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!
Hopefully you’ll get a chance to rest and relax this weekend—or head out for some fun festivities. Let your mind take a break so you can come back refreshed and ready to tackle those submission goals. Just remember, with August ending and September beginning, many submission windows are closing soon—don’t miss out!
To help, NewPages is here with our weekly roundup of opportunities and a dose of inspiration to keep you going.
This week’s inspiration takes a cue from Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana singing “If We Were a Movie”—but with a twist: What if your life were a musical? Imagine the opening number, the show-stopping finale, and all the harmonies in between. Would it be a glittering Broadway spectacle, a gritty rock opera, or something entirely unexpected?
Revolute, a digital literary magazine published by the Randolph College MFA program since 2019 has students contributing to every part of the publication process. Volume .006 features an interview and CNF from Lauren W. Westerfield whose book Depth Control: Essays and Autofictions (Unsolicited Press) was published spring 2025. The online issue also includes poetry by Jared Beloff, Mirande Bissell, Robert Krut, Tina Posner, Mary Simmons; fiction by Jon Doughboy, Teresa Milbrodt; and nonfiction, Jeff Dingler, Jess Lettieri, Sara Javed Rathore, Rachel M. Reis.
“Loss is a sentry,” writes Kimberly Blaeser in Ancient Light. In her sixth collection of poems, the Anishinaabe poet, photographer, scholar, and activist stands “in the shadow of old losses,” watching over the human and ecological wreckage caused by some of the most devastating social issues of our time, including the epidemic of violence against Indigenous Women, the “hidden graves” at Native American boarding schools, the unrepatriated Ancestors who “wait” on museum “shelves in numbered boxes,” the disruptions to daily life, work, and family during the COVID-19 pandemic, “Politics / a super spreader,” and extractive environmental practices like “clearcutting” and “copper mines.”
Blaeser fills her narrative, lyric, and visual poems “with left behind,” with “an abundance we make / of the broken.” Each poem is a “vessel of fire,” carrying the “torch of language” to pay homage to Ancestors and praise legacies of “kinship” with all beings and land. Through poems, photographs, and drawings, Blaeser offers Indigenous stories and lifeways as a means of hope and resilience: “Let us mask / ourselves in hope — all broken of these histories.”
In stunning contrast to “this legacy” of trauma, Blaeser offers a series of ten poems, scattered throughout the collection, entitled “The Way We Love Something Small.” Each of these poems offers “a writ consolation” and “a mended silence.” By connecting to the “sweet notes” of other beings such as “spring peepers,” “newborn mice,” an “egret heronry,” and “Vowel sounds from the land” — “each oldest song / survivance.”
Throughout Ancient Light, Kimberly Blaeser artfully balances speaking “ill of the living” and blessing “the hollowed out sorrows.” Emerging from the despair of “these histories” and “lost futures,” Blaeser’s ceremonial poems use words to “transfigure” this “memory-tangle,” this pain-tangle into an “ancient ballad of continuance.” Ancient Light is a compassionate, wise, and necessary book.
Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser. University of Arizona Press, January 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.
The newest online issue of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry (#168) features Hester Knibbe’s “The homeless roamer,” translated from Dutch by Arno Bohlmeijer; Elí Urbina’s “Beyond the Unnamed Thickets of Silence,” translated from Spanish by Jeremy Paden, and works by Tara Skurtu, Sydney Lea, Mary Jo Salter, Jane Springer, Gary Soto, Sharon Dolin, Christopher Buckley, Christina Pugh, Billy Collins, Ron Smith, some of which include audio recordings, and commentary from the poets and translators.
The issue also includes “A Master of the Living Art: A Conversation with Paisley Rekdal by Frances Richey” and featured essay, “Obeying the Call of Luminous Things: Writing in Paris with Czeslaw Milosz by David Havird,” which “exegetes the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czesław Miłosz’s Aristotelean obsession with particulars over against ‘universals,’ which he referred to repeatedly in his poetry as ‘luminous things.’ In so doing he reveals just how effectively and memorably Miłosz transformed the recondite expression of philosophical parlance into ‘memorable speech.’”
Maritime history is full of drama—and here in Michigan, where the Great Lakes behave more like inland seas, the stories run deep. Beneath their glassy surfaces lie shipwrecks caused by reckless captains chasing speed, tragedies swallowed by fog, and yes… even pirates.
Real-life pirates in the Midwest! These freshwater swashbucklers weren’t after gold, but lumber, illegal alcohol, and wild game meat—sailing the lakes with stealth and grit.
McGulpin Rock stands firm against the waves of Lake Michigan, with the Mackinac Bridge looming in the mist—where history, myth, and mystery converge.
This week’s inspiration prompt invites you to write into the tension between surface calm and hidden danger:
A lake that never gives up its dead.
A family heirloom with a watery past.
A pirate hat that fits a little too well.
A ship that returns every year on the same foggy night.
What stories lie beneath the still water? What truths surface when we stop pretending the inland sea is tame?
Craft an ode to imaginary freshwater pirates—or real ones like Jack Rackham, James Jesse Strang, and Dan Seavey. Write a story of a town on the edge of myth, haunted by a foggy ship every November. Dive into the history of the Great Lakes in a lyric essay. Create a poetry collage weaving verse with images of pirates, Petoskey stones, and more.
Dive in—the water’s full of stories.
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When award-winning professor and writer Ashley Farmer (Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era) discovered that there were no full-length biographies of influential Black nationalist Audley Moore (1898-1996), she set out to rectify the omission. The result, Queen Mother, charts Moore’s ascent as a community leader, first as a follower and supporter of Marcus Garvey, then as a leader in the US Communist Party, and finally as an advocate of reparations to the Black community for the sin of slavery and the continuing damage wrought by racism and white supremacy. It’s a powerful, insightful, and evocative look at a woman who eschewed feminism but made sure that her voice was heard by the men who led the movements she championed.
For most of her life, Moore was a revered speaker, writer, and activist, and spent decades working to galvanize support for the establishment of a separate Black nation within the US. She was also outspoken in her opposition to the integrationist efforts of those, like Martin Luther King Jr., who believed racial equality was both preferable and possible. Moore vehemently disagreed, and her efforts brought her into contact with the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, as well as leaders of numerous newly independent African Nations.
Dubbed Queen Mother, she hobnobbed with controversial figures including dictator Idi Amin and Louis Farrakhan, and spoke out in favor of polygamy. Thrice married and the mother of one son, she nonetheless made “the movement” her priority. While readers may question this and other choices made by Moore, Queen Mother is a brilliant look at one woman’s passionate quest for social justice, peace, and racial equity. It’s a beautifully drawn and provocative portrait of a fascinating activist and leader.
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.
“America’s Farthest North Literary Magazine,” Permafrost is a literary journal run by the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Readers can enjoy both print with online access and online-only issues each year featuring high quality poetry, prose, and hybrid works from both established and emerging writers. The newest print issue (46) includes poetry by Joshua Boettiger, Margaret Carter, Tyler Heath, Carol Durak, Emily Wall; fiction by Charlie Rogers, Alex Juffer; nonfiction by Brian Benson, Angela Townsend; and a hybrid piece coupling poetry and art by Dale Williams. Cover art: “Germination Sequence” by Kyle Agustines, 2024. Visit the Permafrost website to read the full content online.
In The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton explores the complex interplay of human experiences within temporal, economic, and artistic constraints, emphasizing the processes of “making and / unmaking.” The collection is organized into four distinct sections, each unfolding from a “weighted center / stretching extending.”
