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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.
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.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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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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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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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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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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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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
The Tiger Moth Review is an eco-conscious journal based in Singapore that publishes art and literature engaging with the themes of nature, culture, the environment, and ecology. The cover image of Issue 12 by Ethan Leong pays homage to interspecies kinships and relational ways of being on earth, themes that contributors continue to discover and explore in each new publication. Some contributors to this issue include Ilika Montani, Lizzie Ferguson, Adam Anders, Anna Molenaar, Devon Neal, Meenakshi Palaniappan, Alka Balain, Jennifer S. Lange, Johnny Kovatch, and others.
Longtime prison-abolition activist and writer Victoria Law’s latest book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration, tells a maddening story. As a chronicle of bad public policy, it charts the ways public health warnings were ignored by prison administrators who allowed–and likely still allow–overcrowding, a lack of ventilation, and medical neglect to exacerbate the spread of the fast-moving COVID virus. The upshot is that countless severe, and sometimes long-term, illnesses and deaths have occurred.
Law introduces these dire facts by telling the stories of five diverse incarcerated people, all of whom have a lot to say about COVID and medical inequities. Their accounts make the political personal. Moreover, they expose the fallacy of rehabilitation and highlight the near-continual abuse and arbitrary exertion of authority they’ve encountered. But their statements are more than an enumeration of negative experiences, and Law showcases the ways that prisoners have rallied around one another, sharing food, medicine, and other resources to lessen COVID’s impact. It’s a moving show of solidarity.
Corridors of Contagion centers the humanity of those in lock-up and ends with an impassioned plea not only for prison reform but for a completely different system of justice. Indeed, Law calls on lawmakers “to shed the carcasses of racism, poverty, patriarchy and the ills that fuel its addiction to perpetual punishment.”
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.
In this gorgeous Black Sunflowers Poetry Press poet and artist series chapbook, Harryette Mullen’s haiku and essayettes grow in a garden of delights and despairs along with Tiffanie Delune’s lush floral tableaus.
Mullen’s Open Leaves: poems from earth is a study and choice of attention:
Every flower a reminder of all that we miss when not looking.
Of course, where there are gardens, there are plants, their watering and growth, hungry grasshoppers, and a “Kneeling gardener.”
Given the rapaciousness encouraged by the business magnates who brought to society PayPal, Tesla, Amazon, etc., in this context gardening is resistance. And, it is the insistence on connection—to family and Earth.
In Mullen’s poems, gardening is connected especially to the strong women in her family: “Somehow, after he’d left, and his father had died, his mother held on to their acres, even during the Great Depression, and beyond.” Great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother taught her: “You won’t starve if you can grow your own food. If you take care of your green patch, it will take care of you.”
Despite “snagged skin, / bruised fruit, hurt feelings,” gardening offers Mullen a sense of being “Firmly planted here” and a place for sustaining inquiry and her life: “When she scoops a handful of black earth, she thinks of living things that keep the soil alive.”
Gentle Reader, read these poems, and your heart blossoms, your soul alive!
Open Leaves: poems from earth by Harryette Mullen; artwork by Tiffanie Delune. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, March 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.
Cimarron Review’s double issue (219/220) is out and features poetry by Donald Illich, Kate Peterson, Christopher Ankney, D.S. Butterworth, Mitchell Untch, Cindy Xin, Nancy Eimers, Mac McClaran, Nicholas Samaras, Lesley Wheeler, Mark Belair, Nick Norwood, Liz Robbins, Ted Kooser, Babette Cieskowski, Quinn Carver Johnson & Todd Fuller, Lex Orgera, Elisabeth Murawski, Carrie Shipers, Bruce CohenCloe Watson, Mary Vogt Myers, and many more; fiction by Sue Brennan, Will Ejzak, Raymond Fleischmann, James Sullivan; and nonfiction by Lise Funderburg, Nicholas Stevens, Michael Topp, and Rebecca Edgren.
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!
Shō Poetry Journal Summer 2024 issue features work, Lucy, by Harim Choi on the cover. Choi had been asked by the editors to provide a creative interpretation of The Star tarot card. Fittingly, the publication also includes a postcard with the image in each issue.
