Art is at the center of Reverberations, a digital publication of writing that “investigates the way that art echoes beyond itself and interacts with ourselves,” says Editor Linne Halpren. Editor Sage Marshall adds, “Art is often created in response to something else, and our thoughts on art are further reverberations.” Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Reverberations”
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!
SHR 50th and Hoepfner Literary Award
Southern Humanities Review has been published fiction, poetry, and essays quarterly from the Department of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama since 1967. The newest double issue (Vol 50.3&4) marks their 50th Anniversary, and features the essay winner of The Hoepfner Literary Award “Time, Sight, Orbs, Memory” by Megan Kerns. Fiction winner “Landfall: A Novella” by Michael Knight and poetry winner “Epithalamium” by Brandon Amico appeared in Vol 50.1&2. Full text and excepts from the winning works can be read here.
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The Bird-while
Nearly 20 years ago, I was a 19-year old community college student introduced to Keith Taylor’s work via his slim volume of very short stories, Life Science and Other Stories. Since then, I have associated Taylor’s work with a special kind of mindfulness. It does seem redundant to call any poet’s work mindful, really, but his newest book The Bird-while provided me with a more precise way of defining Taylor’s attention . . .
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Nine Island
Jane Alison masterfully constructs an interiority unlike anything before in her novel Nine Island. The prose used in this novel is experimental, lyrical, and poetic. Alison takes the reader on a journey with an aging woman living in solitude with only the company of her cat. The story is constructed in such a way that the reader has no choice but to ride each and every intimate wave that splashes over the page.
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At the Lightning Field
You may not have heard of conceptual artist Walter De Maria, but if you’re curious like me, you’ll want to know more about him and his career after reading Laura Raicovich’s book-length essay, At the Lightning Field.
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Inside Job
“The proper study / of monkey-kind is man, / and the true study / of man is shenanigans.” So writes the playful, keen-eyed and accomplished poet John Skoyles in the poem “Evolutionary Shenanigans” from his fourth book of poetry, Inside Job. Inside Job is divided into three untitled sections, and the poems run the gamut from the autobiographical to sketches of literary figures like Jorge Luis Borges and Grace Paley.
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Ghost Town Odes
If you at times find yourself (as I often do) feeling a bit bummed out by the overproduction of postmodern, fragmentary poems that deliberately eschew narrative elements of storytelling, a self or subject, and/or any sense of purpose and closure, then do yourself a favor and pick up Matt Schumacher’s Ghost Town Odes. This is an ambitious book of poetry seeking to narrate tales of tribulation and triumph in the Old West, particularly in Oregon, the state the author currently calls home.
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Milksop Codicil
Spree MacDonald writes without punctuation in Milksop Codicil, conscious of the placement of the words, lines, and stanzas on each page and how they interact with space to produce meaning. The effect is attention to images and how they interact independent of grammatical constraint.
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Lifeline
Jennifer Givhan’s Lifeline opens with a strong voice in the first poem, “Reupholstering a Chair,” that urges one to “look up from the base of your life.” This perspective continues to play a central role in all the poems in this chapbook; the voice remains strong throughout each piece, even (or especially) those that deal with difficult subjects of loss, shame, violence, love, and death. With the final poem, “Machine for Second Chances,” there is hope in a “machine that makes / meaning, like stardust,” and strength to navigate “the footholds steep / & the footholds careless,” as “we step into our lives.”
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Books :: 2017 PEN Debut Story Prize
The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes 12 emerging fiction writers for their debut story published online or in a literary magazine during the calendar year. The twelve winners each receive $2000 and are to be compilated in the inaugural anthology published by Catapult in August 2017.
This year’s winners were chosen by judges Kelly Link, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Nina McConigley, and together “they act as a compass for contemporary literature; they tell us where we’re going.” Each piece is introduced by the editor who originally published the story, providing editorial insight to aspiring writers and curious readers.
The 2017 winning writers include: Angela Ajayi, Amber Caron, Emily Chammah, Jim Cole, Crystal Hana Kim, Samuel Clare Knights, Katherine Magyarody, Grace Oluseyi, Laura Chow Reeve, Amy Sauber, Ruth Serven, and Ben Shattuck.
