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!
Europa Editions finds success in translations
By Motoko Rich
International Herald Tribune
February 26, 2009
It does not sound like a recipe for publishing success: a roster of translated literary novels written mainly by Europeans, relying heavily on independent-bookstore sales, without an e-book or vampire in sight.
But that is the formula that has fueled Europa Editions, a small publisher founded by a husband-and-wife team from Italy in 2005…[read the rest]
District took Bless Me, Ultima off sophomore reading list
By Danielle Gaines
[email protected]
February 24, 2009
Two teachers from Orestimba High School, upset that a book has been removed from their class reading lists, met with UC Merced students on Monday night.
The educators — Catherine Quittmeyer, chairwoman of the English department, and Andre Powell, English teacher — spoke to about a dozen Chicano literature students and future teachers on the university’s campus.
“This was an event for the students; a lot of them want to become teachers,” Quittmeyer said. “This is something I wish I was able to ask questions about when I was becoming a teacher.” [read the rest]
The Independent Weekly has announced their selection of picks for their 2009 Poetry Issue. Preliminary judges Brian Howe and Jaimee Hills passed along their selections to kathryn l. pringle who selected the following:
First Place: Christopher Salerno
Second Place: Alisha Gard
Third Place: James A. Hawley
Honorable Mention: C.P. Mangel
All have MP3s for your listening pleasure along with their poems to read.
From editors Mark Stricker and Jolynne Roorda: “nanomajority ia back from an unplanned hiatus, excited to reset the clock for our upcoming issues and planning to unveil some new projects in the near future. Thanks to our contributors for being so patient! From an editorial standpoint, nanomajority is interested in the various ways in which artists, writers, and critics intersect (or don’t); there is no single stylistic container or grouping from which we select projects to highlight. There is no overarching manifesto to guide us. We simply publish what interests us.”
nanomajority does not accept submissions in general, but if you have a project in mind – and after reviewing their site, you’ll see how broad a mind they have – you can contact them with a proposal.
In the most current issue: Lizzie Hughes, Myron Michael, e.t. and Michael Bolsinga.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
Summer Research Assistantships for Graduate Students
The Center is now accepting applications for graduate student summer research assistants. Recipients will have the opportunity to participate with the Center’s staff scholars in cutting-edge research and publication projects relating to key areas of Holocaust scholarship. Sample projects may include writing and editing for the Museum’s /Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945; /research and translating for the Center’s archival source series on /Documenting Life and Destruction/; and preparing in-depth studies and reports about the archival collections of the International Tracing Service (ITS), among others.
Applicants must be enrolled in or admitted to a graduate program at a North American university. The Center is unable to provide visa assistance for non-U.S. citizens. Applicants must have basic knowledge of the Holocaust, experience in conducting archival or library research and the ability to work as part of a team. In addition to English, fluency in one or more of the following languages is desired: German, Russian, Polish, Romanian Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Dutch, Hungarian, Slovak, and/or Croatian. Each assistantship will last for up to three months during the May-August time frame. Awardees will receive a stipend of $2,500/month. The Center will also provide funds for one roundtrip airline ticket to and from Washington, D.C. for travel within North America.
Application Procedure:
Applicants should submit a resume, a personal statement of no more than two pages in length, and one letter of recommendation from a faculty member or dean at his/her institution that speaks to the applicant’s qualifications. The personal statement must explain the significance of the assistantship to the applicant’s professional and/or academic goals, and the contributions the applicant’s skills and interests could make to the Center’s research and publication projects. Application materials must be received by March 31, 2009. All applicants will be notified of selection results by early April 2009.
Application materials should be sent to: Dr. Lisa Yavnai, Director, Visiting Scholar Programs, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024. Inquiries may be addressed to [email protected]
“Controversial gay writer Scott Symons, whose scandalous life and 1967 novel “Place d’Armes” rocked Canada’s literary world, has died at age 75. The Toronto-born author passed away at a Toronto nursing home on Monday after several years of poor health, his lawyer Marian Hebb said WednesdayShe remembered Symons as a bold personality who never shied away from strong views on politics, love and literature, at times to the detriment of his personal relationships.”