The Louisville Review Winter/Spring 2024 front cover features Trumpets, a painting by Laurie Fader along with a “Cover Artist’s Statement” inside which narrates the creation of the work and “the biological precarity and the gamut of stylistic influences” that inform it.
Publishing flash fiction online, the Ghost Parachute August 2024 cover art by Genevieve Anna Tyrrell is in keeping with its mission to publish works that are “unapologetically bold.”
Founded in 1979 by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Paterson Literary Review began as a mimeographed publication and, as a testament to the power of the perseverance of the small press, it has become one of the most well-respected resources for poetry in the country. Number 52 of this annual is a hefty tome of just over 400 pages of fresh poetry, memoir, prose, and essays by Marge Piercy, Martín Espada, Joe Weil, Dante Di Stefano, José Antonio Rodríguez, Jan Beatty, Daniel Donaghy, John Bargowski, Tony Gloeggler, Penny Perry, and others. Also included are winning entries, honorable mentions, and editor’s choice selections of the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.
Leah Angstman transports her readers to the perilous and fractured world of French Revolution-era Paris in her new novel Falcon in the Dive, where everyone has secrets and trust was a luxury that few could afford.
The book follows the story of Ani, an intelligent and resourceful teenage orphan struggling to survive on the streets of Paris after her family lost their wealth and status due to the selfishness and greed of the Beaumercy family. Now left with nothing but a burning anger and a desire for revenge, she finds herself being recruited by members of the revolution to infiltrate and spy on members of aristocracy–a mission she simply can’t refuse. What follows this decision is a twisting tale of secrets, betrayal, and a star-crossed love.
Angstman’s second full-length novel is a refreshing take on a historical subject that has been such a popular topic in the media it has become borderline ad nauseam. Angstman’s Paris is a dark and gritty one, a place highlighting the impact which the corruption of power has on those ‘without.’ She attempts to deconstruct the villainy that has so often surrounded the lower class population of Paris, especially in media pieces focusing on the tragedy of Marie Antoinette, and gives a voice to those who have long been forgotten by history.
Angstman does a marvelous job of adding complexity to her characters, showing them in moments of happiness and peace to moments of insecurity, doubt, and moral ambiguity. The lack of fear she exhibits in examining the multifaceted nature of humanity and the will to survive in difficult circumstances makes Angstman’s novel truly authentic in its portrayal of the French Revolution. She has once again proven herself to be a master of historical fiction.
Falcon in the Dive by Leah Angstman. Regal House Publishing, January 2023.
Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Blood & Thunder: Musings of the Art of Medicine, Atticus Review, NewPages, and an anthology with Wising up Press. She can be found on Twitter @Catheri91642131
In her chapbook, The Word for Standing Alone in a Field, J.I. Kleinberg invites readers to consider a scarecrow’s agency and makes effective use of pathetic fallacy. After all, what is a scarecrow but an “effigy,” a “straw man,” a stand-in for a human? It would be fairly presumptuous then to assume a scarecrow does not have human emotions.
Kleinberg’s scarecrow is an “only human” “placeholder / / for grief.” “His work / not crows or corn but sorrows.” He is also a good friend and sage to another with whom he is in constant dialogue throughout the poems. This other, “a shadow looking for a body,” is someone the scarecrow “show[s] how to speak” and to whom” he “asks… about bones” and “skin.”
During the reading of the twenty-eight linked poems, an affecting tenderness grows between these two beings “in the church of corn.” One holds the other as “he wept” and they share their “earliest / memory.” This reader accepted the intimacy between them as “inevitable as dawn.”
In the end, I wanted nothing more than to “stand beside the scarecrow / and look where he looks, / / across the feathered gold / and green.”
Despite its title, Dear Reader, J.I. Kleinberg’s The Word for Standing Alone offers us loving company, tender acceptance, and true respite.
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.
19 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to the first roundup of submission opportunities for August 2024. Here in the Midwest at least it is supposed to be one hot weekend. This is a perfect opportunity to stay indoors and stay cool writing, editing, and submitting. But don’t forget to take a break for a nice cold drink and to step into the out for at least a little while.