Learn more about the prize, the judges, the honorees, and the journals at the PEN America website, and pre-order your copy from the Catapult website.
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4th Annual Independent Bookstore Day
Saturday is the day! April 29 is the 4th Annual Independent Bookstore Day. Indie bookstores across the United States are gearing up to celebrate with exclusive items, literary activities, readings, author signings, giveaways, and more this upcoming Saturday.
Find a great indie bookstore in your area on the NewPages Guide to Independent Bookstores and show your support.
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Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost
The Wallace Stevens Journal Editors Steven Gould Axelrod and Natalie Gerber introduce readers to the Spring 2017 special issue feature Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost: A Reconsideration with these words: “One of the well-worn ironies of epoch-fashioning in literature is its tendency to position literary oeuvres in ways that serve the need for distinction and contrast without attesting to the surprising overlaps and conjunctions that exist in the lives and careers of the era’s foremost practitioners. This, in a sentence, is the story of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, two modernist American poets who have emerged—more so than most of their peers—at opposite ends of the modernist spectrum.”
For a full list of contents, click here. Those with access to the journal through Project Muse can read full text; others can read the beginning portions of each entry.
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New Lit on the Block :: Curieux Academic Journal
When he sought to name his newly envisioned academic journal for high school writers, Theodore Bass said the word ‘curious’ embodied what he wanted to do with the publication. In French, the word is ‘curieux,’ which Bass thought had a nicer ring to it. Thus, Curieux Academic Journal was christened. Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Curieux Academic Journal”
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Books :: 2015 Nightboat Poetry Prize Winner
Nightboat Books publishes the winners of the annual Nightboat Poetry Prize, the 2015 winner to be released next month: No Dictionary of a Living Tongue by Duriel E. Harris. Judge Kazim Ali says of the poetry collection:
No Dictionary of a Living Tongue is formidable in its explorations of art, citizenship, and life as a body amid the social, political, and electronic networks that define us, hold us together, bind us. [ . . . ] An elegant use of sound couples with a keen and roving intelligence and a fierce commitment to social justice to create a unique and powerful collection of poems.
Paging through the poetry collection, I was struck by the variety in forms, visually arresting before even reading the content. I was especially drawn to the fold-out poem “Danger, Live Feed” on pages 69-70, which warrants tearing out and framing (if the idea of tearing apart a book doesn’t make you cringe, that is).
Check out the Nighboat Books website for more insight into Harris’s No Dictionary of a Living Tongue, where you will also find a PDF preview and a link to order from SPD.
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Poet Lore Presents Ana Atakora
In Poet Lore‘s Spring/Summer 2017 feature World Poets in Translation, Hodna Nuernberg translates Togolese poet Anas Atakora. Nuernberg introduces the poet, “Atakora writes in a French that is simultaneously limpid and roiled by the undercurrents of Kotokoli, his mother tongue. . . Atakora’s genius lies in his ability to draw inspiration from this duality, creating a poetic voice that plays with oppositions as he develops a personal lyricism rich with polyphony and intertextuality.”
Nuernberg goes on to explain, “Atakora considers himself to be among the third generation of Francophone Togolese poets, tracing his lineage back to the neo-Négritude writers of the 1960s and 70s. The content-driven and politically engaged writing that characterized the work of the neo-Négritude writers is tempered in Atakora’s work by his interest in stylistic invention and by his commitment to liberating poetic language from formal constraints, a sensibility he shares with writers of the second generation, who came of age during the cultural renewal of the 1990s.”
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Books :: Inside My Pencil
Recently chosen as a NewPages Editor’s Pick, Inside My Pencil by Peter Markus (Dzanc Books, March 2017) recounts poetry lessons taught to children in Detroit public schools. Markus, an award-winning writer and a writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit, sees the magic children hold inside their pencils and shares it with readers in this nonfiction book.
We start with Markus on his first day in the schools and then continue on to read his lessons on similes, metaphor, on the verb to be, the power of imagination. In prose that is poetic in itself, he brings us into the classroom and feeds us lines his students came up with in response. The creativity and imagination of the kids is a joy to read. In one chapter they define what beauty is, and in another, they turn love into metaphors, each line a beautiful display of the magic inside their pencils.
Inside my Pencil is available from the Dzanc Books website where readers can learn more.