The opening section, “day book,” presents a speaker positioned “between / occupant and occupy,” wrestling with the dichotomy of what “takes me” versus what “I take.” Through a single expansive poem, Naughton explores the continuum of daily existence in a city, reflecting on the “proximity” of life through the lens of a window. The imagery the poet conjures encapsulates a world fraught with constructs both built and “torn down,” confronting the viewer with urgent realities, including “waste mass” and microplastics. The speaker sorts “waste carefully,” grappling with the moral implications of what choices to make “when something’s / really / wrong.”
The anxiety surrounding time and economic pressures continues in the second section, “hour song.” This part consists of six poems, each composed of two to four fourteen-line sections. While the sonnet multiplies, the focus shifts from day to hour, “where time passes / like in dreams suspended and waiting.” Here, the intensity of attention grows, encapsulating the notion that daily rhythms and poetry are overshadowed by “the choirs of history.”
In “the question of address,” the third section, nine epistles reflect on personal loss and nostalgia in relationships. As time unfolds elegiacally, the speaker considers familial bonds and the haunting presence of absence — “What was your voice? / Was mine?”
The final section, “the real ethereal,” raises profound questions about the act of recording amidst the failures and chaos of existence. In her thought-provoking and somatosensory debut, Katie Naughton concludes that “the only mark of unendingness we have / the refusal to stop” making.
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.
Cursed Daughters, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s highly anticipated second novel [following 2018’s My Sister, The Serial Killer], brings readers into the middle-to-upper-class community of Lagos, Nigeria, and its adjacent suburbs and tells a complicated story that questions the role of fate in determining how our lives unfold.
The story centers on the economically comfortable Falodin family, whose older generation believes that the household’s women are plagued by a long-standing curse that prohibits them from forming lasting heterosexual relationships. For cousins Ebun and Monife, both of whom consider themselves modern and well-educated, the idea that they can be punished for the sins of past generations seems preposterous. At the same time, their intellectual skepticism runs head-on into tradition, and when Monife unexpectedly dies at age 25, her death leaves 21-year-old Ebun scrambling to make sense of what has happened.
Her difficulties are made worse by the premature birth of her daughter, Eniiye, on the day of Monife’s burial. Moreover, her emotional upheaval is exacerbated by the fact that Eniiye looks shockingly similar to Monife, a reality that has neighbors, family, and friends dubbing the child a reincarnation. This not only leaves Ebun reeling but puts tremendous pressure on the child who wants little more than to be herself.
It’s a soap opera, for sure, but Braithwaite is a spectacular writer who manages to make this a compelling and satisfying intergenerational drama. Although some of what transpires is predictable, the deft handling of Eniiye’s coming of age and her subsequent pursuit of romance is touching and emotionally resonant. Cursed Daughters is told in the alternating voices of Ebun, Eniiye, and Monife and moves back and forth between several decades. But as the puzzle pieces come into frame, secrets, silences, and superstitions are parsed and upended. The end result is that Eniiye does what her foremothers could not and emerges as an autonomous, bold, and independent woman. It’s a transition to cheer.
Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Doubleday, November 2025.
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.
Publishing poetry online since 2018, River Heron Review 8.2 features an interview with Rosa Lane and new works by Christine Degenaars, Jessa Queyrouze, Michael Lauchlan, Chrissy Stegman, Darren Demaree, Daniel Lurie, ariel rosé, Kathryn Petruccelli, William Rieppe Moore, David Eileen, Mike Bove, Cole Pragides, Alison Tanik, Rebecca Faulkner, and Lauren Elaine Jeter. Included in this update is the River Heron Poetry Prize 2025 Issue, spolighting the work of Winner Alison Tanik, Winner and Finalists Julia Foshee, Annette Sisson, and Maria Surricchio.
River Heron Review offers structured and generative workshops facilitated by experienced writers and editors following the Amherst Writers and Artists model of positive reinforcement to guide each writer in developing their unique voice. Limited seats are also still available for the River Heron Review Recharge: A Poet’s Retreat focusing on “Rewilding the Poem” scheduled for October 2025.
TGIF! Happy Friday, everyone! It’s been a long week of coding nightmares and endless link-checking—such is life when you run an online portal for recommended literary magazines, presses, creative writing programs, and submission opportunities.
If your week felt underproductive a well, NewPages is here to help you reclaim a sense of momentum. Whether you’re writing, submitting, or just seeking inspiration, we’ve got you covered. This week’s prompt draws from the real world—and a shared frustration with scientific jargon. Plus, we’ve rounded up over 80 submission opportunities to help you share your work!
Let the good times roll.
🧪 Inspiration Prompt: The Chemistry of Words
From causation and correlation to chaos and confusion, what makes people dig in their heels in the modern age? What sparks outrage, blind allegiance, or misunderstanding?
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, takes the form a of diary — or a devotional, perhaps, as it does reveal a type of devotion — of an unnamed narrator who withdraws from the world. The narrator first comes to the convent as a way to escape the world, which has begun to seem overwhelming to her. Her husband has moved to take a new job, and the narrator thinks it’s obvious that the relationship is over. However, the main motivator seems to be her feeling that she can’t do any good in the world, which had been her career and focus.
She ran the Threatened Species Rescue Center, but she now feels she has done as much harm as she had good. Thus, she visits the convent to take some time to reboot. In the second section of the novel, however, she has become a participant in the community, though not quite on the path to become a nun. In fact, she doesn’t really have any faith in God, though she likes the idea of attention as a type of devotion. She left rather abruptly, as she references people from her previous life who feel betrayed by her quick departure, especially given that she didn’t notify them.
The convent is also near where the narrator grew up, and she seems to be mourning the relatively recent death of her mother — who had died before her first visit to the convent — who did good in the community in a quiet manner, unlike the narrator’s work. She interacts with a schoolmate from her childhood, Helen Parry, an activist nun who has come to the convent during the pandemic to deliver the bones of a nun who worked with her, but who began her time at this convent. The narrator admits that she and others bullied Helen when she was in school, though Helen doesn’t seem to concern herself with that part of her childhood, as she had a mother who struggled with mental illness and was abusive.
This novel is pared down to the essentials, much like the landscape that surrounds the convent, focusing on the narrator’s reflections on what it means to live a good life, mainly through the contrast between an ascetic life as a nun and that of a highly visible activist. Neither the narrator nor Wood attempt to provide an answer to that question, as they want readers to answer it for themselves.
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.
Happy Tuesday! This week’s writing prompt, featured in Monday’s newsletter, was inspired by a video of a gynecologist explaining the difference between correlation and causation—a concept that’s often misunderstood and misused in shaping public opinion and policy in the U.S.
While the video’s core message is serious, one example stood out: the correlation between shark attacks and ice cream sales. It’s attention-grabbing, funny, and oddly perfect for storytelling.
Sometimes, even in dark periods, a spark of inspiration can lead not just to serious exploration and discussion, but also to a break from heaviness—a light-hearted stretch of the imagination.
click image to open flyer
✨ Inspiration Prompt: Correlation isn’t causation—but it sure makes a good story.
Did you know shark attacks and ice cream sales both spike in summer? Coincidence? Absolutely. Causation? Not quite. But the pattern is seductive—and dangerous when misunderstood.
And maybe, just maybe, someone is behind the screen painting the mice to make the experiments work.
This week’s prompt invites you to explore the tension between correlation and causation—the seductive power of patterns, the danger of assumptions, and the emotional fallout when we mistake one for the other.
🧠 What happens when patterns deceive us?
