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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!

Magazine Stand :: Blink-Ink – #57

“Summer Nights” is the them of Blink-Ink #57, apropos for this seasonal quarterly installment of the tiny, independent journal that always packs a big punch for readers. Submitting stories of “approximately 50 words,” writers in this issue help readers capture those beautiful and mysterious moments of summer: the stars, fireflies, sparks from campfires, a thousand points of light against the velvet dark, air as soft and warm as breath – both from long ago memories, recent encounters, or just creations from a writer’s mindscape of impossible dreams, or maybe yet to come to fruition.

Writers featured in this issue include Jennifer Mack, Angela James, Kendra Cardin, Katheryn Kulpa, Eileen M. Hector, Daryl Scroggins, Sarah Shum, Kathryn Silver-Harjo, Susan Israel, Cameron Vanderwerf, E.C. Traganas, Carolyn R. Russel, Emery Caroline Little, and many more, with cover art by Gemma Mathewson.

Note: Blink-Ink has announced that subscriptions rates will be increasing as of December 1, “so now is the time to save a few dollars and sign up or renew.” Who doesn’t love a bargain? And subscriptions are great for holiday gift giving!

Book Review :: Kursid Kids by Ronan Russell and Pat LaMarche

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

In Kursid Kids: Winter Turns [Book Two], the Kursid family are in a downward spiral. After breadwinner Koal loses his job, he, his wife, and three kids are evicted from their home. Despair forces them to take shelter in the woods, and as they try to evade the authorities something miraculous happens: a magic cat enters their lives and grants the two older kids special powers.

As a result, Winter, the oldest, can now morph between a human boy and a flying-swimming creature capable of hearing the area’s iron-handed ruler strategize about jailing the adults and breaking up the family. His sister, seven-year-old Pearl, has been given a different ability; to date, she has been able to warm even the coldest of hearts by a touch of her hand. But will this work on a greedy Magnate eager to make an example of the Kursids? It’s tense set-up and is left unresolved in this second of three intertwined books. (The first was released in 2022; the publication date of the third has not been disclosed.)

The books, written by a grandson and grandmother, weave a social justice fantasy into the harsh realities of class inequality. It’s a compassionate introduction to the day-to-day struggles of homeless families.

For readers 13 and older. All proceeds benefit the Homeless Remembrance Blanket Project.


Kursid Kids: Winter Turns [Book Two], Creative author, Ronan Russell; Technical author, Pat LaMarche, Illustrated by Aron Rook. Charles Bruce Foundation, September 2024.

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.

Book Review :: Glitter Road by January Gill O’Neil

Glitter Road by January Gill O'Neil book cover image

Review by Lauren Crawford

Glitter Road, January Gill O’Neil’s most recent poetry collection, is about change. The poems tell the story of a speaker entering new chapters in her life after the loss of her life partner. Part of that new chapter illustrates her adventures and the exploration of her new identity on new soil: The South.

So many Southern voices, cultures and influences fill these pages. There, change is everywhere: “Here’s the nadir of our suffering, which started in one place to end in another.” We are called to the attention of the South’s gruesome past with racism and division, and Gill does not shy away from braiding culture shock and a land littered with a violent history against a backdrop of Mississippi landscape, the river often speaking in metaphor to the possibilities of change, even for the South itself.

We also bear witness to the change in family; the speakers’ relationship with her young children, as well as another chance at romance with a new, budding love. O’Neil describes the Southern landscape as “A repository for memory preserving a shared moment as when two people have loved each other well the topography transforms, diverges over time, cleaves a clearer path to where it was always meant to go.” And what a gentle, intimate way of writing how to embrace change in an unfamiliar land, and perhaps even how to leave the door open for more.


Glitter Road by January Gill O’Neil. CavenKerry Press, February 2024.

Reviewer bio: Lauren Crawford holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. A native of Houston, Texas, she is the recipient of the 2023 Willie Morris Award, a finalist for the 2024 Rash Award, third place winner of the 2024 Connecticut Poetry Award, and the second place winner of the 2020 Louisiana State Poetry Society Award. Her debut collection, Catch & Release, is forthcoming in 2025 with Cornerstone Press as part of the University of Wisconsin’s Portage Poetry Series. Her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Passengers Journal, The Appalachian Review, Prime Number Magazine, SoFloPoJo, The Florida Review, Red Ogre Review, Ponder Review, The Midwest Quarterly, THIMBLE, The Worcester Review, The Spectacle and elsewhere. Lauren currently teaches writing at the University of New Haven and serves as the assistant poetry editor for Alan Squire Publishing. Twitter @LaurenCraw4d

Sponsored :: New Book :: The Poet’s Guide to Publishing

cover of The Poet's Guide to Publishing by Katerina Stoykova

The Poet’s Guide to Publishing: How to Conceive, Arrange, Edit, Publish and Market a Book of Poetry, Nonfiction by Katerina Stoykova

McFarland, August 2024

This guide to publishing poetry is designed for the poet on a journey from facing a pile of poems to celebrating at a book launch. If you have been writing poetry for some time and have accumulated a volume of work, this guide is designed to meet you where you are in your book creation or publication process. It is organized into five sections to mimic the distinct phases of conceiving, arranging, editing, publishing, and promoting a poetry collection. Each section provides a mix of theoretical materials and practical assignments to demystify and ground the publication process.

Where to Submit Roundup: September 13, 2024

33 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

If you are superstitious and don’t want to tempt fate by going out on Friday the 13th, NewPages has plenty of reasons to keep you safe at home with our weekly submission opportunities roundup for the week of September 13, 2024.

Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Speaking of which, our September eLitPak is slated for release next Wednesday!