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Books :: 2015 SFWP Literary Award Program Winner
The Santa Fe Writers Project hosts their Literary Awards Program each year since 2000. At the beginning of April, they published the 2015 grand prize winner: Magic for Unlucky Girls by A.A. Balaskovits. Selected by Emily St. John Mandel, the winning short story collection retells traditional fairy tales, taking familiar tropes and weaving them into modern stories of horror and hope.
From the publisher’s website:
From carnivorous husbands to a bath of lemons to whirling basements that drive people mad, these stories are about the demons that lurk in the corners and the women who refuse to submit to them, instead fighting back . . .
Find out more about Magic for Unlucky Girls at the SFWP website, where readers can order copies, check out the author’s website, and stop by the Awards Program page, submissions currently open until the tail end of July.
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Boulevard 2016 Emerging Poet Prize Winner
The Spring 2017 issue of Boulevard (vol. 32 nos. 2 & 3) features the winner of their 2016 Boulevard Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets. Contest Judge Edward Nobles selected the works of Stacey Walker, who received $1000 and publication of her three poems, “Reading the Signals,” “Pockets,” and “Grace in War.” Honorable mentions went to Hannah Leisman and Craig Van Rooyen. (Cover art: Fafal Olbinski, The Eye of the Medusa, 2017)
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2016 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner
The Spring 2017 issue of The Georgia Review, in addition to celebrating 70 continuous years of publication, also features the 2016 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner: “Still Lifes and Landscapes” by Emily Wolahan. In addition to publication, the winner receives $1000. The 2017 poetry contest is still open, with Naomi Shihab Nye as the final judge.
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Michigan Quarterly Review Awards 2016 Literary Prizes
Michigan Quarterly Review has announced its annual prizes awarded to authors whose works were published in the magazine during the previous year.
Lawrence Foundation Prize
Ruchama King Feuerman [pictured] has won the $1,000 Lawrence Foundation Prize for 2016. The prize is awarded annually by the Editorial Board of MQR to the author of the best short story published that year in the journal. Feuerman’s “Kill Fonzie” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue.
Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize
John Rybicki has won the 2016 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, which is awarded annually to the author of the best poem or group of poems appearing that year in the Michigan Quarterly Review. His poem “A River Is Not a Watery Rope,” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue.
Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets
Eric Rivera has won the 2016 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, which is awarded annually to the best poet appearing in MQR who has not yet published a book. The award, which is determined by the MQR editors, is in the amount of $500.
For more information about each of the winners, visit the MQR website here.
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Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week
Erin McIntosh is the featured artist in this 70th anniversary issue of The Georgia Review, with one of her works from Geometric Series on the cover and several more inside along with an introduction about the artist and her work.
“Forgetten” by Jane Zwinger on the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of Glimmer Train is a welcome symbol of spring that reflects the blossoming trees lining our city streets this April.
The cover of Ruminate Spring 2017 features an untitled piece from the 2017 Kalos Visual Art Prize Winner Lucas Moneypenny. More of his work as well as that from Second Place winner Chakila L. Hoskins and Honorable Mention Carolyn Mount is included in the issue.
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New Lit on the Block :: The Drowning Gull
The Drowning Gull online biannual of art, nonfiction, poetry and fiction hails an eclectic editorial staff: Tiegan Dakin, a poet and artist living in New South Wales, Australia; Rebecca Valley, poet and writer living in Washington state; Shonavee Simpson, Australian freelancer from Newcastle; and Katelyn Dunne, a Chicago native currently living in Kentucky to attend university. “Living in different parts of the world,” says Dakin, “makes communication difficult at times. But we all have a common love of publishing, so we try tirelessly to make it work.” Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: The Drowning Gull”
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April 2017 Broadside
The April 2017 broadside collaboration from Broadsided Press is “Overheard at the Zoo” with poetry by Jessica Johnson and art by Se Thut Quon. Poetry lovers/activists are encouraged to print the free PDF broadside and become a vector by posting the work around your town, campus, workplace – wherever the world could use just a bit more poetry.