We live in a world overflowing with data but starving for understanding. People see two things happen together and assume one caused the other. Fear spreads. Certainty calcifies. A coincidence becomes a conspiracy. A trend becomes a truth. A symptom becomes a scapegoat.
This prompt is your invitation to interrogate the illusion of cause—and the human need to make meaning, even when the dots don’t connect.
✍️ Try exploring:
A character who builds their life around a false belief rooted in a misinterpreted pattern—or one who manipulates statistics to justify a personal or political agenda.
A society that spirals into fear from imagined connections—or a world where every coincidence is treated as divine causation.
A scientist, artist, or mystic haunted by ambiguity.
A visual piece that plays with misleading graphs, painted mice, or absurd experiments.
A poetic representation of data that tells two conflicting stories.
A collage or graphic narrative that juxtaposes real-world headlines with imagined consequences.
Create in any form: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, scripts, songs, graphic narratives, collages, or other art forms.
And have fun unraveling the stories we tell ourselves when we mistake patterns for truth.
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Donal Ryan’s latest novel, Heart, Be at Peace, reads like a collection of interlocked short stories, with each chapter having a different character as the narrator and focus. Thus, the novel shows several scenes from different perspectives, changing the way the reader sees each character again and again. As such, Ryan’s focus is on character and community, as opposed to plot. The characters live in a small town in Ireland where everybody seems to know or be related to one another, but the area is changing, largely due to a group of young men selling drugs. The question that runs through the novel, then, is whether anybody will do anything about that problem and, if so, what will they do and who will do it.
At the core of the novel, though, is the idea of heart — as the title implies — and relationships. Some of those are traditional, romantic relationships, such as Bobby and Triona, who have what seems to be a solid marriage and family, though Bobby worries that he’s worse than his father was; or Sean and Réaltín, who don’t have a healthy marriage, though Sean tries to find a way to set them back on course, taking an unhealthy way to try to get there.
There are also a number of parent-child relationships or even grandparent-child connections. Millie develops a bond with her grandmother, Lily, whom people believe to be a witch, a description that might be accurate, only to risk that relationship because she begins dating Augie, the main drug dealer in town. Mags’ father Josie tries to rebuild the connection with his son Pokey, who has just gotten out of jail for fraud, and the relationship with his daughter whom he pushed away because of her sexual orientation.
Throughout the novel, characters define and redefine what love looks like for them and for others, often through the question of what they’re willing to do for those around them. Those answers often surprise them and those they love as much as they do the reader, but they can’t deny their hearts, even when they lead them astray, but especially when they lead them back to those they need.
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.
Following the acclaimed launch of its debut issue, Thorn & Bloom — the literary magazine redefining self-care as resistance — presents its bold second edition, Breaking the Cycle. This quarterly publication continues its mission to fuse personal healing with collective liberation, now turning its lens toward dismantling oppressive narratives that bind us.
Thorn & Bloom 02: Breaking the Cycle features bold voices that interrogate societal conditioning and explore how unlearning can forge pathways to personal and political freedom. Where the first issue laid the foundation for self-care as radical honesty, this edition pushes further, offering language as a tool for fracture, freedom, and rebirth, all through essays, poetry, fiction, and expert insight.
“True liberation begins when we disrupt the stories imposed upon us,” says the editorial team. “This issue is an invitation to unlearn, to rise, and to rewrite.”
Inviting readers are over two dozen contributors, including Kara Dorris, Agbeye Oburumu, Grace Flaherty, CJ The Tall Poet, Rita Moe, Melanie White-Heron, Kristy Ettel, Mars Gorman, Mary M. Brown, Margaret Gibbs, Taslym Umar, Tinamarie Cox, and Rachel Turney, among others.
Rooted in inclusivity and empowerment, Thorn & Bloom is a haven for stories that break open and build a new, where vulnerability meets defiance, and self-care becomes revolution. Here, storytelling is not just art but alchemy, turning pain into power and words into weapons of liberation.
Nussaibah Younis’s debut, Women’s-Prize-shortlisted novel, Fundamentally, follows Nadia, a young woman from England who begins a job working for the United Nations deradicalizing women who joined ISIS. She has no training for the job, only an article she wrote in graduate school, and she takes the job to get out of an unhealthy relationship as much as for any other reason. She is out of her depth, as she readily admits and as her new co-workers can clearly see. However, she begins working as best she can on a program, which leads her to go to a refugee camp in Iraq, where she’s based, to meet the women there.
Everything changes when she meets Sara, a young Muslim woman from England, who reminds Nadia of herself when she was younger. Nadia was once a devout Muslim, but she has left her faith behind, which led to a falling out from her mother, exacerbated by Nadia’s relationship with Rosy, her roommate and sometime lover (Nadia believes it’s more than sometimes). Sara doesn’t engage in the programs Nadia begins, but they talk almost every time Nadia comes to the camp, and Nadia begins planning ways she can help Sara. Part of the problem with that help comes from the UN itself, as Younis ‘sends up the bureaucracy’ and in-fighting that prevents any true progress from occurring. Nadia angers almost everybody involved, but then finds a way to placate them again, mainly through providing them with money through budget lines and some sort of control, or at least the illusion of it.
However, when Nadia tries to get Sara out of the refugee camp and back home, a number of circumstances prevent that from happening, so Nadia goes outside of the traditional UN structure to try to help Sara. She has help from her co-workers, who seem as disenchanted with the organization as Nadia does, but she begins to realize that Sara is not quite who she seems to be. Younis uses her comic novel to critique Western views of Muslims, as well as those organizations that work to help, but often find themselves out of their depth, all while creating characters readers can both laugh at and resonate with.
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. Tiny Reparations Books, February 2025.
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.
In A Physical Education, Casey Johnston mainly spotlights her personal story, beginning with her focus on running and dieting to lose weight and the unhappiness that brought, leading to her discovery of weightlifting and the varieties of strength that came with it. She weaves in her relationships that reflect the emotional strength she ultimately developed from weightlifting, as well as her relationship with her mother. Last, Johnston clearly uses research to help her view the world at large, so she works in a variety of sources that talk about weightlifting and dieting, especially as it relates to women.
My only complaint about the book comes from the fact that I’m a runner, and Johnston didn’t have a positive experience there, but that’s because she connected it to weight loss and diet culture. One aspect of lifting she values — the importance of fueling to perform and the need to recover — is similarly important for those of us who try to run our best times, as she does with lifting. Though, to her point, when she was focused on running, the conversation around weight and diet was much less healthy than it is now. That said, her critique of diet culture is spot on, as she moves away from a system and culture that repeatedly tells people — especially women — to deny themselves, then criticizes them when they fail to do so.
Johnston also presents the positives of lifting, especially within the gym, where she expected to find a masculine approach that wouldn’t welcome her. When she reports a man filming her, the two young men working the desk act quickly, confronting the man and banning him from the gym. When she struggles to complete a lift on the first day, Dimitrios, an older Greek man who spends hours in the gym each day, helps her out, but encourages her, as opposed to shaming her.
Johnston not only builds physical strength, but that development leads to her inner development, as she leaves an unhealthy relationship and begins to develop a stronger sense of self. In fact, she becomes her best self by the end of the book, stronger in every way, a heavy lift that she has worked toward for years and finally accomplishes.
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.
Submission/Registration Deadline: August 31, 2025 Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to Black Fox Literary Magazine’s Summer Fox Tales Prize with theme: Feast! Deadline: August 31, 2025! Registration is also open for our September Lunch Break Writing Sessions. View our flyer for more information and links to our website.
