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!
Deadline: February 29, 2024 We want to see your work! Fiction, creative nonfiction up to 1000 words, three poems, and art and photography. Our mission is to explore the edges of things, to find the hidden cracks that let the light shine through. We publish quarterly and are a paying market. Have you got something for us? We can’t wait to see it! Submissions open until the end of the month. View our flyer for more information.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
49 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Another week, another roundup of submission opportunities to enjoy! Our unseasonably warm weather took a nosedive, and we had a mini snowstorm yesterday with some nice strong winds following behind it. So, if your neck of the woods is just as bad or worse, grab a cup of cocoa and hit the ground running with the opportunities below to help hit those submission goals.
Don’t forget 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. You can view our February 2024 eLitPak here.
Zine Lunch! presented by Sarabande Books is a free weekly online workshop “designed to be a fun and low-stakes way to make time for creativity.” Each one-hour session (12-1PM EST) is hosted by an author or friend of the press who guides participants in a uniquely designed practice. A full archive of over 60 recorded sessions is available on the publisher’s Vimeo page along with video directions on folding a one-page zine.
Each workshop is unique, the presenter offers a concentrated writing and/or imaging practice (such as collage). Not every session actually produces a ‘zine’ booklet. It seems the ‘zine’ concept can also mean a condensed practice in creativity, though some presenters come a bit ‘overprepared’ for the limited time, leaving participants to finish their projects afterward.
There is also an opportunity for attendees to share their work if they would like. It’s a friendly, welcoming workshop; I have attended a live session and have viewed about half of the recordings. The series is run by Natalie Wollenzien, Publishing & Communications Assistant, who is wonderful at introducing the presenter, participating, sharing, helping troubleshoot any tech issues, and continuing to curate a superb lineup for the community.
Steeped in the tannins of Heraclitus’s philosophy and the ecology of the Credit River in Ontario, Canada, Maya Clubine offers readers her chapbook Life Cycle of the Mayfly, a series of poems memorializing her relationship with her grandfather and father through the sport of fly fishing.
The “river bugs” in Clubine’s poems are the mayfly, the poet, and the men in her family from whom she learned how to tie flies and inherited flyfishing accouterments such as the waders both her grandfather and father wore. Via declarative and descriptive sentences, the movement of the poems is “catch” and “release”; their form is a memoir-epistolary hybrid.
As the poet writes her letter to her dying father, “mayflies lead the way like lanterns rising / into the air.” The precarious lifecycles of the people and insects point to Heraclitus’s philosophical declaration that there is nothing permanent except change.
Life Cycle of the Mayfly offers readers a family story; the poet’s and the mayfly’s families are “interwoven webs /.. rivers make.” The movement of the river’s waters, of the people fishing those waters, and of “mayfly wings” are the “fragile movements” of Clubine’s poems, movements that will “leave” their “traces” on your earthly heart, dear reader.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
ONLY POEMS. You might think that says it all, but the name is only the beginning of this new online startup that curates a Poet of the Week every Sunday as well as a Poem of the Month for Substack.
ONLY POEMS was founded by Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor as a way to honor the literary community they are both an integral part of – “the true fire of which,” Mann states, “is stoked by lit mags. Both Karan and I are writers who submit a lot. We wanted to give back in some way, to create a unique platform for poetry, which is an ecosystem we are most familiar with.”
The unique platform of ONLY POEMS includes a Poet of the Week series which shines the spotlight on a poet’s oeuvre of work (“or a small beautiful sample of it”) by publishing 3-10 poems by the same poet. “ONLY POEMS also features a detailed interview with the poet,” Mann explains, “which includes conversations around their work, the poetry world at large, and anything else a life of letters might conjure for them.
By mid-2023, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 110 million people worldwide had been displaced by political turmoil, war, economic instability, or ethnic or gender-based discrimination. But the numbers tell just part of this harrowing story.
Journalist Selin Bucak’s first book, The Last Day Before Exile: Stories of Resistance, Displacement and Finding Home, zeroes in on the social trauma that typically ensues for asylum-seekers and refugees and makes clear that it is not only adults who suffer. As the World Health Organization confirms, migrant children often experience poverty, disturbed schooling, and racism in their new homelands, experiences that can lead to lifelong emotional difficulties.
“There are a lot of statistics about asylum seekers and refugees and it is depressingly easy to ignore the individuals behind the numbers,” Bucak writes. By introducing eight people who fled Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, she hopes to change that.
While their stories are not representative–all of her interviewees were granted asylum–they nonetheless provide a nuanced introduction to the dangers facing political activists, LGBTQIA+ people, feminists, and select ethnic groups by anti-democratic governments. Lastly, although the book sidesteps the issues facing migrants at the US-Mexico border, perhaps this will be fodder for a future volume.
The book is now available in the United States with free shipping through April 12 of this year.
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.
So many lit mags, so little time! Save time and energy by checking out the January 2024 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!
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
A journal dedicated to the arts from Fairmont State University, this newest issue (#50) of Kestrel features In the Garden of Grace and Chaos, photography by Jj D’Onofrio, on the cover.