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Jabberwock Review – Winter 2017
Looking back through old family snapshots, a majority include a four-legged family member: Sadie our German Shorthaired Pointer. It has been almost ten years since she passed away, but every time I see the same breed of dog as Sadie, I can’t help thinking of my childhood companion. Upon seeing the German Shorthaired painting by Katie Erickson on the cover of the Winter 2017 issue of the Jabberwock Review, I was flooded with nostalgia, a bittersweetness that followed me throughout the issue.
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Iron Horse Literary Review – Open Issue 2016
In the 2016 Open Issue, Iron Horse Literary Review opens its doors to two new types of writing: translation and graphic literature. It’s the graphic piece that opens this issue which ultimately grabbed my eye and ushered me in to the rest of the work.
Continue reading “Iron Horse Literary Review – Open Issue 2016”
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The Write Place at the Write Time – Winter/Spring 2017
The Winter/Spring Issue of The Write Place at the Write Time reminds us of the power of words in the Editor’s Note: they can comfort and create, and they can dismantle and harm. This issue achieves the former, providing readers with a place to chill out, unload, and just read. The editors go above and beyond as they create an issue filled with timely poetry, prose, interviews, and more.
Continue reading “The Write Place at the Write Time – Winter/Spring 2017”
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The Hudson Review – Autumn 2016
Since 1948, The Hudson Review has served as a platform for emerging authors and poets in a wide variety of genres, appealing to many aspects of American literature and culture. The Autumn 2016 issue shares poetry, fiction, essays, review, chronicles, and comments, each one truly unique and showcasing a wide variety of talents.
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Thrice Fiction – December 2016
Unlike so many other literary magazines, Thrice Fiction is, in itself, a work of art. It captures the spirit of each piece of fiction within its pages through original artwork and bends the concept of “short fiction” to encompass truly creative works that defy traditional short story formats. Self-identified as an alternative zine, each page tells a unique story from a unique voice, illustrated with unique art.
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Conjunctions – Fall 2016
One of my favorite David Bowie songs and music videos is “Loving the Alien” from his sixteenth studio album Tonight. The silver, almost robot-like characters in the video and haunting lyrics (“And your prayers they break the sky in two / Believing the strangest things, loving the alien”) invoke feelings of awe and discomfort about those who are different or “other” from ourselves. The Fall 2016 issue from Conjunctions literary magazine mirrors the powerful emotions of Bowie’s work in “Other Aliens.”
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Consequence – Spring 2016
American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman once said, “War is Hell,” but Consequence magazine takes the hellish landscape of war and transforms it into inspiring works of art, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Consequence is “an international literary magazine published annually, focusing on the culture and consequences of war.” The cover art of the current volume of Consequence exhibits this goal in a powerful illustration of life and beauty rising up from a mouth of suffering alluding to Picasso’s Guernica.
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Tar River Poetry – Fall 2016
The Fall 2016 issue of Tar River Poetry is filled with the work of experienced poets; each piece reveals an attention to form and function in a linguistic mélange of technique containing a bounty of literary treasures. The issue is one to keep by the bedside for easy access to multiple reads.
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Gigantic Sequins – January 2017
The pieces in Issue 8.1 of Gigantic Sequins have an otherworldly quality to them and feel linguistically linked. In her introduction, Editor-in-Chief Kimberly Ann Southwick tells readers that “the fiction in this issue roars and then gives birth,” and I am inclined to extend this metaphor to encompass the poetry and creative nonfiction in the issue as well. The works seem to have a common source with connections to surrealism and themes of nature, violence, blood, and the moon. From p.e. garcia’s opening poem “animal considers animal,” to Craig Chisholm’s review of Anthony Michael Morena’s The Voyager Record: A Transmission (Rose Metal Press, 2016), the issue exemplifies careful editing and consideration in creating a cohesive collection of creative work that stimulates the imagination and lingers long after reading.
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World Literature Today – March/April 2017
World Literature Today certainly lives up to its name, containing amazing pieces of literature from all over the world. This particular issue focuses on Dystopian Visions and the country of Montenegro, but also contains fiction, essays, nonfiction, reviews, and poetry from other countries, with many of the pieces translated from their original language to English.