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: September 13, 2024”

Book Review :: American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin

Review by Jami Macarty

In American Scapegoat, Enzo Silon Surin’s second full-length collection of poetry, the poet writes from a weightiness of being a Haitian-born immigrant to America and the “weight of the wait” for the country to fully reckon with its history of violence and injustice.

“if you’re black, like me, and were born
mourning your rotations around the sun,
you’re a full breath closer to the grave.”

Enzo Silon Surin takes on the myth, ethos, and pathos of America in his poems, and he pulls no punches. Nor should he. There is necessity in bringing to language for readers what the Black body experiences “when / it is being / sized up.” What those persecuted “felt,” the manner of their deaths, whether bullets, rope, or a knee to the neck, must be told. The poet is “writing in the hope that you will care about [his] early / demise, enough to be moved by how often [he] find[s] [him]self on [his] / knees.

Parts “appeal,” testimony, “vigil,” and sermon, Enzo Silon Surin is “in search of something whole and tender.” He “rebel[s] against the Union / by putting” a “felt-tip” pen in his hands and making “black characters” live again in the movies and in our collective “memory.” Enzo Silon Surin writes their “name[s]” and claims his among poets.


American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin. Black Lawrence Press, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, 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, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

New Book :: 90 Ways of Community: Nurturing Safe & Inclusive Classrooms Writing One Poem at a Time

90 Ways of Community: Nurturing Safe & Inclusive Classrooms Writing One Poem at a Time by Sarah J Donovan, Mo Daley, Maureen Young Ingram
Seela Books, September 2024

For writing poetry in grades 6-12, this indispensable resource guides teachers through a year-long journey of poetic engagement, fostering a safe and inclusive environment where every student feels valued and heard. Grounded in social emotional learning and trauma-informed pedagogy, the authors provide practical, adaptable lessons that seamlessly integrate poetry writing into any curriculum.

With a clear framework developed by experienced educators, 90 Ways of Community is designed for teachers at all levels, from novices to veterans. Each chapter begins with a heartfelt “Dear Teacher” letter, offering context and support, while thematic clusters of prompts inspire creativity and connection. The book covers a wide range of topics, from celebrating individuality to extending community and healing through poetic expression. The authors draw on real classroom experiences and the collective wisdom of a community of teacher-poets.

90 Ways of Community is more than a collection of prompts—it’s a roadmap to building a classroom culture where poetry becomes a vital tool for learning and growth. Join in nurturing the hearts and minds of students, one poem at a time.

A free digital version is available at www.ethicalela.com/store

New Lit on the Block :: Pictura Journal

Pictura Journal is a new online journal publishing poetry, prose, and visual artwork three times a year (April, August, December), with the editors favoring “concrete images and work grounded in a strong sense of place.” The journal’s name itself, says Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief Alicia Wright, comes from this same desire for story.

“I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of ‘image as narrative,’ and I wanted a name that made the same statement. I couldn’t tell you the first time I read the Latin phrase ut pictura poesis (and it would take some work for me to recall any more of the specifics of Ars Poetica), but when I was formulating the idea for the journal, ‘as is poetry, so is painting’ pointed directly at what I was aiming for. So: Pictura. I want to publish work that values the concrete image as a storytelling device, and artwork that fits well alongside it.”

Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Pictura Journal”

Magazine Stand :: The Lake – September 2024

The Lake September 2024 issue is now available online if you are looking for the best in contemporary poetry from new and established poets. This newest monthly installment features works by Ian Badcoe, Mark Belair, David Capps, Charlotte Cosgrove, Clive Donovan, Arvilla Fee, Lesley Caroline Friedman, Ann Heath, Chris Kinsey, Claire Scott, J. R. Solonche, and Jeffery Allen Tobin. Readers will also enjoy book reviews of Sarah Wimbush’s Strike and Ian Clarke’s Staying On. One Poem Reviews, which share a poem from a recently published collection, include works by Smitha Sehgal, Leslie Tate, and Angela Topping.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The eight short stories in Dogs and Monsters, Mark Haddon’s latest collection, run the gamut between the touching and the creepy. Most are adaptations of well-known tales: The Myth of the Minotaur; The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells; Zeus’ granting of eternal life, but not eternal youth, to his daughter’s mortal lover; and the suffering of St. Anthony the Great, among them.

In this contemporary retelling, Haddon interrogates important themes including maternal love, sexuality, religious devotion, fear, the cruelty of teenagers, bias against the disabled, and lust.

“St. Brides Bay” introduces a divorced woman whose role in her daughter’s wedding brings up a series of what-ifs about her own partnership choices. It’s a poignant, stinging reflection on the road not taken. Similarly, “The Mother’s Story” addresses maternal love for a disabled son, a child who is scorned by his community and rejected by his father. Like the king’s wife in the story of the Minotaur, gossip about the child’s lineage persists, isolating the pair. Whether love is enough to sustain them remains an open question.

As the title suggests, dogs play a role in many of the tales. But they are not always humankind’s best friends. Indeed, the boundaries between humans and animals are often murky as they serve as both savior and antagonist.


Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon. Doubleday, October 2024.

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.

Where to Submit Roundup: September 6, 2024

31 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

It is September. Time for color changes, spooky season, and pumpkin spice. It also means that submissions are opening for autumn and winter issues of literary magazines. NewPages is here to help you find a home for your work with our weekly roundup.

Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: September 6, 2024”

Editor’s Choice :: The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County

The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County by I.M. Aiken
Flare Books / Catalyst Press, September 2024

Informing the storyline for The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, I.M. Aiken worked on ambulances off and on since the 1980s, starting in the Boston area where she was born and raised. She served one tour in Iraq with the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division, and now lives in Vermont.

This novel is based on her 40 years of work in the paramedic field and centers on main character Alex Flynn. Following in the footsteps of their beloved Boston cop father, Alex trains as an EMT and spends years chasing emergencies in an ambulance. But the person Alex becomes is a far cry from the hero they signed up to be.

