” Baker’s contribution can be read on the NER website here.
The newest issue of The Bitter Oleander: A Magazine of Contemporary International Poetry & Short Fiction (v22 n1) features an interview with comtemporary Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos as well as a seletion of his poems from his Poena Damni triology, translated by Shorsha Sullivan. An excerpt from his interview with TBO’s editor and a selection from his featured work can be read on The Bitter Oleander’s webite here.
The Writer’s Hotel, a hybrid writers conference that meets each June at a floating campus between three hotels in Midtown, Manhattan, is not just another writers conference. With an environment much like that of a Creative Writing MFA community, they work with each writer on a target manuscript from the moment of acceptance, for months before the conference, and offer the rare opportunity to polish manuscripts with professional editors before meeting with instructors, writers, agents, industry professionals and editors on site. There is no other writers conference quite like The Writer’s Hotel.
Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Spring 2016 issue features a strking image – no photo credit given – which shows I’m not always drawn to splashy color covers. You can read some sample poems from the issue here.
Literary Juice is an online bi-monthly of all genres of prose, poetry, and art. As the editors note: “Lately, we’ve done away with all artistrict boundaries.” This issue’s cover photo is “We Almost Rejected the Barn But No One Wants To Be Trolled by Cows” by A. Riding.
“Sad Cactus” by Netherlands photo artist Stanislaw Lewkowicz is featured on the cover of the online Hermeneutic Chaos March 2016 issue. Lewkowicz’s mezmerizing image is the perfect match for Hermeneutic Chaos, which editors consider a collection of “beautifully crafted narrative mindscapes that move us with their linguistic, emotional expanse and powerful imagery.”
In 2015, Derrick Austin was announced as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize through BOA Editions, Ltd. The prize is awarded to honor a poet’s first book, as well as honoring the publisher’s late founder. Austin’s winning title Trouble the Water will be published this month. 
Bitter Oleander Press has announced Christien Gholson as the winner of the 2015 Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Award. Gholson’s winning book All the Beautiful Dead was released last month.
Last month, Coffee House Press announced their partnership with Brooklyn-based feminist publishing project, Emily Books (part bookstore/publisher/book club). Together, they’ve created a new imprint for “original books that speak to the aesthetic excellence, experimental boldness, and social concerns of both organizations.”
Stereo. Island. Mosaic. by Vincent Toro was published in February. Winner of the 2015 Sawtooth Prize from Ahsahta Press, selected by Ed Roberson, Toro received a $1,500 honorarium and publication.