Continue reading “World Literature Today – March/April 2017”
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Aquifer :: The Florida Review Online
The Florida Review has launched a new online component Aquifer, with free weekly literary features (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and graphic narrative), as well as interviews, book reviews, and digital stories. Later this year, Aquifer will open up submissions for this online content. Editors also hope that Aquifer: The Florida Review Online will open up the possibility for even more features, becoming a fully multi-media arts and letter site. We look forward to this great new innovation for TFR!
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Books :: 2016 FIELD Poetry Prize Winner
The winner of the 2016 FIELD Poetry Prize, Chance Divine by Jeffrey Skinner, was published at the end of last month. The editors, David Young and David Walker, selected the collection from a group of submissions they say was one of the strongest in the prize’s 20-year history. However, Chance Divine made an impression, the editors “coming back to it with increasing admiration. It’s a notably ambitious book, unafraid to ask large questions about contemporary physics, poetry, and faith, and the relationships between them—but with a wit and inventiveness that lead to unpredictable, exhilarating results.”
On the Oberlin College Press website, readers can find three excerpted poems, more information about the collection, and a way to order a copy.
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Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week
Photograph “Paula/Window #1” by Roger Mullins on the cover of v16 i2 of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley inspired this week’s theme of lit mag covers.
A detail of “The History of Nature” by Brad Kunkle on the Spring 2017 issue of Arroyo is from his Light & Leaf series, paintings “embellished with genuine gold and silver leaf, which reflects light in a room differently than paint.Therefore, they can appear contrastive and unique when the point of view or source of light has changed.”
And for a dose of humor, Issue #49 of Pembroke Magazine features a photograph taken by Editor Jessica Pitchford at the annual John Blue Cotton Festival in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Love it.
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Books :: #100 Love Notes Project
In 2015, on the anniversary of his wife’s death as a result ovarian cancer, Hyong Yi wrote 100 love notes and, along with his two children, handed them out to random passers by on the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina. The three-line poems were written as conversational love notes between Hyong and his wife, reading “Beloved, follow me to the top of the mountain. Hold my hand; I’m afraid of falling. Don’t let me go.” and “I don’t need a test to tell me who to love. I believe in you and me. I do until death do us part.”
Friends encouraged Hyong to create a website to commemorate his commitment to his wife, and now The #100 Love Notes Project: A Love Story book has been published by Lorimer Press. This beautifully crafted collection features the work of 17 artists commissioned by Hyong Li to illustrate his 100 three-line poems.
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The Tornado is the World
Once, a hundred years ago, the tornado
was a young man being pulled along
by the Missouri River while his friends
laughed, then called, then screamed, then
went silent . . . . — “On the Origins of the Tornado”
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Unbearable Splendor
Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor is full of big questions: Where do we come from? What is our origin? What is family? What is change? What are our fetal dreams? What is an orphan? Why is adoptee not recognized in the plural? Were we born to love? Can the whole world see me all at once? What is a foreigner? Was Antigone the first cyborg?
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Primitive
With great erudition and a fine eye for the lyric, Janice N. Harrington’s Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin is an essential biographical reflection which traces the life of one of America’s most underrated painters. Horace H. Pippin, born in Pennsylvania in 1888, fought in WWI in France. After being injured by a German sniper, he returned to The United States to paint.
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Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods
One should think of reading Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods as a welcome to West Virginia. Sixty-three West Virginians fill this anthology with vivid poetry and fiction that serve to characterize their “wild and wonderful” state.
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The Hero Is You
Perhaps one of the most difficult things about being a writer is knowing how you’re supposed to go about being a writer. Pretty close to the front of Kendra Levin’s The Hero Is You, she says, “Many books and writing programs place so much emphasis on craft, they neglect one of the most challenging aspects of writing: how to go about actually getting the words from your brain onto the page on a regular basis.” This book is, naturally then, trying not to be a book about craft, but rather one about establishing healthy work patterns.
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June in Eden
Rosalie Moffett won The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize with her debut collection of poetry titled June in Eden. In this, her prize-winning book, Moffett shapes original ideas into poems that reflect her interest in family, science and technology. It’s dedicated to her mother and father, and they’re featured throughout.
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The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová
Who was this 19th century Czech woman that Kelcey Parker Ervick writes about in her book, The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová? And why, she wonders, hadn’t she previously heard about this woman who is so famous in Europe? I also wondered why I’d never heard of her. In checking with friends in Prague, I discovered that Němcová was indeed a cherished figure who is introduced to school children and is still held in esteem almost two centuries later. In fact, she’s pictured on the Czech 500 koruna bill.