Over four decades in public safety, Alex encounters a changing America, where veterans are left to rot on streets, women are welcome in dangerous fields but abusers still walk free, and service providers are subjected to intense public scrutiny while being denied the resources they need. After moving from bustling Boston to small town Vermont, Alex discovers an escalating feud between emergency operators and must decide which to protect: their community or their legacy.


To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Magazine Stand :: 805 – August 2024

The online literary and art magazine 805 August 2024 offers readers one final glimpse of summer, on the cusp of fall, just as Margaret Lynch writes about cancer, “teetering between the joy of life and fear of death,” and debut poet Anna Han “pens the boundless possibilities that bloom in a child’s heart.” Readers can enjoy more poetry by Logan Foster, Lisa Loop, Alicia Rebecca Myers, Charlene Pierce, Ivy Raff, Ahrend Torrey; fiction by A.C. Langlois , Sherri Moshman-Paganos, Zach Keali’i Murphy; creative nonfiction by Angela Abbott, Paul Grussendorf, Kira Rosemarie, Olivia Wieland; and art by Jake Huang (cover art), Janina Karpinska, Lauren McGovern, Marsha Solomon, and Sabahat Ali Wani.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Magazine Stand :: Chestnut Review – Summer 2024

Chestnut Review’s Summer 2024 Issue ushers in a new season at the magazine, Volume Six, Year Six (6:1). Editor-in-Chief James Rawlings’ interview with Chestnut Review Chapbooks author, Javeria Hasnain (SIN), opens this issue with cover art by Jules Ostara whose wild and unpredictable, “Ink Flowers,” sets the scene for stubborn artists and writers.

Contributors also include writers Esther Ra, Beth Anstandig, Em Townsend, Elane Kim, Chiwenite Onyekwelu, Alvin Kathembe, Nikki Ummel, Iyanuoluwa Adenle, Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi, Audrey Gamache, Andrew Nickerson, Caroline Beuley, Chidera Solomon Anikpe, J. L. Bermúdez, and art by David Sheskin, Roger Camp, Anselmo Alliegro, and Charles Byrne.

Readers are immersed in work that examines tensions with family, forgiveness, queerness, religion, astronomy, grief, childhood, animals, gothic, natural spaces, city streets, girlhood, and—as always—humanity. Like the chestnut trees that persist, this summer issue values the stubborn belief in each individual’s own worth, in the art of their hands, eyes, and mind.

Book Review :: Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton

Review by Jami Macarty

Sally Ashton’s fifth book Listening to Mars offers readers “thought experiments otherwise known as poems” while “trying to understand” the COVID-19 health crisis, which brought with it death, uncertainty, anxiety, social upheaval, and political protest. Across the globe, “People began to die” or were “separated” from their families while “shelves emptied” and “we were forced to watch the execution of an innocent man in slow motion, over and over.” In other words, “the really big tragedies [of] these days.”

Conjuring “The Dark Night of the Soul,” by St. John of the Cross, and “In a Dark Time,” by Theodore Roethke, Ashton endeavors to “make sense of a dark time” via a Sci-Fi space curiosity. Imagining life on Mars seems to offer artistic escape to the poet, while calling out billionaires’ plots for a “backup planet” bolsters the purpose of her expression. In the moon’s waxing “curve,” a welcomed companionship; the “Stay-at-home orders to ‘flatten the curve’” a source of “panic.” The poems centering on celestial spheres in the Milky Way Galaxy act like points on orbital planes beaming attention back to Earth. The gravity of the situation on Earth is inescapable.

Planetary health and human anguish are also suggested in Ashton’s go-to poetic forms: the monostich and prose paragraphs. The spacious singular lines and dense text blocks suggest the themes and thematic tensions of the poems. The monostiches enact isolation, alienation, and lacunae; prose poems evoke connection, extension, and protest (of form). The collection also includes haibun and “haiku-ish” expressions. These Japanese-derived forms offer lyric qualities adept at managing grief and important to balancing “present danger” in the poems. The “sad trombone” and “highs of panic” brightened by “glints of light.”

Ultimately, the poet seeks “words that make the world look like what it feels like.” In a dark time, Sally Ashton finds her “way with a pen.”


Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton. Cornerstone Press, February 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, 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, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

New Magazines August 2024

Literary magazines offer readers the newest in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, artwork, and hybrid forms both in print and online. Keep your reading fresh by checking out the New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!

Each month, we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content information for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!

Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Literary Magazines and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay the most up-to-date on all things literary!

[Image by Belinda Cave from Pixabay]

New Books August 2024

Still plenty of time to enjoy summer reading. To help you achieve that goal, check out the August 2024 New Books Received. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles.

If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.

[Image by go_see from Pixabay]

Book Review :: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota

Review by Kevin Brown

The main plot of The Spoiled Heart, Sunjeev Sahota’s latest novel, follows Nayan Olak as he campaigns for General Secretary of Unify, a British trade union he has been a member of since he began working. However, his campaign receives a stronger-than-expected challenge from Megha Sharma, a DEI officer who has worked there for roughly a year.

They represent two different approaches to race, though both are of Indian descent, largely due to their class differences: Nayan’s parents struggled financially, while Megha comes from inherited wealth, which she has chosen to turn her back on. Nayan wants Unify to be color-blind, to focus on all working people’s needs, regardless of race, while Megha believes that race and racism matter as much as class, if not more, leading the reader to explore the land-mined terrain of identity politics in a diverse Britain in the twenty-first century.

Further complicating Nayan’s life is the return of a writer he knew when they were children, Sajjan Dhanoa. They didn’t know each other well, and Sajjan left the area to go to college, rarely returning. In looking for an idea for a new book, Sajjan begins telling Nayan’s story, not only the campaign, but the death of Nayan’s mother and son in a purposeful fire at his parents’ store nearly twenty years before.