Herbert Hoover National Historic Site offers two residencies each of two to four weeks from May 1 through September 30. Residencies are open to all professional American artists. Application deadline: February 28
A Room of Her Own
2009 Writers’ Retreat
Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, New Mexico
“My Country is the Whole World”—Virginia Woolf
August 10-16, 2009
Includes: Meredith Hall on crafting memoir; Dana Levin on Sylvia Plath and the creation of “self”; Pamela Painter on double endings; Ellen McLaughlin on lies, secrets, and subtext; A special seminar with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rita Dove, and more.
Limited scholarships available; deadline midnight, March 15th, 2009. General Applications accepted on a rolling basis until June 1st, with notifications of acceptance beginning in early April and occurring roughly every two weeks until all slots are filled.
The third annual Conversations and Connections conference will be held in downtown DC on April 11, with Amy Hempel as the featured speaker. Registration includes the full day conference, one ticket for “Speed Dating with Editors,” a book, and a literary magazine subscription. Breakout sessions are geared to appeal to new and experienced writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and include topics like Fighting Writer’s Block with Play and Experimental Prompts, Sentence Power, Creative Nonfiction: Where are the boundaries? Do they exist?, The Digital Literary Landscape, Writing Sex Scenes, Grants for Writers: Where’s the money and how do you get it?, and more.
Galleries from AmateurArtwork.com are now in their new home at Prick of the Spindle, along with 12 new artists. View art from Jesse Lindsay, David Scott Tenorio, Amy Bernays, Pam Ross, Dave Mullins, Christy Call, and many more. Look for new artists to be added on a weekly or semi-weekly basis.
Also check out the graphic short, The Dragoon, written by Lane Kareska and illustrated by Cynthia Reeser.
Prick of the Spindle is open to submissions year-round.
Twelve Stories is an online literary journal dedicated to publishing quality short fictions of up to 1,500 words each. Editors are Molly Gaudry and Blythe Winslow, whose credentials are as follows: “One of us is a writing professor; the other works in a head shop. One of us is outspoken; the other is passive aggressive. Neither can sing.” Fair enough!
As the publication cycle is whenever Gaudry and Winslow receive “twelve stellar stories,” submissions are open, and sim/subs welcome.
The first issue features stories by Steve Almond, J.R. Angelella, Rusty Barnes, Matt Bell, Jimmy Chen, Timothy Gager, Richard Garcia, Kathryn Good-Schiff, Jim Hanas, Jeff Landon, Jennifer Levin, and Dan Moreau.
In one of the early poems of Isabella Baladine Howald’s haunting new collection, Secret of Breath, the poet writes, “What I love is not seeing, but the effort of seeing.” This untitled poem’s opening line could easily serve as the book’s Ars Poetica: Howald relentlessly self-interrogates as she scrutinizes the philosophical meaning behind her lover’s/husband’s death (it’s never quite specified who exactly died) – and, by extension, life. Continue reading “Secret of Breath”
Here is an austere and well-made collection which brings to mind a spitfire of phrases, like “German ingenuity” and “high modernism” and the “plasir” of the “illisable texte.” The book shifts its glasses and a-hems a bit before engaging me in a conversation which is charmingly incomprehensible. And despite its attempts to be cordial and funny and warm (okay, maybe not quite warm), I can't quite shake that feeling I used to have when I met my physicist boyfriend for beers after work and he'd start talking about trapping ions with lasers: it was sexy as hell but my eyes glazed over almost immediately – not because it was boring, but because I wasn't smart enough. I admit it: this book raises the presumed-dead spectre of my math fear. It feels clean and masculine and well-groomed and logical and intimidating in a way that made me put off writing this review for months. This isn't easy-going for me, but then, I don't think it's supposed to be. Continue reading “Irresponsibility”
Allison Carter’s book of experimental prose isn’t, as Danielle Dutton suggests in the introduction to the slender volume, “a kind of writing that gets called ‘cross-genre’ because it pulls all the best aspects from poetry and all the best aspects from fiction.” A Fixed, Formal Arrangement is far beyond that in its originality of thought and image as to feel like a new genre altogether; something like a planet and a star colliding, fusing a third heavenly body in the process. No longer a star and a planet, they orbit away – a wondrously altered thing. Continue reading “A Fixed, Formal Arrangement”