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A Meditation on Fire
Poet Jason Allen is a poetical pyromaniac who guides his readers through a tour of hell involving scenes of addiction, suicide, homelessness, and family dysfunction. And even if we are tempted to withdraw from such smoldering carnage, ruin and rubble, Allen reminds us that “while we sleep, our worst nightmares / continue happening to someone else.” The thing is though, the poems in this debut collection are a controlled burn. The fire never gets out of hand, which is the mark of a skilled verbal arsonist. Paraphrasing William Wordsworth: a more amateur poet would have left too much spontaneous overflow of emotion in these pages without the necessary distance needed to craft the poems as they are “recollected in tranquility.”
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Wild Things
Jaimee Wriston Colbert has created an incredible connection between the endangered nature of humans and the environment around them. Wild Things is a collection of linked stories that showcase desperation and heartbreak felt by both humans and animals, and the landscape they are all trying to survive in. Colbert crafts a world all readers will be able to vividly picture, and that’s if they haven’t already experienced the all too true reality in each of the stories.
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Books :: What is Poetry?
This historical tome edited by Anselm Berrigan has just been released from Wave Publishing: “The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York.These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century’s most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years.” Poets/artists interviewed include: Akilah Oliver, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Barbara Henning, Bruce Andrews, Charles North, David Henderson, Eileen Myles, erica kaufman, Harryette Mullen, Judith Goldman, Larry Fagin, Magdalena Zurawski, Peter Bushyeager, Red Grooms, Sheila Alson, Tina Darragh, Victor Hernández Cruz, Will Alexander, and many more. The book can be ordered directly from the publisher for the discounted price of $17/shipping included.
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Irish Pages :: Isreal, Islam & the West
Editor Chris Agee included a handwritten note with v9 n2 of Irish Pages, “This issue is already highly controversial. . . ” Why? The focus: “Israel, Islam & the West” with feature content: Gerard McCarthy on the refugee crisis in Greece; An unpublished survivor’s account of Bergen Belsen; “A Trial” by Hubert Butler; Writings on Iran, Bosnia and Islam; Avi Shlaim on “Israel and the Arrogance of Power”; Dervla Murphy’s “Hasbara in Action”; John McHugo on Syria; Chris Agee on “Troubled Belfast”; Ghazels of Hafez; Lara Marlowe on Mahmoud Darwish; New poems on the Middle East by Seán Lysaght, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ciarán O’Rourke & Cathal Ó Searcaigh; and “I am Belfast”, a photographic portfolio by Mark Cousins.
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Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week
The cover photograph for the Spring 2017 issue of Thema by VHoward fits this issue’s theme perfectly: “Take the zucchini and run.” And also gave me a jolt of hope for summer’s soon arrival!
The Spring 2017 cover photo of Willow Springs is by Polish-born photographer Marta Berens from her ongoing series Suiti – documenting the culture of the people of Alsunga, Latvia.
While the ship in the bottle is the focal point of Justin Burks’s image on the Winter 2017 issue of Carve, it was actually the Kit-Cat Clock that drew me in. Burks is a graduate of the Art Institute of Dallas and founder of Birdhouse Branding, a creative agency that helps develop and design brands, websites and illustrations for individuals and organizations.
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100 Thousand Poets for Change 2017
September 30, 2017 marks the seventh annual global event of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a grassroots organization that brings poets, artists, musicians, and photographers together to call for environmental, social, and political change, within the framework of peace and sustainability. The local focus is key to this global event as communities around the world raise their voices through concerts, readings, workshops, flash mobs, community picnics, parades and demonstrations that speak to the heart of their specific area of concerns, such as homelessness, ecocide, racism and censorship.
The 100 Thousand Poets for Change website now features a Global Action Calendar open to everyone for posting creative actions planned to take place around the world, as well as the Resistance Poetry Wall, an open call for posting poetry about the recent USA elections. Poets from around the world are invited to post.
100 Thousand Poets for Change wants everyone planning now for their local September events and asks that organizers register their events on the 100 TPC website so your actions can be recognized.