Published by the University of Findlay, the 2023 issue of Slippery Elm Literary Journal cover features lush and mesmerizing photography by Don Patty.
lazy dork working (from the series “Confinement”) a 2020 acrylic painting by Émilie Gleason is a humorous cover invitation for readers to enjoy the Spring 2024 issue of Epoch, edited by students and faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, in Cornell University’s Department of Literatures in English.
In Sarah Rosenthal’s chapbook, We Could Hang a Radical Panel of Light, the reader is offered the opportunity to view the manual labor behind making cut-up and collaged poems from a dream journal. Black text on a white background affixed to a gray page creates little rectangular light boxes, illuminating the poet’s tactile and associative compositional process.
The composition itself is lyric and elegiac. At its center is a “self / positioning,” figuring out “how to / squeeze into language.” This “implies trauma.” The reader is addressed directly by “Estelle meaning star,” though others or other aspects of Estelle— “I” and “she”— contribute to the conversation from “broken down / years.”
Foremost here seems to be a “child… / en route to woman,” experiencing “a pain that stretches the length of a body” or “one hundred fifty / … years.” The spare, pressured composition matches well with concerns about female identity and pain.
The composition emits a quality of the embodied and disembodied; though words have been affixed to pages and fixed in space, meaning and definitions are in transit. For Estelle, “who dots the sky,” we are her observers. We witness how “night’s / middle daughter / disperses” and is given “a new name.”
To read Rosenthal’s chapbook-length poem is to remind us that “the / dreams we have / [are] divining rods.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
We succeeded in making it through January! How are those New Year’s Resolutions holding out? Well, if reading more was one of them – great news!
With the end of the month comes our update of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
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.
The title of Evans’ most recent novel seemingly relates to the house that Alice—the mother to the three daughters whose lives make up most of the novel—wants to build in Benin so she can live out her remaining days in her home country. Then there’s the pun on house, as in the word for a family line. Given the focus on Alice’s daughters, especially Carol and Melissa, that title would also make sense.
However, Evans wants readers to think of house even more broadly, as most of the characters are searching for a home of some sort, whether that’s in their marriage or within themselves or in their country, especially given the UK’s colonial past. That past comes to the forefront early in the novel, as Alice’s estranged husband Cornelius dies in a fire at his house on the same day of the Grenfell Tower fire.
The Pitt family’s mourning of their father and husband is complicated by the abusive relationship he had with all of them—emotional, physical, or sexual, depending on the wife or daughter. Similarly, the Grenfell Tower reveals how the UK has treated those who seek a better life there, whether the working class, the poor, or immigrants, serving as a metaphor for a country who says they care for such people, but then abuse and exploit them.
As with those who suffered from the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the members of the Pitt family have only each other to rely on to create a home.
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
48 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
If you are out at AWP, we hope you are having a fun and informative time and getting lots of swag. If you weren’t able to attend, we have plenty of submission opportunities to keep you busy in our second weekly roundup for February 2024. Let’s all try to keep our submission goals going strong this year.
Don’t forget 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. Our next eLitPak will be hitting inboxes next Wednesday.
The February 2024 issue of The Lake is now online featuring Bharti Bansal, Mark Belair, Frances Boyle, Bob Bradshaw, Lynn Hoggard, Laura Celise Lippman, Niall Machin, Beth McDonough, Ruby Hansen Murray, Michael Salcman, Alison Stone, Stephen Wing. The Lake also includes reviews of poetry collections, this month taking a look at Pippa Little’s Time Begins to Hurt, Dorothy Wall’s Catalogue of Surprises, and Maurice Manning’s Snakedoctor. “One Poem Review” offers poets the opportunity to share a poem from a recently published book, with Melanie Hyo-In Han giving readers a sample with “My Dear Yeast.”
Salamander Issue #57 features the winners of the 2023 Fiction Contest, selected by Kirstin Valdez Quade: “Come Tomorrow” by Nina Sudhakar and “Americanos” by A.J. Rodriguez. Stories from Kasia Merrill, Ashlee Lhamon, Sue McMillan, and Steph Grossman are haunting and suspenseful; Creative Nonfiction from Andrea Gregory, Laura McPherson, and Julie Marie Wade explores disability, loss, and sexuality. Issue 57 features an art portfolio by Shane Allison and a wide range of poetry from Ginny Threefoot, Anna Laura Reeve, Beth Oast Williams, Javier Sandoval, Darren C. Demaree, Tola Sylvan, Joan Kwon Glass, Maryam Ghafoor, and Rita Mookerjee, among many others.
June and Athena both attended Yale and majored in writing; they even both began publishing short stories, then a novel for each of them. At that point, though, their careers took decidedly different paths. June’s novel ended up with a small press that folded, while Athena’s novel was the first step in a literary career that led to a deal with Netflix. Unfortunately, on the night when she and June are celebrating that deal, Athena dies.