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Holli Carrell’s Apostasies, winner of the 2025 Perugia Press Prize, is now available for presale at Perugia Press and Asterism Books. The sale rate at Perugia is offered until 9/15/2025. This debut, hybrid collection explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the lingering ramifications of being raised within a repressive and patriarchal American religious ideology. View flyer and visit website for more information and to purchase.
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LIMITED SPACE AVAILABLE FOR THE FICTION WEEK, OCTOBER 5-11, 2025. NONFICTION WEEK IS SOLD OUT
Whether you’re just beginning or already well on your way, these seven days will be a life-changing time of inspiration and creativity. Internationally bestselling author Bret Lott has been writing and teaching writing for four decades and will be leading you through a time of finding your path as a writer in both mindful and practical ways. This all-inclusive retreat includes luxury accommodations at Villa Poggiano just outside Montepulciano, as well as curated excursions into the Tuscan countryside for historical and literary and culinary pursuits. Together with trusted providers, The Tuscany Writing Retreats has created a truly bespoke Italian experience. Everything is included so you won’t need to worry about a thing. Registration ends August 31. View flyer and visit the website to learn more.
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Registration Open Now Writers take all sorts of classes on craft: character building, plotting, thematic elements, etc. BUT what you need to know beyond that is THE INDUSTRY. If you want to see your book on the bookstore shelves, you have to be a student of the business of publishing.
Whether you’re just getting started or you have a completed draft, knowing how to pitch and present your novel is imperative! Your query and first 10 pages are your foot in the publishing door.
Thinking you don’t need that yet because you’re still writing the novel? You know the adage, “Dress for the job you want?” You should be writing for the place on the bookshelf you want.
Start figuring that out for sure now and it will make everything you do in the future easier. So, yeah, this workshop IS for you—whatever stage your novel is in!
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Livingston Press will be reading through September. We are looking for novels, linked story collections, and narrative poetry. Send complete work, along with a bio to [email protected]. Check out our flyer for upcoming fall releases.
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Agrippina the Younger follows one woman’s study of another, separated by thousands of miles and two millennia but bound by a shared sense of powerlessness. Agrippina was a daughter in a golden political family, destined for greatness — but she hungered for more power than women were allowed. Exhausted by the misogyny of the present, Diana Arterian reaches into the past to try to understand the patriarchal systems of today. In lyric verse and prose poems, she traces Agrippina’s rise, interrogating a life studded with intrigue, sex, murder, and manipulation. Arterian eagerly pursues Agrippina through texts, ruins, and films, exhuming the hidden details of the ancient noblewoman’s life. These poems consider the valences of patriarchy, power, and the archive to try to answer the question: How do we recover a woman erased by history?
Whether you’re stepping away from your desk for one last summer hurrah or leaning into the cooler weather with a fresh burst of creative energy (indoors or out—laptops travel well!), NewPages has you covered with this week’s submission opportunities for August 15, 2025 (featuring ways to share your work)—plus a creative writing prompt to help spark new ideas if you’re feeling stuck.
📅 Heads up: It’s the 15th, which means some deadlines close today. Don’t miss your chance to submit!
📬 ICYMI: Our August eLitPak went out Wednesday to newsletter subscribers, packed with even more submission calls, fall book releases, and upcoming events for readers and writers alike.
This week’s prompt, Don’t Stop the Music, was inspired by the Japanese drama Glass Heart and the magic of collaboration. Whether you’re imagining your own fictional band or turning your words into lyrics, let the music move your creativity.
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 32nd issue (Summer 2025) 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 160,000 readers in 150 countries, and over 1,100 contributors from 57 countries, already know; the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
While the colloquial phrase to turn over a new leaf essentially means to seek out a fresh start, something new, for The Turning Leaf Journal, “change” is both a theme for the journal’s content as well as a publishing philosophy.
Offering two, open access issues each year (June, December), The Turning Leaf Journal publishes creative nonfiction, poetry, hybrid works, and art “that explore the turning over of a new leaf through life’s entrances, exits, seasons, formation, and destruction. This journal is a space to explore the uncomfortable, the things most usually run away from.”
“Change is the prompt for all of the work submitted to us,” says Editor-in-Chief Megan Eralie-Henriques, “but it is also the reason we started The Turning Leaf. As an undergrad, I felt disenchanted by the idea of publishing because of all the secrecy I saw. There was so much I didn’t understand, and I felt like no one was willing to talk about what it was really like to get involved with a journal. I wanted to know how competitive a journal is – show me the numbers! Tell me what a 3% acceptance rate really means. Were there a thousand submissions, or fifty? Transparency is something we really value at TTLJ and strive to always practice because we think you deserve to know. In my early attempts to publish my own work it would have completely altered my confidence to know just how many submissions my work was competing against.”
Last weekend was full of joyful detours—chores and housecleaning gave way to a quick trip to the farmer’s market that somehow turned into a few hours at the Dinosaur Gardens. Perfect fodder for a writing and inspiration prompt, don’t you think?
Those unexpected turns have a way of lingering, their joy carrying over into the week. And now here we are—today is a dreary Tuesday evening, but sometimes dreariness is a blessing, especially when it comes with much-needed rain. Maybe it will revive the struggling vegetables in the garden.
If you’ve been in a rough submissions patch, our latest newsletter featured 80+ opportunities, plus new lit mag issues and book reviews. And if you’ve been in a dry patch creatively, let this be your metaphorical rain to quench those budding ideas.
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✍️ Inspiration Prompt: The Joyful Detour
Not everyone maps out their life or schedules every moment, but most of us make To Do lists—those small intentions to get things done. Even with the best of intentions, life often gets in the way.
It’s easy to focus on what didn’t get done—but what if we looked at the upside instead?
Maybe your weekend of chores was interrupted by an unexpected bounty of fresh produce that needed preserving. Or a quick trip to the farmer’s market turned into a spontaneous dinosaur dig and rock-hunting adventure. Or perhaps a friend you haven’t heard from in years calls you out of the blue, interrupting your writing time.
These welcome interruptions might derail your plans, but the joy and memories they bring often make the delay worthwhile—don’t they?
Your turn: Dig into your memory. Write a poem, essay, or story—or create a collage, comic, or artwork—that captures a moment when your best intentions were lovingly overruled by something unexpected, something you didn’t know you needed.
What did the unexpected moment teach you? Did it shift your priorities for only a day, or did it affect long-term change in your life?
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“I never knew if I was trying to win my mother’s heart or God’s when I wrote poems,” says Li-Young Lee in his new chapbook, I Ask My Mother to Sing. Both figures feature prominently in the slim volume that collects mother-themed poems from each of Lee’s six collections since 1986, along with seven new poems. It’s the latest in a series of “new and collected” chapbooks from notable late-career poets, including Rae Armantrout’s climate change poems and Yusef Komunyakaa’s love poems.
The book’s title poem alludes to Lee’s mother and grandmother wistfully singing songs about the old China from which they were exiled following the Communist revolution. A rocky childhood in Indonesia and other countries hostile to ethnic Chinese on his way to the U.S. colors both Lee’s poems and his close maternal feelings. Not many people, after all, can credibly say that their mother carried them “across two seas and four borders, / fleeing death by principalities and powers,” as he writes in “The Blessed Knot.”