Mary Miller’s Big World, the second release from the mini-books division of Hobart: Another Literary Journal, is physically reminiscent of the 1950s-era pulp paperbacks you see stacked around used book stores. If I were older, I imagine that David Kramer’s bright front and back illustrations, the colored edges of the book’s pages, and the book’s small size would remind me of the good old days when I could buy naughty books for ten cents apiece and hide them in my back pocket. Continue reading “Big World”
In his introspective novella Circulation, Tim Horvath devotes special attention to examining the grey areas of modern life where reality and fantasy often meet and the distance between life and death dwindles. In what would best be described as character self-development, Horvath brings the reader face to face with the narrator Jay's dual preoccupations of family connection and recorded knowledge. The self examining nature of Circulation presents the reader with a sympathetic look at these twin pillars of the protagonist's identity, even as Jay begins to slowly tear them down. Continue reading “Circulation”
Like most families, the Verbicaros are anything but ordinary. Following five generations of a close knit Southern Italian family over the span of a century, The Islands of Divine Music by John Addiego follows the Verbicaros’ journey from Italy’s boot to San Francisco to the Yucatán Peninsula. Along the way, they encounter traces of the sacred and the profane, discovering themselves in the process. Continue reading “The Islandsof Divine Music”
You could say this is a novel about the Holocaust. You could say this is a story about secrets and the past, control and acceptance, love and emptiness. And The White Space Between is all these things, but, above all else, Ami Sands Brodoff has crafted a tale of ancestry and the familial bond. Continue reading “The White Space Between”
Family Secret is an exercise in using whimsical metaphor and sound to illustrate the rather serious business of love's inadequate worldly manifestations. With his quatrains of irreverent, fanciful observations, Murphy draws conclusions about the absurdity of love in the world we've elected to build. Continue reading “Family Secret”
A vague, unnamable danger drives much of the language throughout Howie Good’s Tomorrowland. The narrator speaks of a land in which “bodies in the early stages of decay hang like gray rags from the trees” and authorized personnel instruct evacuees “to wait for the destroying angels to tire and the broken buildings to stop burning.” It seems that the characters of this world cannot escape no matter how carefully they plot: secret police and paid snitches abound, and the whirring ceiling cameras never cease. Continue reading “Tomorrowland”
Nora Eisenberg tackles a touchy topic in When You Come Home – specifically, she writes about the mysterious Gulf War illness that afflicted a quarter of returning soldiers from the Gulf War, but, more generally, she explores the damage that soldiers sustain physically and emotionally during wartime. Continue reading “When You Come Home”
Get Lit!
April 10-19, 2009
Spokane, WA
The Northwest’s best festival for readers and writers features author presentations and readings, writing workshops and panels, author visits to schools throughout eastern Washington and into northern Idaho, youth poetry slams, and more. Many events are free to the public. The festival, now celebrating its 11th year, is produced by Eastern Washington University Press.
This year’s authors include: Simon Armitage, Charles Baxter, Margaret Lippert, Paul Roberts, Jane Smiley, David Suzuki, Ellen Wittlinger, Pamela Aidan, Zan Agzigian, Glenda Burgess, Patrick Carman, Sarah Conover, Chris Crutcher, Claire Davis, William Dietrich, Kathy Fagan, Deby Fredericks, Sam Green, Adina Hoffman, Christopher Howell, Sandra Hosking, Sherry Jones, John Keeble, Jim Kershner, Melissa Kwasny, Laurie Lamon, Ken Letko, Phillis Levin, Buddy Levy, Samuel Ligon, Tod Marshall, Brenda Miller, Kelly Milner Halls, Kenn Nesbit, Laurie Notaro, Oliver de la Paz, Midge Raymond, Claire Rudolf Murphy, Brandon Schrand, Martha Silano, Gregory Spatz, Mark Steilen, Rachel Toor, Manny Trembley and Eric Anderson, Kathryn Trueblood, Jeanette Weaskus
Cancel out any idea of an Obama Presidential Library? Some think so.
Check out Jessica’s expose on the perils and pitfalls of online publishing: Now You Read It, Now You Don’t: A cautionary look at online magazines. A must read for writers and editors alike.
3rd Annual Gettysburg Review Conference for Writers
Gettysburg College, PA
June 3-8, 2009
The Gettysburg Review invites you to join them in creating a community of writers in a bucolic, convivial, and historic setting. Small workshops (maximum ten people per workshop) will be led by award-winning writers who have dedicated their lives to the teaching of poetry and prose. Limited scholarship support available.
Faculty include: Lee K. Abbott (fiction); Rebecca McClanahan (nonfiction); Dean Young (poetry)
Application Deadlines: Applications must be received by May 22, 2009. Scholarship applications must be postmarked by April 27, 2009.