The bulk of Yellowface proceeds from that point, as June steals a typed manuscript Athena has written and passes it off as her own, even going by her full first and middle name—Juniper Song—to make it less clear that she has no Asian heritage. Kuang’s novel raises questions about cancel culture, social media, the publishing world, and who gets to tell which stories (who controls narratives, in general).
While June is not a likable narrator, Kuang works hard not to stereotype her, especially when talking about June’s experiences in the publishing industry. June is not treated all that well when she’s a no-name novelist, and Kuang doesn’t hold back from criticizing the insularity of the industry.
However, what drives the novel is the sharp-edged satire of June’s belief that she’s entitled to publish this novel and deserves all the celebration that comes with it. Readers should see June’s obliviousness to her privilege; what matters, though, is if they can see their own in her.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. William Morrow, 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
The winter 2023/24 issue of The Writing Disorder features all-new fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art. Is it possible to read 100 books in a year? Visit The Writing Disorder online and read CL Glanzing’s article and find out.
While you’re there, check out these new works of fiction by talented authors: “The Angels Are Leaving, The Angels Are Leaving” by Gaurav Bhalla; “Embarrassment upon Humiliation upon Mortification in My Intern Year” by Christine Benton Criswell; “Nothing Better to Do” by Tom Eubanks; “Dad Stuff” by Toni Kochensparger; “Self Portrait by the Thing Within” by Clayton McMIllan; “The Longer View” by Patrick Parks; “Puppy” by Ruth Rotkowkitz; and “Doomsday” by Anastasia White.
Poets featured in this issue include Duane Anderson, Lawrence Bridges, Annette Gagliardi, Elizabeth Morse, Frederick Pollack, Charlotte Suttee, and Michal Zielinski.
Nonfiction lovers, in addition to Glanzing’s article, can enjoy “Tangled by Blood: Book Review” by Lisa C. Peterson; “Some Peace” by Rita Plush; and “Proper Posture” by Angela Townsend. And finally, our featured artist is Kevin Nance, whose winter-themed photographs are breathtaking.
In this second novel by Mathis, the three main characters — Dutchess, Ava, and Toussaint — are each unsettled in some significant way. Dutchess spends her nights wandering through the woods of Bonaparte, Alabama, a fictional town created by African Americans after the end of slavery, where she often encounters the ghosts of those who have come before, another group of unsettled people.
Ava left that town and hasn’t returned, moving around the country before settling into an unhappy marriage in New Jersey that she leaves at the beginning of the novel, ending up in Philadelphia. She begins by having to move into a homeless shelter, then into 248 Ephraim Avenue, a house for the Ark, a place reminiscent of the homes the Black Panthers created in the 1960s. (One should also note that 248 is twice 124, the house in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Mathis explores trauma in her own way.) Ava’s son Toussaint has had to follow her, but, once they land in the shelter, he begins skipping school and roaming around Philadelphia.
While the bulk of the plot focuses on Ava and Toussaint’s attempts to find some sort of stability and meaning, with forays into Dutchess’s attempts to keep the town of Bonaparte from completely disappearing, what undergirds the novel are the systems that have oppressed and continue to oppress African Americans, especially relating to land and property. In the same way that the characters struggle to find a place that is truly their own, Mathis shows how systemic racism and white supremacy have denied African Americans a home in this country.
The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis. Alfred A. Knopf, September 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
Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is a new venture focusing on – you guessed it – reviews of poetry chapbooks – but also quite a bit more. Readers of the site can expect to find short book reviews, long-form single-book reviews, long-form multi-book essays, craft essays on poetry and chapbooks, interview-driven author features, and weekly updates of poetry books.
Publishing six online issues each year, Editor Aiden Hunt prefers to “keep the publication lively and flexible,” so new content is released on a weekly, rolling schedule.
The Missouri Review Winter 2023 (46.4) is themed “Family Affairs.” Inside, readers will find work from the winners of the 2023 Perkoff Prize, new fiction from Elisa Faison, Robert Long Foreman, Stef Pixner, and Amanda Rea; new poetry from Virginia Konchan and Christine Marshall; and new nonfiction from Adam Boggon. Also: features on Robert Henri and Eva Tanguay; an omnibus review of four memoirs of parents from Cynthia Miller Coffel, and Michael Piafsky’s interview with Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, named one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker, Washington Post, Atlantic, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and Lithub.
In Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, Dimitris Xygalatas brings a wealth of research about rituals, both from the laboratory and the field, but also a depth of passion and interest in a subject that doesn’t get as much study as it does reflection. He is honestly looking for an answer to the question his subtitle implies, as he understands that rituals don’t provide any practical meaning to our lives, but we seem unable to live without them.
Xygalatas delves into how rituals provide order to people’s lives and how they help people bond. He explores how non-religious rituals help people connect with something beyond themselves and why people are willing to sacrifice their time, their money, and even their bodies for such acts. He illustrates how rituals help one’s mental and physical well-being, even when there’s intense suffering involved.