Nayan begins dating Helen and helping her son Brandon, though the reader ultimately discovers Helen, as well as Sajjan’s family, know more about Nayan’s losses than they’re saying. Because Sajjan narrates much of the story, relying on various people’s accounts, Sahota is also calling into question the validity of narrative, an idea reinforced through one of Megha and Nayan’s main confrontations. While the reader may understand exactly what happened, they won’t know exactly why, as even the characters are unsure of their motives, much like people in real life.


The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota. Viking, 2024.

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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools edited by Royel M. Johnson and Shaun R. Harper addresses the ways that the U.S. right-wing has distorted and manipulated facts about how history and culture are taught.

This thirteen-essay collection harkens back to 2019 when scholar Nikole Hannah Jones launched the 1619 Project, a multimedia effort highlighting enslaved people’s vital contributions to U.S. economic and social development.

Not everyone was pleased with this message and white conservatives and Christian nationalists wasted no time in attempting to mute its impact as an educational tool: Since January 2021, eighteen states have passed limits on public school teaching – pre-K to university level – about race and racism. Gender, gender identity, and ways to fight oppression have also captured attention – and have been similarly banned. In addition to legislative attacks, the backlash has spawned “parents’ rights” groups to oppose student exposure to Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their classrooms.

But why all this momentum?

As The Big Lie makes clear, few educators teach this material. Moreover, the anthology challenges the idea that lessons about race or gender are “divisive” and contests the notion that such topics cause white (and male) students to experience “reverse discrimination.” This anti-racist and pro-democracy perspective makes the book essential reading for activists, teachers, researchers, and students.


The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools edited by Royel M. Johnson and Shaun R. Harper. Harvard Education Press, September 2024.

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.

Magazine Stand :: Salamander – 58

The Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Salamander (58) features fiction by Laton Carter, Jules Fitz Gerald, Amber Silverman, Casey Wiley, Lindsey Godfrey Eccles; creative nonfiction by Marin Sardy, Jannie Edwards, Kristin Ginger; an art portfolio by Stephanie Juanillo; and poetry by CD Eskilson, Amy Smith, Andrew Hemmert, Sonja Vitow, Michael Quattrone, Michael Beard, D. Dina Friedman, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Bernadette Geyer, Cathlin Noonan, Sean Cho A., Caroline Kanner, Stephanie Yue Duhem, José A. Alcántara, Maria Surricchio, Nancy Lynée Woo, Aliyah Cotton, Sara Backer, Jennifer Stewart Miller, Veronica Kornberg, Sheree La Puma, Caylee Gardner, Ella Flores, Kathleen Winter, Ruth Hoberman, Lizzy Beck, Ann Keniston, Rob Macaisa Colgate, Christa Fairbrother, and Vera Kroms.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Where to Submit Roundup: August 30, 2024

32 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

Severe thunderstorms, power outages, oh my! It’s been a week. Strong storms blew in and took out power lines, trees, lawn furniture, signs, flags, and who knows what else? When you have nothing to do, what better way to while away the hours than writing and editing? With September and Labor Day around the corner don’t miss out on the end-of-August opportunities!

Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: August 30, 2024”

Book Review :: Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce

Review by Jennifer Brough

Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Ponce’s debut Blood Red is a rush of a novel that charts a 38-year-old unnamed woman’s unravelling. She skates through a city full of drugs, sex, and friendship, desperate to avoid looming life-changing decisions and a skin-picking compulsion that has haunted her since childhood.

In the midst of a rocky divorce, the narrator flits between casual lovers. Her regular hook-up lives in a cave-like apartment, where the walls appear as muddied vines pulsing under peeling pink paint. As her inner conflict spirals, Ponce uses color to demonstrate the fracturing between the body’s boundaries, with the ‘softness’ of her character’s inner self (white) that threatens to spill over and against the world’s forceful, hardened outer shell (red). Pain and pleasure are a hair’s width apart, creating a discomforting middle ground when these opposites converge in sexual encounters, memories, and vivid hallucinations.

Booker delivers a seamless translation that sweeps us along in this vortex, effortlessly layering the narrator’s deceptive cynical tone with the fragile stream-of-consciousness underpinning it. Ponce pushes her character to the brink of a visceral internal void, leaving the reader akin to the narrator in ‘trying to embrace the untouchable or unnamable’ experience of this mercurial text.


Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce; Translated by Sarah Booker. Dead Ink, January 2024 (Restless Books, 2022).

Reviewer bio: Jennifer Brough is a slow writer and workshop facilitator. Her work has appeared in Ache Magazine, Eunoia Review, SICK Magazine, Artsy, Barren Magazine, among others. Jennifer is writing her first poetry pamphlet, Occult Pain and was shortlisted for the Disabled Poets Prize’s Best Single Poem 2023.

New Lit on the Block :: The Zinnia Anthology

In the symbolic language of flowers, the zinnia represents friendship, remembrance, and lasting affection, which is what inspired the name of a new online annual, The Zinnia Anthology. Here, readers can find short stories, poems, memoirs, and art focusing on human connections and relationships with each other outside of the romantic lens. “Specifically,” the editors note, “friendships and familial relationships that we often take for granted or easily overlook.” Indeed, the first issue, themed “Platonic Relationships” sets the tone of bringing marginalized issues to light and offers inspiration for readers to see their platonic relationships in a different light.

Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: The Zinnia Anthology”

Magazine Stand :: World Literature Today – Sept/Oct 2024

World Literature Today September/October 2024 features Japanese Women Writers in the 21st Century. Such writers as Mieko Kawakami, Hitomi Kanehara, Hiroko Oyamada, and Coreco Hibino are profiled in the cover feature guest-edited by Rea Amit. Additional highlights include numerous interviews, including a Q&A with Turkish writer Elif Shafak; poetry from China, Ukraine, and the US; fiction from Kenya; and Alejandro Puyana on six “classic” and “upstart” literary debuts. Be sure to check out the latest must-read titles in WLT’s book review section—including new releases by Conceição Lima, Yoko Ogawa, and Salman Rushdie—and much more!

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: Near Where the Blood Pools by Ben Terry

Review by Elizabeth S. Wolf

I don’t always read front matter, but with Ben Terry’s Near Where the Blood Pools: A Novel in Verse, I’m glad I did. There’s a character list organized around Cephas, older brother to Hope, a young girl who disappears. The cast includes Memphis, a Seer; Church ladies; and a can of ashes. I was intrigued.

In the author’s note, Terry illustrates a span of roughly twelve years before and after Hope’s disappearance: Hope Exists — Losing Hope — Hope Gone — What Remains

Calling attention to the timeframe of each poem requires readers to mind where each speaker is along this path. In addition to Hope’s family, treasure hunters trawl old pig farms. Bones sing. Menfolk go to jail.

Terry is currently incarcerated; his poems about prison are pithy and authentic. The reader frequently stumbles over exquisite lines, such as: “Memphis parted his lips to speak / and from them poured coal / and ash and water and time.” And from Marl Mae: “Everything good gets taken. / That’s history straightening up / before the future arrives.”

In a novel in verse, the few words on each page must develop character, place, and plot. It’s a tall challenge. Ben Terry succeeds.


Near Where the Blood Pools by Ben Terry. Livingston Press, July 2024.

Elizabeth S. Wolf has published five books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a 2018 Rattle prizewinner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.

Magazine Stand :: Allium – Summer 2024

The Summer 2024 issue of Allium is available for readers to enjoy online, opening with works by Featured Artist Jeanne Marie Beaumont, who works ‘principally in collage and assembly. Readers can take these final days of summer to savor fiction by De’Andre Holmes, Lily Swanson, Hayden Casey, Daniel Steinmetz, Tom Roth, Elise Swanson Ochoa, Odin Weller, Lori Cidylo, Alex Rawitz, Brad Dress, Louise Wilford, Steve Ives, J. D. Strunk, George Tyler, Maura Stanton, Eve Rayve, Amelia Dellos; nonfiction by Scott Hurd, Gail Tyson, Deja A. Smith, Chelsey Clammer, David Tippetts; and poetry by Grant Chemidlin, Amy Miller, William Orem, Arden Stockdell Geisler, Riane Bayne, Eric Ellis, Yana Kane, Aurora Bones, Banah Ghadbian, Alexandra Riseman, Justine Mercado, Sarah Brockhaus, Alex Schmidt, Jeremy Radin, Caroline Patterson, Monet Lewis, Kelly DuMar, Rosanne Singer, Frances Klein, Brendan Bense, Vanessa Ogle, Nathan Santiago, Jane Costain, and Alanna Shaikh.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman

Review by Kevin Brown

The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, Shechtman’s lengthy title and subtitle might make readers think they know what they’re getting when they open her book, but they would be mistaken. While the crossword puzzle is certainly one of Shechtman’s interests, there is much more going on here, for good and ill, depending on what readers are looking for.

If one wants the focus to remain on crossword puzzles, she has an interesting perspective, given that she published her first New York Times crossword puzzle when she was nineteen, and given that she is female. Despite the male-dominated landscape of the CrossWorld today, Shechtman points out several important women who helped shape the development of the puzzle. Similarly, she points out the continued sexism of that CrossWorld, not merely in the fact that most puzzle creators are male, but in the clues and solutions one would see.

If the reader is only looking for a book on crossword puzzles, though, they’ll be disappointed to find that Shechtman spends only about half the book, at best, on that area. Instead, she has written what she refers to near the end of the book as a “memoir wrapped in a cultural history.” The memoir aspect of this book centers around her struggles with anorexia, connecting that to her fascination with crossword puzzles. This part of the book also pulls heavily from feminist theoreticians and Freudian analysis, as Shechtman uses both of those approaches to understand who and how she is. Those sections might push a reader looking for a history of crossword puzzles.

That said, the combination largely works. Shechtman clearly lays out the connections between gender and crosswords and anorexia, helping readers to see how she puzzled her way through her life, in more ways than one.


The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle by Anna Shechtman. HarperOne, March 2024.

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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Where to Submit Roundup: August 23, 2024

31 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

It’s been an exhausting week, hasn’t it? Let NewPages help you take away some of the work in finding a place to submit to with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the week of August 23, 2024.

Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

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Book Review :: The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The folk music scene of the 1960s through 1990s is as much a character in The Singer Sisters as the many members of the large family whose struggles and conflicts it chronicles. They’re a diverse lot and include once-popular singer Judie Zingerman, her daughter Emma, son Leon, ex-husband Dave Cantor, and sister Sylvia, the other half of the renowned Singer Sisters.

As the story unfolds, generational conflicts emerge and long-held family secrets begin the rise to the surface. The result is a rich and complicated multi-tiered family story, in which bonds are repeatedly tested but never completely unravel. This makes the novel an intergenerational love story, with wholly believable characters whose flaws and insecurities are writ large.

Issues of reproductive justice are skillfully woven into the story, and the political milieu of the times becomes an important, but subtle, backdrop for what is revealed. This is a story about the big stuff – life, death, career aspirations, sexual agency, parenting – but all are handled with a light enough touch to make this a debut to savor.

In addition, insight into what it takes to be a successful musician, the constant travel, the frayed relationships, and the pressure to keep audiences engaged and entertained add heft to the book. Highly recommended.