PEN 2009 Translation Feature
Speaking across geographies, styles, and literary conventions, this month’s Online Feature showcases some of the most interesting voices—old and new—in translation. Find recent translations of fiction and poetry from around the world, doing the work that Susan Sontag calls “the circulatory system of the world’s literatures.”
From the latest issue of Granta comes this essay, How to Write About Africa, by Binyavanga Wainaina. Should be required reading on at least a dozen lists I can think of: “Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life — but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause…”
Tucson Festival of Books
March 14-15, 2009
University of Arizona
Featured authors include Jimmy Santiago Baca, Josh Bazell, Jennifer Lee Carrell, Billy Collins, David Eagleman, Diana Gabaldon, Brent Ghelfi, Temple Grandin, J.A. (Judith) Jance, Elmore “Dutch” Leonard. and Richard Shelton. Separate events for children and teens.
According to this article on Reutgers, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion believes students can’t “get past ‘go'” in such classics as Milton’s Paradise Lost without having basic knowledge of the Bible. Other classics that suffer in their loss of students understanding their full meaning also include Shakespeare, with something as simple as the title “Measure for Measure” (which comes from the Bible) being a lost reference for students.
Interestingly enough, Professor John Mullan comments that this lack of Biblical background may come from universities “accepting young people from much broader social backgrounds, with less frequent immersion in classical literature, than they had in the past.” Or perhaps more specifically, less exposure to the Bible and Christianity? (Though they do argue religious adherence is not a requirement.)
I’m sure it is a lament of every generation, but will there come a time when Milton and Shakespeare are no longer the “classics” to be studied? Will their references, regardless of how “archetypal” be so without point of grounding in student understanding that they become irrelevant? Me thinks it is only a matter of time…
Protests over one teacher’s inclusion of Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth draw encouraging support from her former students.
Technically not *new* Agricultural Reader is an arts annual founded in 2006 by Jeremy Schmall who currently edits the publication with Justin Taylor. However, the most recent issue (No. 3) is making its national debut via X-ing Books.
Agriculture Reader is interested in fiction, poetry, criticism, and “anything we haven’t seen before or even thought of yet.” They ask contributors to send a query letter rather than a submission: “Tell us about yourself, what you liked about our previous issues, and feel free to include a brief, representative sample of your work. We read queries year-round and respond, in the fullness of time, to all of our mail.”
The first issue includes works by Shimon Adaf, Christian Barter, Heather Christle Joshua Cohen, Julia Cohen, Dennis Cooper, Mark Edmund Doten, Will Edmiston, Elaine Equi, Christian Hawkey, Robert Hershon, Jen Hyde, Noelle Kocot, Justin Marks, Anthony McCann, Mike McDonough, Sharon Mesmer, Eileen Myles, Peter Orner, Joey Parlett, Stephen Priest, Ariana Reines, Jerome Sala, Tony Towle, Diane Williams, Rebecca Wolff, Matvei Yankelevich, and Matthew Zapruder.
You can get a sneak peek and some of the content and format on their website.
NYU’s Violation of Student Rights
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
From John K. Wilson’s post on College Freedom, “I was not a fan of the student occupation of a New York University cafeteria. I didn’t like the incoherent list of bizarre demands, and I don’t like the use of occupation as a tactic in general. But the response of NYU in suspending 18 students, who were arrested when the occupation was ended, is a gross abuse of due process.” Read the rest.
MTV’s latest series How’s Your News first began over ten years ago at a summer camp for adults with disabilities in Massachusetts. The current series grew out of the 1999 documentary directed by author Arthur Bradford (Dogwalker) and produced by South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In the How’s Your News? film, Harrington, Bird, Perry, Costello, and Ronnie Simonsen (who’s currently battling leukemia) — all of whom attend Camp Jabberwocky, a Martha’s Vineyard camp for the disabled where Bradford is a counselor — pile into a tour bus and head west.
Along the way from New Hampshire to California, the group conduct a string of man-on-the-street interviews, and their conversations offer a funny and revealing look at how the disabled perceive and are perceived. The TV show follows the same general pattern, but it ups the star quotient somewhat, filming the HYN reporters as they interact with celebs like Sarah Silverman, Ben Affleck, and Amy Sedaris. (The Boston Phoenix)
Episodes from the series can be viewed in full on MTV’s website.