Near the end of the book, which he wrote during the beginning of the Covid pandemic, he shows how even minor rituals are important enough for people to try to recreate, such as drive-by birthday parties and graduations, and how rituals must be flexible to continue providing meaning as our world changes. He differentiates between ritual and habit, revealing how we all need a source of purpose in our lives, whether religious or secular, and how rituals that don’t make much sense to those outside of a tradition help us find that purpose that encourages us to keep living and growing.
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
48 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday and happy February. The temperature yo-yo is back in full swing. There comes a time when you just want Mother Nature to make up her mind and stick with one…hopefully NOT the arctic cold, but she is a very fickle woman. Grab a cup of something warm like coffee, unless you are like me and have to forgo all acidic foods and beverages for the foreseeable future, and get ready to dive into our first weekly roundup of submission opportunities for February 2024…perhaps after a walk if your weather isn’t awful.
Don’t forget 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. Our next eLitPak will be hitting inboxes right after AWP.
The Main Street Rag Winter 2024features an interview with poet Anne M. Kaylor by Kim Blum-Hyclak, followed by “Stories & Such” by Mark Brazaitis, Jan English Leary, John Mauk, Randy F. Nelson, Jessi Waugh, and a hefty selection of poetry by Anne M. Kaylor, Johnny Cordova, Chris Dahl, Adam Day, Richard Band, Morrow Dowdle, Gary Fincke, Bonnie Stanard, Chapman Hood Frazier, Tony Gloeggler, Diane Gottlieb, Alessio Zanelli, Dennis Herrell, Michael P. Hill, Dana Kinsey, Tom Laichas, Linda Lerner, Donald Levering, George Longenecker, Daniel Edward Moore, John Nizalowski, Hayden Nielander, Beth Paulson, Alexandria Peary, Scott Owens, Jason Ryberg, Richard Rubin, T. Parker Sanborn, William Snyder, George Staley, Rob Vance, Jessi Waugh, Frederick Wilbur, Dede Wilson, and Erin Wilson.
The MacGuffin Fall 2023 (vol. 39.2) issue welcomes a familiar name to the masthead’s editor slot: Brett M. Griffiths. Readers will remember Brett as a Poetry Staffer, and this issue’s diverse poetry selections should give a sense of this, from Angie Macri’s elegiac “The rain suddenly silver over the diamond,” to Rebecca Foust’s trio of Orwellian poems to, MacGuffin fan-favorite Joey Lew’s contemplative closing poem, “Holding Pattern.” The opening and closing stories follow the magazine’s recent bend toward narrative experimentation, with J. Grace’s Brautigan-esque “My Father Was a Serious Man” and the deconstructed narrative of Chris Wiberg’s “Multilateration” serving as prime examples.
Blue Collar Review editor’s note opens the Fall 2023 publication: “This issue emerges in maddening times. As I write this, the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, triggered by a brutal uprising of oppressed desperation, continues in Gaza as well as in the occupied West Bank with avid support and weapons supplied by our country’s leaders. [. . . ]
“Some poems in this issue struggle with whether our protests and resistance even matter in the face of overwhelming odds and the stubbornly deaf power of the corrupt monstrosity of our seemingly insane ruling class. They affirm, based in our own working class history, as well as continuing labor victories, that it absolutely does matter; that we lose when we give in to hopelessness, cynicism or the cultivated division that isolates and disempowers us. Given the impending climate catastrophe, the danger of growing wars and of nuclear war that threatens our existence, we, like Palestinians, have no choice but to struggle for our own survival against the same entrenched, corporate militarized power. [. . . ]
“We remain grateful for your support, for the strong words and poetry sent and to be able to continue publishing in spite of rising prices and postal rates. As a poem by Cathy Porter notes, ‘Poetry can’t solve a damn thing / but readers can / And we must.'”
Sunday Forrester, the narrator of Lloyd-Barlow’s Booker-longlisted novel All the Little Bird-Hearts, is different than her family and friends. She prefers to eat white food only; she isn’t concerned about how she dresses; and her internal monologue makes it clear that she struggles in social situations. Though she never explicitly says she’s autistic, Lloyd-Barlow’s biography explains that she has “extensive personal, professional, and academic experience relating to autism,” and the publisher’s page pronounces the book to be “a remarkable debut by an author who is herself autistic.”
Despite her struggles, though, Sunday is quite happy with her life, both with her work at her ex-husband’s family’s greenhouse and her life with her daughter from that marriage, Dolly. Her life, in fact, seems to get better when Vita and Rollo move into the house beside hers, renting it for at least the summer, perhaps longer. Vita, especially, brings excitement and color to Sunday’s life, as Vita seems the opposite of Sunday in every aspect, yet she seems enamored by her new neighbor.
Vita and Rollo begin taking Sunday, then Dolly, into their life on a more regular basis. However, Vita and Rollo bring a wider world into Dolly’s small-town life, often taking her to London and showing her what a life away from her mother could look like. They use Sunday’s differences to create conflict, heightened by the difference in wealth and class, leading to a difficult ending for all involved.