The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer. Flatiron Books, August 2024.

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.

Book Review :: Bear by Julia Phillips

Review by Kevin Brown

The epigraph of Bear comes from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about Snow-white and Rose-red, setting up Phillips’ modern-day fairy tale about two sisters, so readers should expect a bit of the fantastic. Given the echoes of fairy tales that run throughout the novel, the reader might expect the bear of the title to serve as a symbol or metaphor, perhaps even turning the story into an allegory. However, Phillips avoids that trap, focusing instead on the relationship between Sam and Elena, two sisters roughly a year and a half apart in age. Or, at least, she focuses on Sam’s view of that relationship, as readers get her thoughts on life, but not Elena’s.

They live on an island off the coast of Washington that relies on tourism, and they are struggling to survive. Their mother is sick after years of working in a nail salon, so they have accumulated serious debt. They both have service industry jobs—Elena at the country club and Sam selling concessions on the ferry—leaving them with only the house as an asset, the house where their grandmother lived, then their mother, and now them. Sam is waiting until their mother dies, so they can sell the house and leave the island forever.

In the midst of their day-to-day lives, a bear arrives—an oddity on their island—and they react in opposite ways to its appearance. Their reactions drive the plot, revealing more about them than the reader and they, perhaps, know. Some fairy tales end with a “happily ever after,” leading readers to wonder whether the sisters’ relationship will ever be the same again.


Bear by Julia Phillips. Hogarth, June 2024.

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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Magazine Stand :: The Meadow – 2024

The Meadow is the annual literary journal of Truckee Meadows Community College. In this 2024 issue, readers will discover fiction, nonfiction, and poetry selected from the best student work alongside national contributors such as Meghan Sterling, Mark Sanders, Katheryn Levy, George Perrault, Kathy Nelson, Richard Robbins, Janelle Cordero, Daniel Edward Moore, Max Stone, January Santoso, Lenny DellaRocca, Natalie Solmer, Deidre Sullivan, as well as many others wrapped in the mesmerizing, mythical cover art, Icarus, by Kateryna Bortsova.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: In Violet by Margo LaPierre

Review by Jami Macarty

In violet. Inviolate. In her chapbook In Violet, Margo LaPierre brings her attention to homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings. From that fine line between sound and definition, the poet inquires: How does a person who has been violated refrain from perpetrating violation? In other words, how does a person committed to nonviolence conduct herself in a violent world?

In Violet’s ten poems are offered to the reader at a conceptual and analytic vantage from the speaker’s traumatic past. The speaker seems to have acknowledged the “system of stress” and has passed into the rage phase. The rage may be rightful and only natural, but it is what is “gripping the body.” The speaker is comfortable enough taking revenge against “all [her] rapists” in her dreams, but fantasizing about it during waking hours causes discomfort. As a result, she seems to switch focus to the “ones [she’s] hurt.” Such is the despairing struggle between “snuffed” and “saved” in the aftermath of trauma. Yet, each phase of recovery is necessary, all of it together a “healing spell.”

On the pages of In Violet, Margo LaPierre brings to color what “lays years upon [a] body” and the lagging “effects of / the stressor.” In the process, the poems of In Violet take some steps away from “villainy.”


In Violet by Margo LaPierre. Anstruther Press, 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, 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, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Book Review :: Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis is an inspirational text, reminding us that we can do something about gentrification, sky-high rents, and deteriorated living conditions. Although it is short on practical details, the book offers readers an upbeat look at how tenants can amass power by organizing their buildings and then branching out to organize city blocks, as well as whole neighborhoods and even cities. The goal? Better code enforcement, investment in neighborhoods, and controls on rent increases.

Both authors are involved in the Los Angeles Tenants Union and draw on examples of successful organizing to forestall evictions, lower rents, and improve living conditions. But while the book doesn’t address the cost of housing maintenance—that is, if housing was not privately owned and a source of profit, would the government be responsible for providing upkeep and other services? Would the tenants form co-ops and each pay their share of the total?

Despite these deficits, Abolish Rent offers a keenly-drawn alternative to housing for personal gain, with landlords literally operating as Lords of the Land and profiting from their investments. Yes, rent is too damned high, and Abolish Rent reminds us that we can win affordable and accessible housing if we organize to demand it.


Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. Haymarket Books. September 2024.

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.

Book Review :: The Monsoon War by Bina Shah

Review by Kevin Brown

This novel is the second (and possibly last) book in a series Shah began with While She Sleeps. It’s not necessary to have read the first novel to understand this one, though doing so would provide more depth and background on the world Shah has created. While She Sleeps focuses on life in The Green City (a fictional city in what seems to be Southwest Asia). Here, women have multiple husbands due to a nuclear war outside their country, which led to the Virus, which has led to women’s being unable to produce many children who survive. That novel focused on survival, especially for a small group of women who live in the Panah (sanctuary) underground. They serve as companions for the powerful men, not providing sex, but merely lying with the men until they fall asleep, offering an intimacy that has become absent from society.

In The Monsoon War, Shah focuses on resistance, as she moves the action to the mountains outside The Green City. This novel follows three different women—Alia, a wife to three husbands; Katy, a fighter in the Hamiyat (an all-female freedom fighter group); and Fatima Kara, a Commander of one of the Hamiyat units. Instead of merely surviving, these women find ways to try overthrowing the government, risking their lives in open rebellion (unlike the women of the Panah, who risked their lives in more subtle means of rebellion). In fact, all of the villages of the mountain have been quietly rebelling, as they raised their female daughters as male to avoid their being taken by the government and forced to be wives.

Shah points out in her acknowledgements that she drew on female fighters from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Columbia for much of the inspiration for this work, but she also acknowledges that women throughout the world resist patriarchal domination in a variety of ways. Through this novel, she celebrates that diversity, while reminding readers the work of rebellion is far from done.


