NewPages Blog

A new biannual online magazine, Ostrich Review, publishes poetry, fiction, and art. Editor Nayelly Barrios says that the name of the magazine actually came from a vote on the font, which is Sans Ostrich. “But we also happen to like burying our heads in the sand,” she says. Along with Co-Editor Benjamin Sutton, she says they “want to be a part of the literary tradition. Our mission is to publish work that shakes us.”

Barrios says that in Ostrich Review, readers can expect to find “not necessarily backs turned against expectation, but an attempt to display work reaching for the unexpected. We don’t have a specific aesthetic. We don’t want to have one specific aesthetic or style. We deliver diversity (which is evident in our inaugural issue). We deliver the good stuff. No, the amazing stuff.”

The first issue features poetry from Carmen Gimenez-Smith, Carolina Ebeid, Carolyn Hembree, G.C. Waldrep, Jaswinder Bolina, and Rodney Gomez; fiction from Brian Allen Carr, and Patricia O’Donnell; and art from Andrew Spear and Roymieco A. Carter.

Ostrich Review accepts submissions through Submittable year-round; there are no submission deadlines.

Add some art to your day! Omnidawn Publishing has posted a series of images Visual Poetry: Andrea Baker. The work is excerpted from The Incredibly True Adventures of Me, Baker’s 150-page manuscript made from cutouts and paper packing tape.

In the most recent issue of Our Stories, an online magazine that gives personalized feedback for each submission received, Editor-in-Chief Alexix E. Santi announces big changes in the way the magazine is run. He said that they will no longer publish “a finite cache of authors on a quarterly basis after the summer 2012 issue.” He said that the last issue will be the one for the already collected pieces for the Flash Fiction contest.

He goes on to explain their new approach: “In the fall of 2012 we will begin our new business model which will be the publishing of revised short stories that we have worked on in a souped up new website. Everyone who does a workshop with us at Our Stories (no matter the length of that workshop) will have one of their short stories published by our staff. We will publish one of the final drafts (if the workshop has more than one story) and a PDF version of the first draft that had our edits in the manuscript, you’ve seen these PDF versions before and there is a fancy YouTube video here that shows you how we go about editing a manuscript. So, we’re still publishing short stories but we’re trying to find a more direct way to show you the readers what we do. You, the readers will have the opportunity to see not only the final edited manuscript but we will be publishing the initial feedback that we gave to the writer as a marked up PDF. While this brings up moral / litjournal / hyperventilating / rheumatic fever thoughts in my mind of a pay-to-play scenario at Our Stories, I believe it is more of our true business model.”

Justin Brouckaert, one of the newer magazine reviewers for NewPages, just had his first piece of fiction published in Thrice Magazine–which can be purchased as a print copy or downloaded as a PDF, e-book, or Kindle file for free–titled “What is Hell, if not a Hard Candy.” He also had a one-sentence story called “She Gets Starry Eyed When We Make Love” published on MonkeyBicycle in June. 

From the University of Houston and the Downtown Natural Science Creative Writing Club comes a new biannual online magazine–available in PDF, EPUB, or Kindle formats–Dark Matter: a journal for speculative literature. The magazine features poetry, fiction, essays, and “musings.” Managing Editor Bradley Earle Hoge says that readers can expect to find “an eclectic mix of provocative, insightful, and sublime thoughts and ideas expressed through poetry, fiction, and essays. They will not find science fiction, horror, or fantasy, though elements of these genres will certainly be incorporated into the work published in Dark Matter. Pieces in Dark Matter will use metaphor to describe our connection to the natural world, to explore interpretation of experience, and to search for meaning.”

Hoge explains that the name of the magazine is inspired by both definitions of “dark matter”: “unknown particles suggested by the Standard Model to explain observations of gravity which cannot be accounted for by observable matter and energy” and “a reference to the thoughts and ideas that ferment inside a human brain before they emerge through spoken or written words.” The title then, he says, is meant to “reflect emphasis of the unknown in both scientific inquiry and creative writing.”

Alongside Hoge will be Advisory and Contributing Editors Robin Davidson and Lisa Morano and University of Houston student editors. “Our goal,” says Hoge, “is to make Dark Matter a relevant contributor to the ever adaptive landscape of modern poetry and fiction.” He said they started the magazine to provide a place for literary speculative writing “that uses natural metaphor and allusion without resorting to the mystical.” Dark Matter,” he says, “will use cosmological, evolutionary, quantum mechanical and traditional natural metaphor to elicit literary thought and infuse modern ideas into poetry and prose.”