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
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 27th issue (Winter 2024) features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 150,000 readers in 150 countries, and over 800 contributors in 50 countries, already know: the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
David Lipsky’s 2023 summer release, The Parrot and the Igloo, is a non-fiction work that focuses on climate change, but even more provocatively, the growing denial of its existence and the mammoth topic of potential human extinction.
Lipsky explains why climate change is so contentious using trendy narrative non-fiction techniques (think Capote or Mailer) to give insight into not only Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla’s scientific minds, but their personal idiosyncrasies as well. These insights allow casual readers to digest a convoluted and complicated topic: climate change and the subsequent denial of it.
Lipsky’s portrayal of a doom and gloom scenario reads like a comic entertainment of a who’s who in the field of science. Rife with current pop culture references from Disney’s Frozen to equating the severity of an ozone hole to a Christopher Nolan special effect, Lipsky makes reading about a potentially pending apocalypse fun. Wait… Is that possible? Unequivocally, yes.
Lipsky garnered much of his fame writing about the much more famous David Foster Wallace in his quasi memoir, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. But with the emergence of this Pynchonesque tragicomedy of world population proportions, Lipsky firmly stands on his own.
Reviewer Bio: Nicholas Agelis is an unpublished high school English teacher and basketball coach in North Jersey, and is currently an MFA student at William Paterson University.
Winner of the 2023 The Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award, Fiona Lu’s debut chapbook, How to Become the God of Small Things, is a layered introspection on survival and mourning.Lu offers a glimpse into the irreplaceable and delicate nature of life on a personal level, as discussed in “Elegy” and “Misstep.” On the other hand, she plays devil’s advocate by painting the insignificance of one’s life in the grander schemes of the world in poems such as “Loneliness” and “Poem Made Entirely of Gardens.”
In addition, Lu’s poetry collection displays a great deal of hand imagery to convey the God-like power and control that lie in one’s hands, “he / stuck his hand into a fishtank and squeezed,” as well as the kindness and humanity capable from the same hands, “the way he always claps his hands in apology / before he feasts,” as demonstrated in “Hunting.”
Lu’s quiet resilience commands each page or world of hers, unafraid of experimenting with different forms and rhythms. Evidently, she has given much thought to the artistic composition of her pieces, since many are worthy of the cork/bulletin board treatment.
Overall, How to Become the God of Small Things delivers startling reality checks on mortality, leaving readers to ponder its visceral imagery in moments of stillness.
How to Become the God of Small Things by Fiona Lu. October 2023
Reviewer Bio: Debbie Pierre is working towards an MFA in Creative & Professional Writing from William Paterson University. She is the recipient of Bloomfield College’s Joyce Carol Oates Award in Creative Writing in 2022. As an up-and-coming poet, her poems have appeared in BC Underground. She loves the macabre, the arts, and cheesy jokes.
Southern Humanities Review issue 56.4 is full of water. A poem about renaming rivers. The story of a flight that ends in the ocean. An essay following boats full of refugees, landing in different countries, in different years. Themes of motherhood and mothers’ bodies are also woven throughout. This issue features poetry by Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, Terry Belew, Anders Carlson-Wee, Jackie Chicalese, Aliyah Cotton, Brandel France de Bravo, Trey Moody, Robert Okaji, Emily Oliver, Doug Ramspeck, Cheyenne Taylor, Alex Tretbar, Lindsey Wayland, and RL Wheeler. Nonfiction contributors include Chris Campanioni and Jennifer Taylor-Skinner. Fiction by Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Areej Quraishi, M.C. Schmidt, and Rachel Talbot. The abstract cover, Stairway to Heaven, 2023, is from Nora Kelly. Some content can be read online, and individual copies, as well as subscriptions, are available on the Southern Humanities Review website.
47 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
From some negative temperatures to balmy 30s, from snow to sleet to rain. January has been quite the month for weather whiplash in the Midwest…and all over the US according to weather reports on the news. But January is almost behind us, isn’t it? In fact, this will be our last roundup of submission opportunities for the month of January 2024. Next week will be our first roundup in February. Here’s hoping for less chaos! If your neck of the woods is still having awful weather, time to stay indoors writing, editing, and submitting.
Since next week does end January, don’t forget there are several January 31 deadlines that you don’t want to miss out on. And with February upon us, it’s always a good idea to check out our Big List of Writing Contests for the upcoming month, too. We have started the new year by doing a huge update to our entire contest list, so please enjoy.
Don’t forget 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.
On one level, the title of Lahiri’s story collection, Roman Stories, is an obvious description of the work, given that all of the stories take place in Rome. However, in many of the stories, the characters are not actually Roman, or at least not by birth and, sometimes, citizenship.
Instead, they have often come to Rome later in life, and, thus, the retain that outsider status, even if they end up staying in Rome for the remainder of their days. By taking such an approach, Lahiri gives voice to a wide variety of characters, pointing out the multitude of stories found in a city like Rome.