Erica J has her own to say on Disability Nation: Why I Really Didn’t Like “How’s Your News?”
Check out the World Press Photo of the Year contest winners. The overall winner is a very telling image of our tough economic times: “Following eviction, Detective Robert Kole must ensure residents have moved out of their home. Cleveland, Ohio, 26 March”
Tom Lombardo is now Poetry Editor at Press 53. Last year (2008), Tom edited and published After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books), which features 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 countries. Tom is a widely published and respected poet and is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. His mission is to bring 4-6 poetry collections to Press 53 each year and to be the preliminary judge for Poetry in the Press 53 Open Awards.
Specs is an annual journal of contemporary culture and arts at Rollins College that “aims to create sympathetic interfaces between artistic and critical practices.” Spec accepts fiction, non-fiction, cultural criticism, artwork, poetry, and pieces that blur genre boundaries.
The editors are particularly interested in works that examine contemporary culture and/or cross the critical/creative divide while riffing on the theme of “Faux Histories” in multiple ways.
Issue One contributors include: Douglas Barbour, Molly Bendall, Jeffrey L. Bohn, Christophe Cassamassima, D.P. Clark, Robert E. Clark, Glenn Deutsch, Denise Duhamel, Eliza Fernbach, Vernon Frazer, Jeanne Genis, Janis Butler Holm, Rosalie Morales Kearns, Amy Letter, Michael David Madonick, Kate Middleton, Sheila Murphy, T.A. Noonan, Melissa Parks, Chad Reynolds, Micah Riecker, Sarah Rosenblatt, Sankar Roy, Craig Saper, Jeff Solomon, Rodrigo Toscano, Lyzette Wanzer, Nina Zammit-Zorn, Slavoj Žižek
Essayist Karen D. Culley offers an overview of black authors in American literature: African-American Writers: Legends of Literature
Or at least for this year. Congratulations go to Morgan Ross for winning the Hayden’s Ferry Review Worst Love Poem/Flash Fiction Contest. Here’s just one stanza:
Your nose
is straight like an arrow,
it points to my heart.
You know you want to read it all…
Alimentum , the only literary review all about food, will once again publish a poetry broadside of menupoems for National Poetry Month. The poems are distributed to participating restaurants for diners to enjoy some poetry with their menu! We need your poems! Only about a dozen poems will be selected. Click here to see past Menupoem examples. Deadline: March 4, 2009
ATTENTION RESTAURANTS
(Readers – ask your favorite restaurants!)
Restaurants can participate by giving diners menupoems during National Poetry Month. Alimentum will ship a stack, and post the restaurant’s name and address on ther website throughout April. Participation is free! Write to Alimentum and let them know you’d like to take part in the menupoem party!
More than just a lit mag, Weave is an organization based out of Pittsburgh, PA that seeks “to create a space for a cross-section of writers and artists of all walks of life to meet on the page, on the stage, and in workshop. We celebrate diversity in both the creator and their works and strive to showcase both novice and established writers and artists.” Weave will host a series of workshops that focus on the writing and submissions processes as well as on bringing poetry to the stage as a viable performance art. Weave will also collaborate with writers from their publication to present readings that will showcase Pittsburgh’s young literary talent. During open submission dates, Weave accepts poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, short plays and visual art.
Issue One includes poetry by Ivy Alvarez, Mary Biddinger, Rachel Bunting, Juliet Cook, Crystal Hoffman, Tom Holmes, D.M. Huneke, Jason Kirin, Dana Guthrie Martin, Carol McCarthy, Khrys Myrddin, David McLean, Michael Constantine McConnell, Phoebe North, Michael Ogletree, J.R. Pearson, Molly Prosser, Jay Robinson, Daniel M. Shapiro, Susan Slaviero, Sarah J Sloat, Ringa Sunn, Frank X. Walker, fiction by Jack Cobb, Stephen Dorneman, Mehgan McKenna, Jack Swenson, Jared Ward, and art by Angela Bayout, Sofija Canavan, Sarah Greenwood, Nashay Jones, Bonnie MacAllister, Heidi Richardson Evans,
Beloit Poetry Journal invites readers to join the online conversation with BPJ poets on their monthly Poet’s Forum. Participating poets change with each journal issue. For the newest issue (Spring 2009), poets include Greg Wrenn discussing the surprising genesis and formal evolution of “Centaur” for February, Fady Joudah will join the conversation next month, and Mary Leader the following month.