The Monsoon War by Bina Shah. Delphinium Books, May 2023.

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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Wilson College MFA Accepting Applications for Fall Enrollment

Screenshot of Wilson College MFA program's fall enrollment flyer
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The Wilson College MFA program is designed for working professionals with a low-residency schedule tailored to meet the needs of artists allowing them to reach the next level in their field. View our flyer for more information and a link to our website.

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Apple in the Dark Winter 2024 Submissions

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Deadline: December 15, 2024
Apple in the Dark is reading for the Winter 2024 issue. Free submissions; tip jar donations accepted. We publish works of short fiction and creative nonfiction up to 1,500 words per piece. Multiple and simultaneous submissions are OK. Up to 3 pieces per submission. See flyer for more information and link to submit.

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Alternating Current Press Submissions Open for August—Closing Soon!

screenshot of Alternating Current Press August 2024 open submissions flyer
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Submissions now open for the Futurist Debut Book Award for debut books in any genre ($1,000 prize), the Spark Translation Prize for translated books ($1,000 prize), several anthologies, book-length nonfiction manuscripts, and more! See what’s closing at the end of August, and plan ahead for what’s opening in September. View our flyer and learn more at our website.

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Contest and Submission Opportunity from Black Fox Literary Magazine

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Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to Black Fox Literary Magazine’s Portraits of Failure Writing Contest! Deadline: August 31, 2024! We are also accepting free submissions for our Winter 2025 print issue. Free subs close on November 30, 2024! See flyer for more information and link to our website.

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Raven Chronicles’ Inaugural Annual Awards for Innovative Fiction & Nonfiction

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Deadline: October 1, 2024
We seek nonfiction & fiction work for publication in Spring 2025 on the theme Habitat: Planet Earth. Chosen authors will receive $1,000 and 50% of net sales. Each year we will publish two books, one fiction (speculative, utopian, historical, etc.) and one nonfiction (creative nonfiction, memoir, scientific, historical, etc.). A new theme will be chosen each year. Submissions now open. View our flyer for more information.

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Where to Submit Roundup: August 16, 2024

21 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

August is officially half over with. This means that our monthly eLitPak newsletter was officially released this week! There you can enjoy even more submission opportunities along with the ones below.

Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: August 16, 2024”

Book Review :: Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

Review by Kevin Brown

Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy’s most recent novel, is clear-eyed in its portrayal of motherhood, especially during the challenging first few years. The mother in this work—known only as Soldier—addresses her son—the Sailor of the title—throughout, explaining to him why she behaved the way she did when he was younger. She tells him that she used to be a different person, and she will be a different person again, but the sleep deprivation and constant demands of raising a young child have changed her, especially in her inability to think clearly.

She could be different if her husband helped with any aspect of her life, whether that’s directly taking care of their son or cooking dinner or doing absolutely anything to make her days easier. Not only does he not help her, he seems oblivious to her feelings and her state of being, and he definitely doesn’t notice the change their marriage has undergone.

Kilroy provides a contrast to Soldier’s husband in a friend she runs into at the playground, somebody who knew her before she had a son, a man who’s taking care of his three children, while his wife works as a doctor. Through that juxtaposition, the reader can clearly see that Kilroy isn’t critiquing men, in general, but the vast majority of them who do little to nothing to participate in the care of their children.

Her main focus, though, is simply on the realities of being a mother, one day after another, with all of the constant demands and the lack of appreciation. That focus is more than enough and more than needed.


Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy. Scribner, June 2024.

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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Magazine Stand :: The Lake – August 2024

The Lake poetry journal August 2024 issue is now online featuring works byJude Brigley, Douglas Cole, Bhaswati Ghosh, Jenny Hockey, Norton Hodges, Rustin Larson, Al Maginnes, Beth McDonough, Estill Pollock, Joshua St. Claire. This issue also includes reviews of Niki Herd’s The Stuff of Hollywood, Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems, Kathleen Strafford’s Girl in the Woods, and Martin Figura’s The Remaining Men. “One Poem Reviews” is a unique feature that invites writers to share a poem from a recently published collection. This month spotlights Mike Dillon and Scott Elder.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Magazine Stand :: The Main Street Rag – Summer 2024

The Main Street Rag Summer 2024 issue opens with an interview with Dave Essinger, whose novel, This World and the Next, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in October 2024 (discounted pre-order available here). Readers can also enjoy “Stories & Such” by Steve Putnam, Carlos Ramet, E. G. Silverman, Jessi Waugh, and Michael Woodruff, as well as lots of great new poetry from Joan Barasovska, Jacqueline Berger, Robert Cooperman, Mary Alice Dixon, R. E. Ericson, Greg Friedman, Bill Griffin, Alan Harawitz, PMF Johnson, Dianne Mason, John Minczeski, G.H. Mosson, Cal Nordt, Robert Perchan, Laura Ann Reed, John J. Ronan, Richard Allen Taylor, Miles Waggener, and Ronald Zack among many more.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: Stealing by Margaret Verble

Review by Kevin Brown

The title of Verble’s latest novel has multiple meanings throughout the work, ranging from the stealing up on somebody when they’re unaware to the theft of land that occurred when colonizers landed on North America to the life that the main character feels has been stolen from her.

Kit, a twelve-year-old Native American girl living in the middle part of the 20th century, tells the story of her life, ranging from when she was six, when her mother died of tuberculosis, to her current situation in a boarding school. That span covers a number of ways Indigenous people have continued to suffer from the colonization of their land. Her mother’s death reveals the poor healthcare; her Uncle Joe is an alcoholic, which ultimately leads to his death; his father, even though he served honorably in World War II (several people in town refer to him as a “war hero”), finds himself in a difficult legal situation due to Kit’s relationship with a new neighbor, Bella; the court puts Kit in a boarding school rather than with her family, trusting the state over her true relations.