The best example of this approach is the longest story in the collection, and the only one in Part II: “Steps.” The story shifts through six different sections, each focused on a different person/group of people: The Mother, The Widow, The Expat Wife, The Girl, Two Brothers, The Screenwriter. Each character or group has a connection to the same set of steps, a connection that reveals something important about each character or group. Though they come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, this place in Rome binds them all together, at least on some level.
That serves as a metaphor for the collection itself, as the characters are diverse, but their connection to Rome binds them all together, whether they want to be or not.
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Alfred A. Knopf, October 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
On the morning of April 16, 2014, a passenger ferry carrying 476 people was en route from Incheon, South Korea to the island of Jeju. After a dangerous turn against a strong current, the boat began to capsize, with hundreds trapped inside.
The sinking would take the lives of 306 passengers, including 250 schoolchildren and 11 teachers from the outskirts of Seoul onboard for a field trip. The excessive death toll has been largely attributed to the failure of the Korean Coast Guard to mobilize sufficiently, leading to a highly publicized court case and jail time for members of the crew, who abandoned the ship and all aboard.
The tragedy caused public outcry around the world. But none were so bereft as the families left behind, like the main character, Yun-young. As the days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months, they wait for news of Yun-young’s Unnie (the Korean word for “older sister”), a teacher now missing. As Yun-young embarks on an unfamiliar journey to understand Unnie’s life, she finds herself entangled in a blend of memories and unforeseen revelations, stirring an irresistible yearning. From Korea to America and back again, past and present overlap, as Yun-young tries to piece together the life of her enigmatic older sister.
“I’m a high school teacher in Korea,” writes author Yun-Yun. “At times, when I observe my students immersed in laughter with their peers, I feel a sudden wave of sadness, reminded of all the young lives taken away too soon. I imagine they, too, would have laughed just like that. Writing Unnie, my first novel, I was surprised at how easily the words flowed from me. To this day, I can’t shake the feeling that the lost students were guiding me as I wrote.”
Originally published in 2022, this edition is revised and re-released in honor of the 10-year anniversary of the event.
Red Hawk’s Book of Lamentations opens with the poem, “Come Sisters, Let Us Lament,” which begins, “Where do we go, how / shall we make our way / when the Stars go out?” The collection is divided into sections of poems that seek to answer the question – or take readers on a quest of their own: Lamentations of Innocence: What is Lost, What is Gained; Lamentations of the Animals: Whose Cross is to Bear Our Pain; Lamentations of Experience: What it Costs, What Remains; Lamentations of Conscience: The Holy Ghost in Our Brains.
The author shares his experience that guides his writing, “Red Hawk is not an Indian name, nor was it ever intended to be one or pretend to be one; it is an Earth name, given by Mother Earth many years ago after a 4-day water fast at the Buffalo River in an effort to save my life in one of the darkest periods of my life. It was given as answered prayer. It indicates a deep love & reverence for the Earth which named me, and how it has shaped my life. I stand by it. Love of the Earth is my Spiritual path. It honors Her power to direct the course of our lives. I am Her legitimate son. As the illegitimate son of unknown parents, Robert Moore is my adopted name given to me by 2 people who died of alcoholism; I honor them by the way I live my life.”
Red Hawk is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. He is the author of 11 books of poetry and two books on spiritual practice. He is a student and devotee of the Spiritual Teacher Lee Lozowick and of Lozowick’s Master, Yogi Ramsuratkumar, the Godchild of Tiruvanamali, India. He is also a long-time student of the Spiritual Teacher George Gurdjieff. His root-Guru was Osho Rajneesh. He is the winner of numerous national honors for his writing.
The MacGuffin is looking to add a couple new editors to their Prose Staff. Staffers are responsible for reading around 10 stories per week (assigned on Submittable) and attending a Zoom discussion every other Thursday to decide what stories to publish. Interested readers can contact Gordon Krupsky, managing editor, at [email protected].
Where The Meadows Reside greets us this new year with its open-access, online seasonal quarterly publication of poetry, prose, creative nonfiction, hybrid, artwork, and audio. Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief Meadow Sherif is a literary artist whose name you might think was the inspiration for the publication, but its inception is much more than that.
“I’ve always been intrigued by the liminality of the world,” Sherif says, “particularly in Augé’s non-places, though even beyond when I could ever put a name to it. Where The Meadows Reside is endlessness, an inevitability. I find the relationship between humanity and endlessness very enduring.
“We are constantly in our own fields — filled with moments like wildflowers, meadows. Though it seems as though there is a conflict between our external fields — our world in revolution around work, survival. So, in a world that revolves around endlessness and necessity, it seems as though what remains of the world – land – suddenly, endlessness with purpose.
Kaleidoscope magazine publishes work that creatively explores the experience of disability through literature and the fine arts. In issue 88 several authors share ways they’re mastering the art of living with disability as an essential element of a creatively crafted life.
In the featured essay, “The Tree That Reminds Me,” author Rhonda Zimlich runs, and with every stride, she pushes her body, clears her mind, and denies the disease within. When she runs in her neighborhood she passes a tree that has been damaged by a lightning strike. MS has ravaged the bark of her nerves, leaving her scarred and exposed, just like the tree, and this kinship with the deciduous maple causes her to reflect on her existence.