This collection is well-timed following Lee’s 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement and last year’s well-received The Invention of the Darling (W. W. Norton). Whether readers are new to these poems or already familiar with Lee’s work, they can get a great feel for a classic poet at a reasonable price. As both a reader and the editor of a chapbook-focused magazine, I hope Wesleyan University Press keeps these gems coming.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator and editor of the Philly Chapbook Review, and his critical work has appeared in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
The Summer 2025 issue of The Baltimore Review features the winners of their summer contest selected by final judge Pamela Painter: “It’s Not the End of the World, but I Can See It from Here,” prose poetry by Corey Zeller; “Tornado Family,” flash creative nonfiction by M.S. Reagan; and “Back Together Again,” flash fiction by D.E. Hardy. Filling out the rest of the issue that readers can access online include Stefan Balan, Adriana Beltran, Kate Broad, Tom Busillo, Dolapo Demuren, Sam Flaster, David Hansen, D.E. Hardy, Andrea Figueroa-Irizarry, Michael T. Lawson, M.S. Reagan, Fay Sachpatzidis, Tim Stobierski, Maureen Tai, Cammy Thomas, Julie Marie Wade, Carson Wolfe, and Corey Zeller.
Readers can also check out past issues online back to the Winter 2012. Before that — starting with Vol. I, No. 1, Winter 1997 — The Baltimore Review was print only and continues to publish an annual print compilation every summer.
In DEED, torrin a. greathouse delves into the origins of word and action, crafting a vibrant “queer lexicon” that reflects new possibilities for engaging with trans life and sexuality. This collection, while acknowledging themes of betrayal, consciously steps away from a trauma-centric narrative. The poems are infused with a sense of liberation, free from the “stigma” often associated with discussions of trans desire and chronic illness. Although they carry a history of violence and oppression intertwined with desire and choice, the poems embrace a refreshing, unapologetic exploration of intimacy without guilt.
One of the most striking aspects of this collection is the way words transition from meaning something to doing something, combining etymological “miracle” and mythological “metaphor.” A “verb can carry many meanings.” Take “swallow”: to resist expressing; to believe unquestioningly; to cause to disappear; the muscular movement of the esophagus. This range of definitions offers greathouse the possibilities of “What language is there for survival.”
The poet’s style exhibits remarkable control, perhaps a response to the intense subject matter, which includes themes of transition, sex work, and the complexities of dominant-submissive relationships. Notably, greathouse employs poetic forms such as the “burning haibun” and “cleave tanka.” Each embodies a sense of duality, wherein two expressions cleaved together or apart create a dynamic interplay of ideas. This structural doubleness echoes the content, “born / from the severance of” — transitioning from victimization to empowerment through sexuality. In these chimeric forms, greathouse creates transformations of context and meaning.
At times, greathouse invites patience from the reader with phrases like “Bear with me,” hinting at the demanding nature of her subject matter while simultaneously encouraging an engagement with the profound exploration of identity and desire within the poetry. In “trusting the broken / / machine of my desire,” torrin A. greathouse is held by words and creates new “cognates” for belonging.
DEED by torrin a. greathouse. Wesleyan University Press, August 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.
If one were to look in the acknowledgements at the end of The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien’s new novel, it would appear as if she has written traditional historical fiction, given the number of books and authors she references. However, her novel is more complex than that. There’s one main plotline that involves Lina, who has run away from Foshan, China, it seems, with her father. They now live beside the Sea, though what sea that is varies based on who one asks. They almost seem to be in a temporary refugee resettlement camp, as many people stay there for brief periods of time, then leave on ships. Lina and her father, Wui Shin, stay there for years, though, as her father is sick.
When they fled — the reader finds out why in the middle section of the book, which flashes back to Wui Shin’s younger days — Lina’s father took three books from a series of books on explorers; Lina even complains that they were not her favorite three, which is why they were less worn than the others. The three explorers are Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt, as the series authors included those who explored mentally as well as geographically.
Lina and her father’s room in a building seems to be outside of time in some way — the connection between time and space is a recurring theme in the novel — and their room connects to a room where three people live: Jupiter, Bento, and Blucher. When they find out about the three books Lina has read and reread, they point out how much the books have omitted, and each of them tell her all that’s missing from those three people’s lives, about which they seem to know much more than they should.
What ties the novel together is the theme of oppression and power, as Wui Shin and Lina are fleeing an oppressive Chinese regime, much as Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt all had to deal with people in power who tried to repress their thinking, as well as physically oppressing or killing those who disagreed with them. Thien has crafted a work of historical fiction that connects several characters who try to survive, recording their lives and struggles, so that those who live in a time where there are still those who try to suppress ideas and oppress people can find connection and hope.
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.
The August 2025 issue of The Lake, online journal of poetry and poetics, is now fresh and features works by Dolo Diaz, Mike Dillon, Syvia Freeman, Norton Hodges, Shirin Jabalameli, Tom Kelly, Marion McCready, Maren O. Mitchell, Donna Pucciani, Fiona Sinclair, and Susan Stiles. Readers will also enjoy poetry book reviews of Donald S Murray’s Tales of a Cosmic Crofter, Victoria Gatehouse’s The Hawthorn Bride, Vicki Feaver’s, The Yellow Kite, and Julia Kolchinsky’s Parallax. ‘One Poem Reviews’ offer a sample of poetry from recently published collections. August shares works from Indran Amirthanayagam, Diane Elayne Dees, Robin Houghton, Brenda Kay Ledford, Beate Sigriddaughter, and J. R. Solonche.
Sadly, the rain seems to be avoiding my area like the plague, and my vegetable garden could really use some TLC to help its struggling plants along. If your area is also bracing for yet another awful heat wave, NewPages has plenty to keep you cool and help you meet your submission goals. Take a break, watch a movie, go to the beach, get recharged to write, edit, submit, and repeat!
🎤 This Week’s Inspiration: K-pop Demon Hunters
I’m late to the trend, but thanks to its explosive popularity, I finally caved and watched K-pop Demon Hunters on Netflix—even my non-K-pop-loving family members loved it! Now its characters, plot, and of course music are living rent-free in my head. And while it’s an animated movie, it’s packed with deep themes—perfect for nudging your creative juices.
Instead of one singular prompt, here are three creative prompts inspired by this trending film. Whether you write fiction, poetry, nonfiction, scripts, or songs—or work in visual mediums like graphic narratives, collage, or mixed media—these themes are ripe for exploration:
Jill Hoffman’s Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves features a candid and unfiltered poetics that demystifies the fame surrounding poets and writers. This reflects her long-standing involvement as a poet and editor of Mudfish magazine and Box Turtle Press in New York City. Hoffman’s poems read like “a story streamed forth / like a show on Netflix, seasons of episodes / that hook you into long nights of binge- / watching.” Hoffman’s poetry is confessional in the truest sense, free of pretension and deeply human.
Her poems sometimes take the form of aubades, sonnets, ekphrasis, villanelles, or fairy tales, but they are most often written as epistles, inviting readers to become confidants. Hoffman’s writing is reminiscent of the New York School poets and includes name-drops of figures like John Ashbery, one of the most renowned among them. Her style is vivid, urban, and unafraid, weaving together themes of medical concerns, old age, and death, with relationship desires and editorial responsibilities, featuring kimonos, “clogged toilets,” a “tree wearing mermaid earrings,” and a dog named Vermeer, along with plenty of anecdotes about dog walking and dinner parties.
Through her everything-out-in-the-open poems, readers gain insight into Hoffman as a writer confronting her own biases regarding her “privileged heart” while simultaneously addressing her Jewish heritage. She also reveals her experiences as a mother estranged from her daughter, who she feels has “betrayed” her. Beneath the lively and playful nature of these poems lies the deep pain of their fractured relationship.