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.
When Brooke Randel was in her early 20s, her grandmother, Golda Indig, known as Bubbie, called her and suggested that she write about her life: “What happened in the war…You know, a young girl in the camps.” The request was jarring since Randel’s family had generally sidestepped discussions of the Holocaust, instead fixating on the present, with food, family, and holiday celebrations taking center stage. But Randel was intrigued and began interviewing Bubbie.
Surprisingly, the process was more difficult than she expected, for not only was Bubbie’s story filled with vague and random anecdotes, but it unfolded in fits-and-starts that were complicated by her illiteracy, easy distractibility, and memory gaps. Nonetheless, Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust chronicles Bubbie’s traumatic deportation to Auschwitz as a 13-year-old and describes her transfer to Bergen-Belsen before being liberated by American soldiers; her eventual emigration to the US adds a riveting dimension to Bubbie’s tale.
In addition, the book veers into Randel’s own story – with details about her nine-year search for data to support Bubbie’s account – that are well-woven into the memoir. This makes Also Here unusual, as much about writing and research as it is about a love-filled but fraught inter-generational relationship. An emotionally resonant and compelling debut.
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.
Wrongland balances on an edge of migration and return. It crosses from an Albania recently rid of Hoxha to a Greece riven by tensions that ultimately drive the protagonist on to America. But homecoming is the pivot — one stuck in an unavoidable vying between alternate worlds.
The reader, a simple stranger, is introduced to Ters, a city configured by remnants from the past, a locale scored by evil — at times, gripped by good.
Gazmend Kapllani is the author of two collections of poetry in Albanian and four published novels (written in Greek and Albanian). His literary work centers on borders, totalitarianism, migration, identity, and how Balkan history has shaped private and public narratives and memories.
Cover art by Torkwase Dyson invites readers into the newest issue of The Malahat Review (227), which opens with the 2024 Novella Prize Winner Ryan Cannon’s “A Hunting Story” (readers can find an interview with Ryan Cannon on the magazine’s website). Also featured in this issue is poetry by Isha Camara, Morgan Cross, Daniela Elza with Brian Brett, Nathan Erwin, Wess Mongo Jolley, Diane Louie, Raymond Luczak, Eli Mushumanski, Lauren Peat, Aaron Rabinowitz, Kyeren Regehr, Vivek Sharma, and Saadi Youssef (translated by Khaled Mattawa); fiction by Courtney Baird-Lew and Kaitlin Ruether; creative nonfiction by Kevin MacDonell; and reviews of new publications of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
Judith Butler is known primarily as a gender theoretician and philosopher, most famous for her 1990 book Gender Trouble. Her latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender, presents as more accessible than her previous writings, published by a trade publisher, as opposed to an academic press. Saying that this work is more accessible than her more theoretical work, though, is akin to a weekend tennis player stating that they’re only playing the 100th best tennis player in the world, not somebody in the top 10. That’s not a criticism of the book, just a heads-up for readers.
Butler crafts a nuanced argument against those who claim to oppose “gender,” which encompasses much more than the LGBTQIA+ community to include what some politicians call “woke culture”; thus, Butler explores race, colonialism, and abortion rights, among other ideas. Butler methodically goes after religious groups, especially the Catholic church, who claim that “gender” is an assault on the natural order, but they also break down the arguments of the politicians and the state, as well as the TERFs (“trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” though they prefer the term “gender-critical”).
Ultimately, they point out that all of these groups are threatened by everything they put under the umbrella of “gender,” as they ultimately want to curtail or take away altogether the rights and freedoms of groups with whom they disagree. Butler shows that these groups believe that somebody else’s freedoms will limit theirs. Butler reveals their fear, not just the flaws in their arguments.
Butler ends, though, on a positive note, as they argue for alliances between the groups that get sorted under the “gender” umbrella, pointing out that all these groups value freedom and that freedom for one group will lead to more freedom for others. They try to imagine a different world than the current world, an optimistic conclusion to redefine how readers see others.