Dave Wisniewski is the featured artist. He is a legally blind painter whose canvases depict larger-than-life characters from the Wild West. In addition to the features mentioned here, Kaleidoscope hopes readers will enjoy the work of these contributors: Aisha Ashraf, Kelsie Bennett, Cynthia Bernard, Tim Campbell, William Cass, Amy DeBellis, Stacie Eirich, Nancy J. Fagan, Connie Harold, Waylon Henggeler, Carrie Hinton, Claire Ibarra, Hareendran Kallinkeel, Danielle Krikorian, Geri Lipschultz, Emmy D. Wells, Jordan Wilson-Dalzell, and Ellen Zhang.
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
Ponder Review is a student-run publication of the MFA program at Mississippi University for Women publishes fiction, flash fiction, nonfiction, poetry, short plays, new media, and visual art twice a year. Cover art: “Near Future” by Lila Byrne.
The Ear from Irvine Valley College has been publishing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, and photography annually since 1982 and can be read in print or online. This thought-provoking cover image is Synthesis of Man and Nature by Brennan Roach.
Subtropics: The Literary Journal of the University of Florida Summer/Fall 2023 issue cover image is In the Parco Piersanti Mattarella (Giardino inglese), Palermo (2022), photograph by Mark Mitchell.
How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo’s collection of essays comes from the lineage of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, a work Castillo references several times. She wants to show readers the assumed whiteness of their reading and writing, the assumed whiteness of their world, essentially.
Castillo analyzes a wide range of writing (and texts in a wider sense), from the controversial Nobel-prize-winning Peter Handke to Jane Austen to the Cinderella story to Homer’s Odyssey, with many stops in between.
Like Morrison, Castillo points out numerous places where writers assume characters are white without any description of their being so and the effects that has on readers and how they see the world. She reminds readers to look for the gaps in texts, the places where authors are silent about the reality of the world in which they write, such as Austen’s father’s involvement in the buying and selling of those who were enslaved.
Her main point, which underlies all others, is that white writers/readers get the benefit of seeing their work as universal, while writers of color are educational material, something one reads to learn about a particular culture, not work that conveys any ideas about simply being human. After reading Castillo’s collection, a reader can’t help but look at the world and their reading differently, high praise for any book.
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
Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke is the fantastical adventure of young mop-headed Milo who is sent looking for his baby sister’s missing sock in the basement of their new home. Not just any sock, this “special sock” was made by her Tia Maria “with her special yarn.” The pressure is on as Milo reluctantly heads into the strange, gloomy basement to check the laundry.
What ensues is a series of Milo stumbling into and across one breadcrumb to the next, each taking him deeper and deeper into a secret world under his house. For kids who are terrified of basements, so is Milo! He is resistant time and again to continue his pursuit of the missing sock, but as he meets various underground dwellers and becomes entangled in their plight to survive, his inner hero eventually shines through.
Hatke’s use of frameless borders and often organically shaped panels lends to the eerie feeling of the story along with a rich palette of shades to reflect the gloomy atmosphere. Brighter colors emerge as the action ramps up with some pages seeming to burst with energy and excitement. Dialogue is minimal throughout, with some characters communicating in easily interpreted symbols.
Milo’s lack of confidence throughout the story is frustrating at times, but this also makes him a wonderful role model for kids who may fear basements as well as for kids who are fascinated by them. In the end, Milo’s victory saves his newly forged underground friendships and allows him to conquer his own internal struggle, making him the ultimate hero.
Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke. First Second :01, August 2023.
Reviewer bio: NewPages.com Editor Denise Hill reviews books based on personal interest.
Application Deadline: April 30, 2024 Interested in being a screenwriter in Malibu? View our flyer and email [email protected] for more info!