Readers who are aware of what Native American children suffered at those schools won’t be surprised by what happens to Kit and her peers there. What they might be surprised by, though, is Kit’s resilience. As her relatives consistently remind her, they survived the Trail of Tears, so they can survive anything. Though the dominant white society tries to steal everything Kit values, she holds her true self in her heart, where nobody and nothing is able to take it away from her.


Stealing by Margaret Verble. Mariner Books, 2023.

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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Magazine Stand :: The Missouri Review – Summer 2024

The Missouri Review Summer 2024 is themed, “In the Altogether” and features debut fiction by Sara Beth Greene and Ina Lipkowitz, as well as new fiction from Mark Barlex and Hana Choi, new poems from Chaun Ballard, Amorak Huey, and Tina Schumann, and new essays from Jennifer Anderson, Nancy Jainchill, and Allen M. Price. Also included is an art feature on contemporary dada and an interview with classics scholar and acclaimed translator of The Odyssey and The Iliad, Emily Wilson. Cover art by Thomas Lerooy, Disclosure (2019).

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: à genoux by Morgan Christie

Review by Jami Macarty

In the chapbook à genoux, the “soft words” of Morgan Christie’s poems respond to Virginia Chihota’s intimate, folkloric artworks. à genoux, from the French “on one’s knees,” is the focus of both the poet and the artist who consider the various reasons and calls to bend a knee, ranging from protest to prayer.

Which gesture of kneeling has to do with willing supplication and which power dynamics?

how soundly the reason fumbles
from the tellings and retellings

they all took knees before
but only when they were told (“—white lines”)

When we “hear someone yell / get down on your knees” we know we are not being told “to pray.” To “recognize the distinction” between “having to bend” and wanting to “means to understand the sacred.” Ultimately, “longing for what is ours is why we keel.”

As Christie is brought to her knees by the history of subjugation, she bows to the strength of family. When “we think of kneeling / we don’t have to be on our own.”

Indeed, in à genoux, Morgan Christie and Virginia Chihota “kneel together” as “the truths” of their words and colors draw a warm “blended bath / of change.”

Gentle Reader, regardless of what Auden wrote, together Morgan Christie’s poetry and Virginia Chihota’s paintings make something happen. So does Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, who made this stunning, full-color chapbook!


à genoux by Morgan Christie; artwork by Virginia Chihota. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, 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, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Where to Submit Roundup: August 9, 2024

19 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

The first full week of August is behind us. The back-to-school panic and flurry will soon be in full swing. Take a moment to sit back, relax, write, edit, and submit! NewPages is here to help with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.

Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: August 9, 2024”

Add Indie Bookstores to Your Summer Adventures

NewPages Guide to Independent Bookstores in the U.S. and Canada is a frequently updated resource for finding local independent bookstores that offer curated selections, personalized recommendations, and unique atmospheres. Bookstores are also the hub of local communities, sharing their space to host cultural events and social efforts.

For authors and publishers, our list is a goldmine of opportunities for finding sales outlets and reading venues to promote your books. Indie bookstores network their local literary scenes, connecting writers directly with their audience.

NewPages.com currently lists only brick-and-mortar stores (no online-only, pop-up, mobile, comics-only shops, or shops with books as a side business). We offer free enhanced listings in our Guide to Independent Bookstores to help booksellers connect with book lovers.

If we’re missing any stores you know about, drop us a note!

[Thanks to our friends at The Booksmiths Shoppe in Danbury, CT, for the lovely photo! If you’d like to see your bookstore featured here, click the ‘drop us a note’ link above.]

Sponsored :: New Book :: Pulp into Paper

front cover of Pulp into Paper by Lenore Weiss

Pulp into Paper: A Novel, Fiction by Lenore Weiss

Atmosphere Press, April 2024

In the close-knit community of Hentsbury, racism and the local paper mill’s oppressive control over the town collide in a gripping tale set in the 1990s in southern Arkansas along the fictional Mud River.

Rae-Ann, owner of a convenience store and unofficial mayor of Hentsbury, finds her life intertwined with Vernon’s when a budding romance between them hits an unexpected roadblock. Their love story takes an abrupt turn when chemicals from the mill’s runoff claim the life of Rincon, a young black boy battling acute asthma. In a harrowing failed rescue attempt, Vernon, the plant’s Environmental Officer, relives the trauma of holding the dying boy in his arms.

As the community grapples with this tragedy, Vernon stumbles upon a back-door deal between state and local officials who ask him to suppress critical information about the mill’s dangerous hydrogen sulfide emissions. With the rising tensions, Rae-Ann begins to question whether Vernon will stand by his principles.

In the end, it’s Rincon’s determined grandmother, along with Rae-Ann and her older sister, who rallies the town to take action. Their efforts lead to the arrival of an EPA investigatory team, but not without consequences. When the dust settles, Vernon loses his job, but he and Rae-Ann embark on a new chapter in life together.

Magazine Stand :: The MacGuffin – Spring 2024

The MacGuffin Spring 2024 (volume 39) features Barbara Crooker’s selections from POET HUNT 28, including Dawn Dupler’s grand prize–winning “Scars” and honorable mention selections by Johnny Cate and MacGuffin regular Rebecca Foust. There is also a four-poem spread by POET HUNT 29 guest judge Michael Meyerhofer. New prose selected for this issue invites readers to enjoy the unfolding postmodernism of Max Blue’s “Preservation”; the satirical “Taylor Kills a Unicorn” by Laton Carter; and the madcap reporter’s narrative of Nicholas Litchfield’s “Superstars of Today.” This issue features artwork by Metro Detroit painter and designer Linda Pelowski.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.