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
Bear Paw Arts Journal is a new open access online journal of flash fiction, micro memoir, poetry, and featured artists publishing one issue each year in the fall. “It’s free to submit, free to read. This is a labor of love, and we’re proud of that,” say the editors.
Bear Paw Arts Journal takes its name from the Bears Paw Mountains in north central Montana. The editors explain, “The range is known locally as ‘The Bear Paws.’ These mountains were originally named by the native Cree and Blackfeet people as ‘The Mountains of the Bear.’ Bear Paw Arts Journal seeks to publish works that, like the Bears Paw Mountains, surprise and delight with each new turn.”
Inside Consequence Volume 16.1, readers will find a concentration of beautiful and compelling work that wrestles with the consequences of war and geopolitical violence. From “The Philosophy of Escape’’ where the speaker struggles with the guilt of fleeing his war-torn home to “Nora’s Wedding,” which follows a Jewish woman as she unexpectedly finds family and love in Germany, to “Gertie’s Labyrinth” with its children who use make-believe to parse reality, each piece of prose, poetry, and visual art in this issue engages with the entangled consequences of conflict in an artful and memorable way.
A Sign of Her Own, Sarah Marsh’s debut novel, follows Ellen Lark, a girl who lost her hearing when she was four due to Scarlet Fever. Her mother and paternal grandmother—her father worked away from the family, then died—send her to school, then to work with Alexander Graham Bell, to learn lip-reading and Visible Speech, a phonetic means of pronunciation. Essentially, they want her to be able to pass as a person who is able to hear others.
Ellen fully embraces this approach, though there are hints of dissatisfaction early in the novel, even before she works with Bell. That unhappiness becomes fully developed when she meets Frank, as he grew up in a largely Deaf family—his mother is the exception—and community. She sees the joy of communication they have with one another, not through trying to imitate those who are able to hear, but by fully embracing their culture, especially signing.
Bell’s work on the telephone is in the background throughout the novel, especially the possibility that he stole the idea from Elisha Gray, reinforcing the overall idea of (mis)communication and (missed) connections. Ellen’s lip-reading often leads to misinterpretation, and numerous characters accidentally or willfully misunderstand each other.
Marsh clearly portrays the Deaf community’s internal conflict over signing versus lip-reading/English (heightened by external actors, such as Bell). Ellen has to learn who she is and who she wants to be, which will ultimately help her find the community she needs.
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
In this double issue of The Iowa Review – Winter 2023/Spring 2024 – readers will be entranced by the Night Witches, aging backward, cardiologists, Freddie Mercury, family secrets, FreakFest, coyotes, VHS tapes, and more with poetry by Janice N. Harrington, John A. Nieves, Robert Wood Lynn, John Hodgen, Claire Denson , Eliza Gilbert, Rae Gouirand, Kate Gaskin, Richard Haney-Jardine León, Matthew Minicucci, Michelle Acker , Amanda Smeltz, Stella Wong; nonfiction by Sai Pradhan, Jennifer S. Cheng, Ryan Van Meter, Shannon Huffman Polson, Rochelle Goldstein Bay; fiction by Lucas Southworth, Tom Howard, Gracie Newman, Geri Modell, Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk, Jennifer Genest, Brynne Jones, Alex Burchfield; and cover art by Carlos Maldonado.
Home, Rewritten: Celebrating Asian American & Pacific Islander Voices Fleeting Daze Magazine, May 2024
“Created in 1992, AAPI Heritage Month celebrates the immense culture and history fostered in the AAPI community. With the growing population of the AAPI community, AAPI media has been embedded into American society and heavily influenced its culture. However, AAPI artists constantly face stigmatization and microaggression in their work, especially when Asian artists deviate from the traditional ‘Asian ideal.’ This unwelcoming environment diminishes the diverse voices representing the AAPI community, leaving the American population vulnerable to homogeneity and narrow-mindedness. As editors-in-chief stemming from an AAPI background, we felt motivated to use the platform we’ve created to uplift AAPI youth voices undermined in society. We realized that allowing Asian artists to express their heritage genuinely and candidly brings true representation that society is working towards.”