Also now on BPJ‘s website, a “Poem for the Day” selected from the magazine’s 57-year archive.
For anyone who has never attended the AWP conference and would like an overview persepective on it, check out Robert Gray’s post on Fresh Eyes Now. Here’s an excerpt:
“All those headlines declaring the book is dead and readers are an endangered species seemed to have little effect on the 8,000 writers, give or take a few hundred, who inundated the Hilton Chicago last week for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference. . . Was everyone attending the conference carrying a manuscript in their back pocket? Probably. Was the possibility high that few of those books would ever see the light of publication? No doubt. Did it matter? Not so much, at least not last week.”
FREEDOM TO READ WEEK
February 22-28, 2009
Freedom to read can never be taken for granted. Even in Canada, a free country by world standards, Freedom to Read Poster 2009 books and magazines are banned at the border. Books are removed from the shelves in Canadian libraries, schools and bookstores every day. Free speech on the Internet is under attack. Few of these stories make headlines, but they affect the right of Canadians to decide for themselves what they choose to read.
Originally in print in 1983, and online since 1996, the legendary Exquisite Corpse is now back in print with Issue #1, 2009. Editor in Chief Andrei Codrescu presents artwork by Ralph Steadman, Joel Lipman; poetry by Diane di Prima, Bill Berkson, Alice Notley, Mike Topp, Jim Gustafson, Ruxandra Cesereanu; prose by Jerome Rothenberg, Willie Smith, Aram Saroyan, Lance Olsen, Davis Schneiderman; and more. Still an online force to be reckoned with, Exquisite Corpse plans a yearly publication of both online reprint and new material.
New Lit Mag Listings
The Ne’er-Do-Well – fiction, nonfiction
specs – fiction, non-fiction, cultural criticism, artwork, poetry
Mare Nostrum – poetry, essays, traveler’s tales, fiction, translations
Wordscapes – poetry, short story, environmental essays
Like Water Burning – fiction, nonfiction
The Smoking Poet – poetry, fiction, nonfiction, reviews
New Publisher Listing
Permanent Press – fiction, non-fiction
Canadian author Margaret Atwood has pulled out of an international Dubai literary festival after organizers banned a novel by a British author because it contains references to homosexuality.
In a letter addressed to the festival’s director, Atwood said she could not attend Dubai’s inaugural International Festival of Literature next week because of the “regrettable turn of events surrounding” the book “The Gulf Between Us.”
Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their December Fiction Open competition.
First place: Cary Groner of Tucson, AZ, wins $2000 for “Elaborate Preparations for Departure”. His story will be published in the Summer 2010 issue of Glimmer Train Stories, out in May 2010.
Second place: Aaron Carmichael of Broomfield, CO, wins $1000 for “Driver Yu’s Penance”. His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories.
Third place: Aaron Cutler of New York, NY, wins $600 for “15 Shots”.
A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here. This quarterly competition is open to all writers and all themes, with a word count range of 2000-20,000. Click here for guidelines
Also: Very Short Fiction Award competition (deadline February 28)
Glimmer Train hosts this competition twice a year, and first place is $1200 and publication in the journal. It’s open to all writers, no theme restrictions. Word count must not exceed 3000. Click here for complete guidelines.
The Sun authors and readers, as well as editor and publisher Sy Safransky, gather for lively weekends of conversation, reflection, and inspiration. The Sun will host two gatherings this year: one on May 15–17 at the Rowe Conference Center in Rowe, Massachusetts, and the other on October 30–November 1 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Online registration is now available.
The True/False Film Fest returns for its sixth edition Feb. 26-March 1, 2009 in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Most films come freshly discovered from Sundance, Toronto and other festivals, others appear mysteriously before their official premieres elsewhere. The main venues are the Missouri Theatre Center for the Arts, the Blue Note, the two-screen Ragtag Cinema, the Forrest Theater at the Tiger Ballroom, as well as Stephens College’s Macklanburg Playhouse and Windsor Auditorium. Along with films are parties, workshops, and hosted debates.
American Book Review Writer’s Conference
Cuernavaca, Mexico, March 16-18, 2009
Hosted by the University of Houston-Victoria and Unversidad Internacional
ABR Faculty: Charles Alcorn, Jeffrey Di Leo, Carmen Edington, Dagoberto Gilb, Macarena Hernandez, Tom Williams
You must apply by February 21, 2009 to attend the conference.