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: January 22, 2024 Full Tuition & Lodging Fellowships for parent-writers, educators, writers of color, and queer writers to The Martha’s Vineyard Summer Writers Conference (May 26-31). MVICW was founded with a belief that a supportive, creative, and nourishing community is essential for a successful writing life. Our Summer Writers’ Conference is open to writers at all stages of their careers. View our flyer for more information. Apply at our website.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: March 10, 2024 The American West invokes a fraught mythology of whiteness, masculinity, and uninhabited terrain. Our next issue invites you to consider and reimagine all things West. Send us your prose, poetry, and visual art that conceives of the West beyond its conventional and colonialized framework to help us decenter traditional subjects and propagandized histories of this region. View flyer and visit website to learn more.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: March 15, 2024 Every year since 2012, Trio House Press has published the winners of the Trio Award for a First or Second Book of Poetry and the Louise Bogan Open Award in Poetry. Send us your manuscript and you could join our long list of talented and award-winning poets. Prize includes $1,000, publication, author copies, and marketing/publicity. Join us at Trio House! View our flyer or visit www.triohousepress.org to learn more.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
HINDSIGHT Creative Nonfiction Journal is accepting submissions for online and print publication. We accept all forms of creative nonfiction writing, and forms of art including paint, drawing, photography, and more! Find more submission details and read our latest issues at our website.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Authors and artists in issue 88 share ways they’re mastering the art of living with disability as an essential element of a creatively crafted life. Each issue of Kaleidoscope magazine focuses on the experience of disability through literature and fine art. Submit your best work to us today! View our flyer and visit our website for more information.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: February 16, 2024 Join us for our week-long, residential writing workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with acclaimed faculty in beautiful Gambier, Ohio. Unlike other writing workshops, the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops are generative, focused on giving writers time and space to produce new work. Since 1995, these workshops have provided thousands of writers with a nurturing space to take creative risks and push their writing to the next level. The low student-teacher ratio and supportive, rigorous, and immersive writing community have proved so popular that many students return again and again. Applications are open now and close February 16, 2024! Visit our website and view our flyer for more information and to apply.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
45 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
With the arrival of Friday comes the news that temperature warmups are on the way! Of course, in Michigan, warmer weather means it will be warm enough to snow again…or rain…or both…or worse…freezing rain. Yes, winter has arrived. If you’re like us or dealing with other types of foul weather, we are back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities to help give you the perfect excuse to stay indoors with a nice hot drink to write, edit, and submit.
Don’t forget 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. Our January eLitPak issue was just released this Wednesday.
Transitions: A Mother’s Journey, Élodie Durand’s graphic nonfiction work, takes a nontraditional approach to narrative, visuals, and the idea of transitioning. First, this work isn’t a memoir, as Durand doesn’t tell her story; instead, she tells the story of Anne and Alex Marbot, fictional names for the mother and child whose lives she shares with the reader. Durand also moves back and forth in time, telling the Marbots’ story chronologically, at times, but then breaking up that story with inserts from Anne’s journal, which includes various inserts about gender identity.
Visually, the work moves between more realistic comic panels that tell most of the story and impressionistic sketches that reveal how characters (usually Anne) are feeling. The real difference, though, comes in the idea of transitioning. Rather than telling Alex’s story of their transition from female to male, this work focuses on Anne’s transition as she learns to accept her son for who he is.
Alex knows who he is throughout the work, as the reader only sees him after he comes to his mother to tell her of his decision. Anne, however, takes a couple of years to accept Alex, a journey that sees her move from questioning Alex’s decision in the fairly typical ways (believing they’re too young to make a decision or that their therapist put such an idea in their head) to becoming not just an accepting parent, but a staunch ally in the fight for trans rights and acceptance.
In this story, Anne is the one who must transition into becoming who she needs to be by the end of the work.
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
The year is 1971. Lost deep in the woods of West Virginia, a desperate young girl discovers a book of witchcraft and pledges herself to Satan. But the Devil’s checking into town, and he’s got something special in store for this new little witch.
When Black Lavender Luci, the Devil himself, rocks up to Clockmaker, West Virginia in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith, wearing alligator boots, a chinchilla coat, Porkpie hat and a gold-plated grin, he’s got his sights on only one thing: fifteen-year-old Miss Priscilla Carpenter, the baddest witch in town. Tired of being on the receiving end of Old Red—her father’s favorite paddle—Priscilla doesn’t hesitate when she stumbles upon a book of witchcraft and stains the pages with her blood.
At first, signing her soul away to Satan was just an opportunity to have some fun, help the people she loves, and get a little revenge on the townspeople that turned their backs on her and her mother, Lavinia. Flanked by her childhood best friend Joseph and her loyal disciple Big Tommy, Priscilla makes her way through the increasingly demanding spells of her beloved grimoire. But when the Devil calls in his favor and seduces Priscilla deeper into the world of dark magic, drugs, and desire, she unwittingly unleashes a torrent of death on Clockmaker, causing dams to break, women to go missing, and rabbit piss to fall from the sky. And pretty soon, she finds herself the baby mama of Hell himself.
Telling the Truth as It Comes Up Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 by Alice Notley is a collection of prose writing that gives opinions and anecdotes of strong interest to reviewers and scholars of contemporary poets and poetics. It is also a great companion to Notley’s poetry, especially her book, At Night the States.
Notley digs deep into dream territory in the first essay, “What Can Be Learned From Dreams?” and says, “This work is also very disobedient” when describing her new work. Because she uses terms and language that are accessible, what is sometimes difficult and complex about poetry becomes transparent and real.
“The Mohave desert is vast with space and one fills it with thoughts and dreams—or I did. I acquired certain habits of thought from growing up in this landscape,” Notley writes in “Dreams, Again.”
I was so happy to find “Where’d You Get It?” her essay on Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger (2018) tucked in between “Musical Influences” and writing about Philip Whalen’s collected poems, “To do exactly that, right now” (2007).
Notley shows and tells what is apparent and transfers her whole self into whatever she discusses. In this collection, she is also a historian of American Poetry, especially the particular dreamscapes that modern technology brought/brings to influence dreams and dreaming.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