“This project has been a long time in the making,” say Editors-in-Chief Rosie Hong and Caroline Zhang, “and we are so proud to be able to highlight AAPI voices and share with the world how we have redefined our homes and families through our experiences growing up.”
Besides being an award-winning writer, Millet has worked at the Center for Biological Diversity for roughly twenty-five years. In We Loved it All: A Memoir of Life, she combines those two areas of expertise to create a poetic, meditative book that explores climate change, storytelling, hope, and despair.
However, Millet is not making an argument here, so much as she is simply sharing her love of nature and animals, celebrating the beauty and wonder of the world, in the hopes that others will see and appreciate the awesome diversity she recognizes. In fact, she doesn’t even seem to offer any practical solutions—though there are a few in the final essay. She believes that, if people love the world the way she and so many others do, they would make the necessary changes in their lives, in their policies, and in their corporate decisions to change the world.
Given Millet’s work as a writer, her approach to language is both beautiful itself and ironic. She writes each essay—there are three, roughly eighty pages or so long—in short sections, ranging from one sentence to a few pages, using fragments to provide a fractured, imagistic tone. She talks about the importance of bearing witness and telling stories to help shape the ways in which we see the world.
She also admits the limitations of language to both explain the scope of the problem and provide solutions, even acknowledging that the world will outlive our words. In the meantime, though, her language calls us, as best as it can, to truly see the world around us and love it all, hoping beyond despair that love will be the beginning of enough.
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
37 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Say it isn’t so! Here comes our final submissions roundup for July 2024. Next week kicks off August already. This is a great time to take that vacation you’ve been wanting to and kick back and relax before autumn decides to settle in. Want to spend some of that time writing and submitting? We’ve got your back! Plus, don’t forget that several opportunities end July 31. Don’t miss out.
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.
Issue four of the online poetry journalRed Tree Reviewis now live. As always, readers will find poems that surprise, harrow, and awe, this time featuring work by Cortney Bledsoe, Halee Kirkwood, Mirande Bissell, Scott Davidson, James Croal Jackson, Alex Sarrigeorgiou, Eva Skrande, Alison Heron Hruby, Clara Burghelea, C. B. Stuckey, Matthew Burns, and Jacob Schepers.
Enter Ghost, the title of Hammad’s second novel, refers to the stage directions from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of which serves as a metaphor throughout the work. Sonia is a British citizen with Palestinian heritage, working in London as an actor. While her career has never elevated to the top ranks, she has consistently had work. She feels a bit stuck, though, partly due to her career, but also partly due to an affair with a married theatre director, so she leaves England, supposedly to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa.
While there, she meets Marisa, a friend of her sister and a theatre director, who convinces Sonia to play Gertrude in a production of Hamlet. Sonia, as well as the other characters, are haunted by a number of ghosts from their past. There are the personal ghosts—such as Sonia’s affair—the breakdown of Sonia and Haneen’s family, and Sonia’s career.
However, the most significant ghost is the Palestinian past that has led to the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Throughout the novel, Haneen and Sonia refer back to their father’s involvement in anti-Israel activities, and it’s a visit to the West Bank that has led Haneen to live in Israel, as opposed to London, where her father and sister live.
The Israeli government and army are constantly watching the play to see if it contains anti-Israeli ideas, leading to the real possibility that they could shut down the performance. Sonia ultimately learns more about herself, her family, and Palestine, but she also finds true community through the production, as Hammad reminds readers of the power of art, even in the midst of war and suffering.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. Grove Atlantic, April 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
Whenever I hear someone kvetch, “Just how many literary magazines does the world really need?” a publication like LIBRE comes along to respond that there is room for this much-needed resource for the literary community.
LIBRE is a new online journal of prose, poetry, and art with three main goals: to uplift the marginalized voices of the mentally ill and those whose lives are affected by mental health; to celebrate the excruciatingly nuanced boundaries and expressionistic approaches that magical realist literature and artwork bring to our otherwise mundane realities; and to explore the oftentimes overlooked intersection that quietly, but stubbornly blooms between fabulist and health-oriented writing.