As she weighs her life “on the scales,” Hoffman’s humanity shines through her imperfect responses, faux pas, and awkward moments. By sharing her “old funny life / Of heartbreak / And ecstasy” in this sincere manner, she helps dismantle the taboos surrounding artistic, diasporic, and societal expectations, offering a book “to make a reader fall in love.”
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.
Moonday Mag is home to speculative writing, including horror, fantasy, scifi, magical realism, anything that spawns from the “what if” of a creator’s mind. Publishing quarterly online and in print, Moonday Mag was started by Editor-in-Chief Caridad Cole who sought to “bridge a gap” she experienced when seeking to publish her own work. “Moonday Mag will give speculative writers a more traditional platform for their work, and in turn, give them the confidence to pursue even bigger goals. I wanted to create a magazine that I myself would strive to be published in, a place that publishes work that makes me think, Wow I wish I had written that!“
The name for Moonday Mag, Cole explains, “comes from an old teenagehood blog, which was named for a combination of Monday (the day of the week I was born, and the subject of my favorite nursery rhyme, “Monday’s Child”) and the moon (an obsession for as long as I can remember). The first poem I ever wrote was called “Starstruck by the Power of the Moon,” and I have no idea why. Maybe I’m from there.”
Happy Tuesday! This week in our newsletter, we tried something new—giving you a sneak peek at what’s coming to our Magazine Stand. Hopefully, you enjoyed that first look at the upcoming lit mag issues. If you missed Monday’s newsletter, you can catch up here.
If you love independent bookstores and maps, we are also working behind the scenes on trying to bring an interactive map to life. Baby steps…wobbly and uncertain, but we’re trying.
Speaking of uncertainty, we actually brought you a writing prompt devoted to turning uncertainty in love into certainty with the idea that you know you will fall in love with a certain person in the future.
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Inspiration Prompt: A Premonition of Love
We’ve all seen it—books, movies, songs—where love strikes like lightning. Two strangers lock eyes across a crowded room, and just like that, they’re swept into a whirlwind romance. It’s the classic “love at first sight” trope.
But what if we turned that idea on its head?
In Japanese culture, there’s a beautiful phrase: koi no yokan—a premonition of love. It’s not the instant spark of passion, but rather a quiet certainty that love will bloom in time. A subtle knowing. A gentle inevitability.
It’s the moment before the moment. A glance that lingers. A silence that feels full. A feeling that says, “I’ll love you—just not yet.”
Is this love destiny? A soul recognizing its match? Or is it our mind projecting hope onto a stranger, crafting a story before it’s even begun?
You be the judge.
This week’s prompt invites you to explore the concept of koi no yokan in your own creative way. You can:
📝 Write a poem, story, or essay 🎨 Create a piece of visual art or collage 🎭 Capture the feeling of love’s quiet arrival in any medium you choose
Think of something along the lines of e.e. cummings’“somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond” or Julio Cortázar’s“The Night Face Up.” Maybe write a story that ends with the line: “I knew I’d love them, just not yet.”
Or illustrate the moment before love begins—a gesture, a shared silence, a fleeting glance. What does that premonition feel like visually?
(And yes, if you now have Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca” stuck in your head—“I’ve got a premonition, that girl’s gonna make me fall…”—you’re welcome.)
💌 Want more prompts like this? This one was originally featured in our newsletter—where inspiration meets inbox. Subscribe now to get weekly creative sparks, book reviews, and community highlights delivered straight to you.
In Stronger, Michael Joseph Gross gives a historical overview of the importance of muscle throughout one’s life by centering on three different people and areas. Gross’s background as an investigative reporter shows as he divides the book into three sections: one that focuses on Charles Stocking, a professor of classics and kinesiology, and draws on how the Greeks and Romans viewed strength; a second with Jan Todd as the core, showing how women’s strength developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the final portion building on Maria Fiatarone Singh’s research on strength in older adults.
Throughout the book, Gross uses a wide range of resources, as his acknowledgements and notes sections make clear, to make the argument that strength training, especially through heavy lifting, benefits people in all areas of health, no matter their background, age, gender, or any other identifying aspect. The experts he refers to point out how medicine and politics have overlooked the importance of building strength, focusing on pills and policies that are less effective.
Strength isn’t a how-to manual, but a work that should serve as an inspiration to begin the journey of building strength, whatever that looks like at any stage of life, drawing on stories from Stocking, Todd, and Singh to show how everyone can benefit from incorporating strength training into their lives. The research that surrounds the information from Stocking, Todd, and Singh’s reinforces the work they have done to make a compelling argument that building strength can help us all live longer and healthier lives.
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.
Publishing online and in print since 2020, Superpresent‘s Summer 2025 issue is now available. This free quarterly magazine of arts and literature presents striking visual art and writing equally, always free to download or view online with print copies sold at cost of production plus postage.
This newest issue feature prose by Zach Murphy , Rituparna Mukerjee, Brittany A. Silveira, Andrew Wickham, Renée LoBue, Richard Abramson, Anna-Grace Tracy, Arjun Razdan, Ben Guterson, Devin Murphy, Dominic Pillai, Dorit d’Scarlett, Makhosini Mpofu, Katya Cengel; poetry by Duncan Forbes, Spider Dailey, Abi Tabor, Carole Greenfield, Edilson Ferreira, Effie Spence, Miriam Sagan, Rita Moe, Brittany A. Silveira, CJ Giroux, Flossie Hedges, Carolina Hospital, Kate Price, Kelsey Britton, Larry Kilman; art by -1, Alyona Fedorchenko, Aleksandra Sceptanovic, Sheridan Hines, Alex Charey, Oleksandra Viazinko, Anastasiia Teslenko, Cyril Oluwamuyiwa Emmanuel, Clara Hoag, Kamila Jantos, joni brown, Oksana Kami, Natali Agryzkova, Isomidddin Eshonkulov, Maria Faust, Shahriar Medi, Grzegorz Wroblewski, Ernest Compta Llinas, Julia Forrest, Anton Konovalenko, Leemour Pelli, Li Bilestka, Brent Galen Adkins, Maksym Romenskyi, Dănuț-Adrian-Iași Chidon-Frunză, Antonio Muñiz , Barak Rotem, Mariia Horshkova, Madeline Hernandez, Tyler Alpern, Mary Jane; video and sound Héctor Almeda, Jourden Fenner, Chalotte Leamon, Roxana Halina.
Poet, essayist, and activist Margaret Randall’s latest book, More Letters from the Edge, follows the April 2025 release of Letters From the Edge, a series of chronologically-organized excerpts from written exchanges between the noted author and five intellectuals and artists on the political left. In More Letters, Randall continues this pattern. This time, however, she zeroes in on her communications with poet-writer-teacher Arturo Arango; former member of the Weather Underground Kathy Boudin (1943-2022); graphic artist and painter Jane Norling; and retired museum curator Robert Schweitzer. The emails and letters that Randall includes are fascinating, allowing readers to glimpse the ways these progressive activists have blurred the artificially constructed line that typically separates personal life from political struggles.
In fact, although most of the missives center on politics and social concerns – the struggle to earn enough to pay the bills; growing censorship and repression in Cuba, and the deleterious impact of the long-standing US blockade of the island; the ethical, racial and gender dynamics surrounding U.S. museum exhibitions; and whether violence can ever be justified in pursuit of social betterment – this is a moving celebration of friendship. Indeed, the connections between Randall and the people she corresponds with reveal deep bonds that have flourished despite periodic set-backs and obstacles.