The first issue features fiction from J. J. Anselmi, Allie Marini Batts, Robert Boucheron, Olive Mullett, Valery V. Pertrovskiy, Jordan A. Rothacker, Patty Somlo, and L. E. Sullivan; poetry from Victoria Chadwick, Nicholas Cittadino, William Doreski, Billie Duncan, Susan Gundlach, Tim Kahl, Anne King, Mira Martin-Parker, Mira Martin-Parker, Ed Meek, Robin Amelia Morris, Ben Nash, Liam Pezzano, Rhonda Poynter, Erik Rice, Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb, Carol Smallwood, Claude Clayton Smith, Carolyn Steinhoff, and Frank Symons; and essays from Vincent Caruso and Darren Taggart.

Dark Matter will accept submissions year-round through Submittable. Hoge says they will also consider e-mail submissions to the managing editor but not through traditional post.

The newest issue of 5×5 announces upcoming changes to the magazine. Poetry Editor Jory Mickelson writes, “Perhaps it would be best to say that our next theme for 5×5 is ‘Under Construction.’ While this isn’t the actual theme, it’s definitely a signpost for the changes we are making to our literary magazine.”

The founder and Editor-in-Chief Bradley Wonder will be resigning and “handing off the reigns of 5×5 so that it can continue to grow,” says Mickelson. Mickelson and Sonya Dunning will stay with 5×5. Wonder writes, “for me, as well as 5×5, I feel like this is a step forward. Time for a new chapter in my life, and a lot of great changes for 5×5.”

Among those changes is a transition to a quarterly online-only magazine in an attempt to reach a larger audience. Each year, they plan to publish a “Best of 5×5” in print. The current issue will be the last print quarterly. However, current subscribers will be added to the list to receive the first copy of the “Best of” issue.

This issue, themed “Backwards,” is actually backwards. The front cover is on the “back” where the content begins. “This issue’s all backwards,” says Wonder. “But within each spread, you’ll still read left to right, top to bottom. Although you may have fun reading some of the stories backwards.” It includes work from Stephanie Papa, Leonard Kogan, Joanne Mallari, Lily Cao, Shabnam Nadiya, Melissa McElhose, Richard Marx Weinraub, Willy Conley, Therin Johns, Peter Cooley, Evvan Burke, Catherine Doucette, Ariane Sanford, and Jess Feldman.

NewPages reviewer Sean Stewart’s short story “The Boat” was recently published on Subtle Fiction. Four of his prose poems appeared in the most recent issue of Avatar Review, and two of his prose poems appeared in the new issue of Umbrella Factory.

Ninth Letter has put out their first special edition fiction chapbook, guest edited by Scott Geiger. Man-Made Lands includes stories from: Joe Alterio, Seth Fried, Luther Magnussen, Micaela Morrissette, Ben Stroud, and Will Wiles; and proposals from Bjarke Ingels Group, Family with Office of Playlab, Steven Holl, and Keita Takahashi. “A Tale of Disapperance” is a commissioned collaboration between author Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer.

Arnold Rampersad, award-winning biographer, literary critic, and professor emeritus at Stanford University, has been named winner of the 77th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards is the country’s only juried literary competition devoted to recognizing books that have made an important contribution to society’s understanding of racism and the diversity of human cultures.

Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book prizes in 1935, in honor of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family’s passion for issues of social justice. Today it remains the only American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity.

The esteemed jury, overseen by Henry Louis Gates Jr., includes poet Rita Dove, author Joyce Carol Oates, psychologist Steven Pinker, and art historian Simon Schama. Each year, the jury honors works of fiction and non-fiction and recognizes one individual whose life work has enhanced an understanding of cultural diversity. Previous Lifetime Achievement Award winners include Oprah Winfrey, August Wilson, and Gordon Parks.

Rampersad is the author of the two-volume work, The Life of Langston Hughes, which is widely considered the definitive biography of the poet. Volume One, published in 1986, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 1987; Volume Two, published in 1988, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. He has also written award-winning biographies of Ralph Ellison, Jackie Robinson, and W.E.B. Dubois. “Arnold Rampersad has illuminated the lives of the central figures in African-American literary and cultural studies,” commented Gates. “By so doing, he has single-handedly inserted the African-American character into American biographical literature.”

The announcement was made by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, who serves as jury chair, and Ronald B. Richard, president and chief executive officer of the Cleveland Foundation, which administers the prize.

[Press release content via Randi Cone, Coterie Media.]