The Summer 2024 Colorado Review takes a unique perspective on the season. “While summer is not the season we generally associate with loss, it does offer pause: time to reflect on what has been taken from us, what we might let go of, what we hope to hold on to, what we may yet reap.” This issue includes short fiction by Erika Krouse, Amanda Rea, Afsheen Farhadi, and Amy Silverberg. Also featured are essays by Elizabeth Kadetsky, Lilly Nguyen, and Jean McDonough.
“So much loss, yes, in this issue,” says editor-in-chief Stephanie G’Schwind of the prose. “Yet there is much to be gained in the exploration of what we no longer have. Of her pain, Nguyen writes: ‘I had become so accustomed to it over the years that its absence was remarkable…. With this came new knowledge.’ And an absence, suggests McDonough, can hold great value: ‘I remember this—the nothingness—and it will not be taken from me.’”
Poetry editor Camille T. Dungy has selected poems by Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Alyse Knorr, Max Seifert, Nasser Alsinan, Caroline O’Connor Thomas, and many others. “These poems vibrate,” writes Dungy. “They are sensitive. They are afraid but still insistent. Alert but also calming. They move from harrowing to hopeful, and they show what it means to live in-between.”
When Amanda Jones, a middle school librarian and head of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, spoke before the Livingston Parish Library Board in August 2022, she did so as a concerned community member. Her message was clear and direct: Diverse collections must include books that accurately address U.S. history and offer readers multiple ways to understand race, class, gender, sexuality, and sexual identity. The latter category, she said, is especially important for children, adolescents, and teens as they navigate coming of age.
Although Jones was not the only person to express this viewpoint, four days after she testified she found herself on the receiving end of a well-organized hate-and-harassment campaign coordinated by Citizens for a New Louisiana, a newly-formed conservative group that dubbed her a pornographer and menace to children.
That Librarian, part memoir, part impassioned political argument against censorship and book bans, is a deeply felt exposition of the physical and emotional toll these smears exacted and a strategic workbook about ways for communities to fight back. Moreover, it charts Jones’s personal transformation from a 2016 Trump supporter to become a forceful advocate for civil rights, civil liberties, and the right to read. It’s a powerful, angry, and inspiring book.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The Blue Collar Review: Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature Spring 2024 issue opens with these words from the editor’s note, “This Spring is marked by escalating tensions'” to which much of the work included bear witness. The editors conclude, “change must come from the bottom, from the working, exploited and oppressed – from us. Promoting and presenting examples of the consciousness of class connection necessary for that change remains our primary goal. We continue to struggle against the odds of increasing expenses and censorship pressures to get your words out. Your continuing support and unique writing keep this effort alive and we are grateful.” Sample works are available on the publication’s website.
Neel Mukherjee’s most recent novel, Choice, tells a triptych of tales, all tangentially related to one another and all, not surprisingly, centered around the idea of choice. The first story follows Ayush, an editor at a publishing house where the focus has shifted from books and authors to profits. He is also not merely concerned with climate change, but obsessed with it, to the point that it disrupts his relationships with his husband, Luke, and their two children. He consistently repeats, as narrator, that one must change their life, which leads him to an important decision.
The second part follows Emily, a professor at a school that might be the same one Luke works at (or this story could be a story from a collection that Ayush publishes), though that’s left unclear. Emily takes a ride share home one evening, and the driver might have hit something and/or someone, though Emily didn’t see clearly, given that she was both drunk and digging around the floor of the vehicle for her dropped phone. Rather than going to the police, though, she gets to know the driver, Salim, and learns his story and his family’s story, as they immigrated from Eritrea, leading Emily to make a radical life choice.
The final section tells the story of Sabita, a woman living on the border of West Bengal and Bangladesh, and is most likely a response one of Luke’s fellow economics professors gives to Ayush when he asks about her work on poverty. Sabita and her family receive a cow as part of an experiment to see if a change in assets can change one’s level of poverty. Unlike the other respondents in the experiment, the situation does not go well.
Ultimately, Mukherjee’s novel asks the question of how one should live in the twenty-first century, especially around how one can do good in such a complex world. Mukherjee leaves the reader with that question, as he knows there are no easy answers.
Choice by Neel Mukherjee. W.W. Norton, April 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