It’s an intriguing showcase for relationships that are based on shared, and sometimes evolving, values. Randall calls her friends outriders and says that all four serve as ”bridges between cultures, between languages, between ideas. They bring people together and strengthen communities.”
The same can be said of Randall. More Letters models what it means to live an engaged life and maintain a steadfast commitment to peace and progressive social justice while simultaneously pursuing personal fulfillment. It’s an inspiring, revelatory book.
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 basic premise of Lucas Schaefer’s debut novel, The Slip, is simple: Nathaniel Rothstein went missing in the summer of 1998, and he’s still missing more than a decade later. However, it takes almost five hundred pages to explore the characters who are closely related to that disappearance — his uncle, Bob Alexander; his supervisor/mentor, David Dalice; and Sasha, his 1-900 Russian girlfriend, of sorts — and those who seem to circle loosely around what happened — Miriam Lopez, a police officer who wasn’t even on the force in the 1990s; Alexis Cepeda, an up-and-coming boxer; and Ed Hooley, a troubled, middle-aged man who appeared at the boxing gym around which all the characters circle (Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym) out of nowhere.
“The slip” is a move in boxing where one dodges a punch by seeming to move one’s head, but actually creates the move through an adjustment of the legs. The first half of the novel tends to focus on the fact that nobody in the novel is exactly who they say they are, some because they don’t yet know who they are, especially the younger characters; some because they don’t want others to know who they really are; and some because they can’t seem to stop being somebody they’re not. As Schaefer moves later in the novel, though, he begins raising larger questions around race, immigration, and policing, all of which connect to the first half because there are also characters who are unable or unwilling to see others as they truly are.
In some cases, characters grow into their new selves, such as one character who transitions from male to nonbinary to female, ultimately becoming comfortable being who she’s always wanted to be. Others, though, put on a face to match the world’s expectations of who they should be, and that face ultimately becomes their face, even when such a change causes them to lose part of the goodness of who they once were.
Ultimately, the novel explores the question of how one defines themselves, for both good and ill. Like many American novels, it’s concerned with identity, as the relatively young country still is. It shows an Austin, Texas, that is changing in ways that it might not like, just as the U.S. has changed in the twentieth century in ways that lead to citizens not seeing each other as they are. Schaefer has written a substantial novel that’s asking important questions at a time when those questions need better answers.
The Slip by Lucas Schaefer. Simon & Schuster, June 2025.
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.
In a city that celebrates life in the face of death, New Orleans’s bohemian past is honored with Sue Strachan’s The Obituary Cocktail. This drink, made with gin, vermouth, and absinthe, was a staple of mid-20th-century café society before it faded into obscurity. This book, much like a good obituary, recounts the drink’s history from its 1940s origins at Café Lafitte, a hub for New Orleans’s vibrant café society. Author Sue Strachan explores the ingredients, offers recipes, and resurrects tales of other morbidly named cocktails. By including detours into secret societies and parades, The Obituary Cocktail gives this unique beverage new life.
Happy August! With the start of a new month comes fresh submission opportunities and approaching deadlines. NewPages is here to help you keep your writing and submission goals going strong with our weekly roundup of submissions and a fresh writing prompt to help get your creative energy flowing again.
The narrator of Ocean Vuong’s second novel, Hai, is a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant whose life isn’t following the traditional stereotype. Though he was the first in his family to attend college, he dropped out and returned home to New Gladness, Connecticut, a fictional town with struggles that mirror so many cities that once were centers of industry. He tells his mother he’s been accepted to medical school in Boston, but he actually intends to jump from a bridge. An eighty-something-year-old woman in the house next to the river, Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant, stops him from jumping, and he becomes her caretaker as she descends into dementia.
The core of the novel is Hai’s job at HomeMarket, a restaurant clearly modeled on Boston Market, where he forms meaningful relationships with BJ, Maureen, Wayne, Russia, and Sony (his cousin). Each person has struggles and dreams, wanting to move on from the low-wage job, and they each support one another as best they can. That’s especially true with Hai and Sony, given their family relationship, as Sony’s mother is in prison, and Sony is living in a group home, as he has been diagnosed with autism and is unable to live on his own.
While Hai helps others with their problems, he is unable to manage his drug addiction. He has recently come out of three weeks at a rehab facility, but he has begun using again, largely drawing from the drugs Grazina’s husband had around the house before he died. The shadow of the Vietnam war hangs over the novel, as Sony believes his father was a soldier in the war, but Sony is obsessed with the Civil War, even favoring the Southern side, given that he and Hai are from the Southern part of Vietnam, ignoring the racism that motivated the South. The novel is also set in the financial crisis of 2008, reinforcing the decline of New Gladness, and leading to Hai’s lack of employment options in the town.
Vuong wants his readers to see those people who survive on low-wage jobs that literature often overlooks and the ways in which they help each other do so. Rather than competing with one another for hours, when a regional manager wants BJ to fire one of the crew, they try to volunteer to give up some shifts for each other. Though each of them have concerns of their own, they create a type of family in a place most readers wouldn’t expect to find one.
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.
Raw Deal: The Indians of the Midwest and the Theft of Native Lands by Robert Downes The Wandering Press, January 2024
In Raw Deal: The Indians of the Midwest and the Theft of Native Lands, Robert Downes offers a highly-readable dive into the history of the Native peoples of the Midwest and their 500-year struggle to defend their homeland. Raw Deal explores the theft of Native lands in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions, tracing how Indigenous peoples were dispossessed by squatters, speculators, and fraudulent treaties, which offered pennies per acre and were enforced by the threat of violence. Downes chronicles the heroic efforts of Native peoples to retain their homelands through centuries of warfare and exploitation, from the earliest inhabitants to their confrontation with a flood of European immigrants.
Bob Downes of The Wandering Press is author of eight books, most of which have a Northern Michigan connection. His best-selling Biking Northern Michigan guidebook offers cycling routes throughout Leelanau County and beyond, while his historical novels, Windigo Moon and The Wolf and The Willow celebrate the culture of the prehistoric Anishinaabek.
What if literature wasn’t just a collection of books, but an entire universe?
Welcome to Litfinity—the boundless, ever-expanding cosmos of storytelling, where every genre is a planet, every poem a star, and every narrative a force that fuels the galaxy. This is the kind of imaginative spark you’ll find in the latest issue of the NewPages newsletter—alongside fresh literary magazine issues, submission opportunities, book reviews, and indie bookstore news.
✍️ This Week’s Inspiration Prompt: To Litfinity & Beyond!
(Picture Buzz Lightyear, book in hand, shouting this new catchphrase as he rockets into the literary unknown.)
In this prompt, you’re a Litronaut, tasked with restoring balance to the universe after the mysterious darkening of the Library Nebula—the heart of Litfinity. Your journey will take you across genre-planets like:
Melancholia – a world powered by poetry and emotion
Chronotex – a tech-charged sci-fi realm pulsing with innovation
Mythara – floating isles woven from fantasy and myth
But what caused the nebula to go dark? Is there a villain lurking in the shadows of forgotten stories? Could you uncover a lost genre—one that reshapes the very fabric of Litfinity?
Optional twist: Include excerpts from fictional books or poems you discover along the way. Bonus points if you invent a new genre-planet entirely!
🎨 Art Prompt: The Library Nebula
For the visually inclined, this week’s art prompt invites you to illustrate the Library Nebula—a swirling galaxy of books, scrolls, and glowing ink. Imagine a ship powered by metaphors and similes, navigating constellations shaped like punctuation marks. Think:
Vellum clouds
Ink-splatter stars
Parchment rings
Genre-themed color palettes
Or take it further and illustrate one of the genre-planets. What does Chronotex look like? How does Mythara shimmer with fantasy magic?
Subscribe to the NewPages newsletter to get a fresh prompt delivered to your inbox every week—along with the latest in the literary world. Whether you’re a writer, artist, or reader, there’s a place for you in Litfinity.
👉 Subscribe now and let your imagination go to Litfinity—and beyond!
In The Utopians, Grace Nissan provides a tangible exploration of an artist’s fascination with Thomas More (1478–1535) and his fictional work, Utopia, published in 1516. Nissan’s book resonates with and responds to More’s in three distinct ways. Nissan’s text is assembled from the language “parts available” in More’s. The Utopians features a series of “Dear More” letters and includes a serial poem entitled “The World,” which underscores the tensions between origins and change. “The first world was a world, the second invention. The first world was a world, the second critique.” To survive, Nissan’s “second world had to cannibalize” More’s “first world.”
While Thomas More’s narrative primarily depicts the religious, social, and political customs of a fictional island, Nissan’s narrative addresses the current socio-political upheaval “in terms of money.” It highlights the devastating consequences of capitalism’s “territorial lust and imperial phantoms,” and the chaos caused by the relentless pursuit of “private property” and the “production of luxury.” These situations reflect the indifference of the wealthy toward the “miracles” achieved by those who contribute their labor to “mend roads / clean out ditches / repair bridges.”
As The Utopians is also a formal exploration of artistic “invention” and “critique,” it emphasizes the need to confront “prison & syntax.” Throughout the collection, the refrain “I must tell you about…” is supplemented by: “the Utopians,” “the towns,” their “debates,” “wars,” “scribes,” “language,” and “death.” This leads to a “Semantic satiation of the world.”
Being “starved of meaning” and “losing meaning through repetition” results in a world “grim & desolate.” The critique appears to have succeeded only in a reshuffling that “rebuilt the things it abolished, in negation.” “History” comes back. Nissan’s lyric elegiac poetry, reflecting social transformation and political upheaval, reads like an “epitaph.” After all, “aren’t all human beings / sort of war damage”?
The Utopians by Grace Nissan. Ugly Duckling Presse, May 2025.
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.
The Meadow is a free, annual print and online journal of Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada, publishing works from new and established writers and artists and one of the few literary journals in the country publishing students alongside well-known authors. Submissions are open every year from August 15 thru January 15. This newest issue features nonfiction by Trinity Smith and Landa wo, fiction by Billy Thompson, Kendall Klym, S. Frederic Liss, David W. Berner, and Laura Lambie, and poetry by Robert Wrigley, Jan Beatty, Ace Boggess, Dani Putney, Audrey Buccola, Melanie Diaz, Moon Grizzle, Jason D. Benjamin, Rachael A. Trotter, Brytlee Hansen, Hunter Brown, Isai Diaz, Christopher Linforth, Kimberly Ann Priest, Gabrielle Patterson, among many more contributors rounding out this reading experience. A beautifully crafted publication to savor slowly and deeply through the year or gobbled up in one sitting!
Though Meghan O’Gieblyn’s book was published in 2021, it has only become more relevant with the rise of and reliance on AI. O’Gieblyn explores how we think about this emerging technology and the effects of that thought process on our humanity and theology. She draws on a variety of philosophers, especially those from the middle part of the twentieth century who were dealing with the horrors of World War II and the role technology played in it, as well as her personal experience, as she attended a fundamentalist Bible college before leaving her faith behind.
One of the main ways O’Gieblyn thinks through technology’s role in and effects on our lives is through the metaphors we use, as we often refer to ourselves, especially our minds/brains, as machines — for example, we talk about processing information or experiences, as if our minds are CPUs or servers. Similarly, we anthropomorphize technology, a comparison that has only become more pronounced as computers, especially AI, have begun to mimic humans more convincingly — many of us use he/she pronouns to refer to our GPS, to name one example.
O’Gieblyn ties all of these comparisons to theology, as we have begun to speak of computers and AI as having predictive capabilities, as when a website suggests a book or movie we might like. Since even the creators of some algorithms and AI admit they don’t quite know how they work, they become like a god that is beyond our understanding. The problem then occurs when we make them into a sovereign god — like the Calvinist God whom humans should not question because of their omnipotence and omniscience — as we have begun trusting machines to make decisions. Thus, we lose our humanity, depending too much on something we see as beyond us.
O’Gieblyn wants to remind readers of the stakes in such an off-loading, as technology that doesn’t take our humanity into consideration (or humans who don’t realize what they’re giving up) will lead to a technology and to lives without purpose or meaning.
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.
Comet Neowise was visible in the Northern Hemisphere’s night sky during July 2020. A group of friends “camping near the water to see” the comet serves as the backdrop for Ariel Machell’s debut chapbook, In the Wake, which explores the theme of “fleetingness,” asking: “How much will we allow to pass us by?”
Predominantly composed of prose poems, the collection is an apostrophe to the Willamette River, an elegy for past intimacy, a celebration of cosmic phenomena, and introspective “thinking about what made an ending.” The poems alternate between addressing Memory as an intimate other and recounting the camping trip when the comet “erupted” into the group’s shared vision, propelling readers toward philosophical inquiry about the essence of memory and how it navigates the complexities of time and distance.
Machell’s writing is firmly rooted in the river’s landscape and the relentless nature of memory, demonstrating a rich eco-philosophical elegiac lyricism. Her poetics prioritize felt experience over narrative clarity, offering deep intimacy while purposefully omitting specifics of the betrayal. “The sadness — I refused to explain it.” This absence inspires further inquiry: Does the origin of a feeling matter, or is the emotion itself the primary focus? The lack of definitive answers is among the collection’s strengths, embracing the “indefinite” with vulnerability.
Machell captures the “idea,” “image,” and “feel of” grief without resolution, allowing each poem to stir with the potential to “wake.” A vigil, disturbed water, an emergence — the triple entendre of the collection’s title allows “Possibility to do all the heavy work.” The title allows the poet-speaker to mourn the end of a romantic relationship, navigate the disturbed water left behind memory’s boat, and to catalyze “Waking up.” Some endings are beginnings.
In the Wake by Ariel Machell. Finishing Line Press, 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.
The Spring/Summer 2025 issue of Black Warrior Review (51.2) features the work of Artist Char Jeré with a full-color portfolio of work inside as well as on the cover. The issue also includes a dedicated portfolio of Palestinian writers with “amplified stories that challenge and inspire us, creating space for voices that refuse to be silenced.” In keeping with Black Warrior Review‘s “long tradition of pushing boundaries and championing brave new voices,” the editors write, “In putting together 51.2, we have read and written freely, unburdened by literary convention or fear of failure. We have shattered molds, challenged norms, and uplifted narratives that defy categorization. And in breaking with tradition, we have created a tradition that is entirely our own.”
Contributing to this new tradition is poetry by Angie Mazakis, Holly Zhou, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, Ashley Warner, Hussain Ahmed, Milla van der Have, Brionne Janae, Kim Jensen, Iqra Khan, Dana Tenille Weekes, Lisa Suhair Mujaj, Rajiv Mohabir, Haya Abunasser, Sa Whitley, and Thaer Husien; prose by Amber Starks, Uyen Phuong Dang, Thalia Williamson, Nicole Chulick, Robert Randolph, Jr., Megan Walsh, Thea Lim, Mary Leauna Christensen, M. K. Thekkumkattil, Suchita Chadha; and comics and art by Emily Lewandowski and H. Roth-Brown.
