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!
In Deep, Judith Sanders’ debut poetry collection shifts deftly among registers of language, from satirical to heartfelt to laugh-out-loud funny. Many of her poems delight in flights of imagination. Her observations are accurate, musical, and precise. Her politics are expressed slyly, elliptically; there’s a feminist strain, too. Her voice is unpretentiously real, whether probing everyday experiences or ultimate cosmic paradoxes. Wherever these wide-ranging poems travel, they plunge in deep.
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The poems in Daniel Klawitter’s Where Sunday Used to Be display a masterful and contemporary twist on a beloved poetic tradition that carefully employs the tools of meter, rhyme, and rhythm. Readers will find these poems to be both accessible and thought-provoking. It is rare to encounter a poet capable of such range in tone and subject matter: from the humorous to the tragic, the divine to the devilish, the author expertly blurs the lines between our notions of the sacred and the secular.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Sacred Spells: Collected Works by Assotto Saint Nightboat Books, August 2023
In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and trans activist movements in the United States, both historic and present.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The spring 2023 issue of Apple Valley Review online journal of contemporary literature features short fiction by Marianna Vitale (translated from the Italian by Laura Venita Green), Nico Montoya, Anita Harag (translated from the Hungarian by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess), Sohana Manzoor, and Kristian Radford; a lyric essay by Amy Ash; poetry in prose by Yves Bonnefoy (translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers); and poetry by Ashish Kumar Singh, Susan Johnson, Laura Goldin, George HS Singer, and Liza Moore. Cover image by Tunisian photographer Houcine Ncib.
53 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
The mid-month submission rush is over. Now it’s time to start preparing for the end of month submission rush. NewPages is here to help you find a home for your work with our Where to Submit Roundup for the week of April 21.
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The poetry in Danielle Pieratti’s Approximate Body reflects upon the dramas of domestic life with equal parts cynicism, nostalgia, and grief. Richly narrative, fragmented, and featuring a variety of landscapes suburban, tropical, and ancient, these poems affirm an intricate mix of guilt and longing, proclaiming that “if I’ve loved / anything it has not been / enough.”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Spring 2023 issue of West Trade Review is their annual print edition and features fiction by Emily Hall, Nick Gregorio, and Maria Alvarez; poetry by Robert Wood Lynn, Rogan Kelly, Kimberly Ann Priest, Anthony DiPietro, Bree Bailey, Max Parker, and Megan Merchant; CNF by Haley Notter, Lily Levin, and Katherine Grasso; visual art by Nika Novich; interviews with Emily Hall, Robert Wood Lynn, and Nika Novich. West Trade Review‘s mission is to perpetuate the work of artists both well-known and yet-to-be-known, reflecting diversity in style, content, and perspective throughout prose, poetry, photography, and other artwork.
Imagine a book’s binding has dissolved. Now consider what it means when a country loses its binding: “each house / to grieve a long list / of mourners / who had no procession.” Now, dear reader, you are in the “tenacious presence” of Disbound, Afghan poet and translator Hajar Hussaini’s debut. Disbound’s inquiry: What binds self, family, and nation after war? The nation: Afghanistan, where “the state of affairs chauffeurs the thousands / out of place.”
The poems of Disbound offer “an inventory / / of memories” and the demographics of immigration: “four in ten would leave given the opportunity.” The lives of citizens are pitted against papers and files: “shake an immigrant / and scraps of paper fall out of reality”; “father may die before the files are processed.”
Gestures of dismantling contribute to Disbound’s aesthetics. According to the end notes, several of the collection’s poems “are made of found language borrowed from” various Afghan media sources. This repurposing seems to allow the poet to subvert ideological messages while highlighting a “new gen continuum” and privileging artistic expression: “a slaughterhouse / was renovated / an art production built /… / … / against forgetting.”
Similarly, expression of female sexuality and desire “in gendered halls” is brought forward: “in this language the body / is both / alive and not.” The “manifestation of… immeasurable needs” is perhaps a disbounding from Afghan national norms, and in that way, a “gain,” if there is such a thing, from disbounding. In a book, written out of profound disconnection, Hussaini’s willingness to reconnect with language and the body “is a post-traumatic act,” is a radical act to rebound and rebind after disbound.
Disbound by Hajar Hussaini. University of Iowa Press, November 2022.
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. More at https://jamimacarty.com/
The prose poems in Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai explore how we are part of and stranger to our environments and to our families and how identities form by where and who we come from. Told through two siblings’ perspectives of the loss of their parents, the book is a map of isolation, longing, and what it means to be deserted and alive. Sadre-Orafai is an Iranian Mexican American poet and writer. She is the co-author of Book of Levitations and the author of Malak and Paper, Cotton, Leather. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She co-founded Josephine Quarterly and teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University.
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A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn’s String tells the story of a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy’s fractured, echoing voice—in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation—String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his. Thorburn is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Grace of Distance, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the book-length poem Dear Almost, which won the Lascaux Prize.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
In celebration of National Poetry Month April 2023, Terrain.org offers readers poetry with a summer flavor by Pattiann Rogers and Judy Halebsky, a video poem by Forrest Gander, Alison Hawthorne Deming’s interview with poet David Baker, a review of poet Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s Corvus and Crater, plus nonfiction by Sharon Kirsch and fiction by Marilyn Abildskov. Terrain.org also has an upcoming reading featuring poets Pattiann Rogers, Andrew C. Gottlieb, and Kamella Cruz in honor of National Poetry Month and Earth Day. Poetry editor Derek Sheffield hosts. Visit their website for more information.
The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories, 2023: Writers of Color edited by Keith Pilapil Lesmeister EastOver Press, March 2023
The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories, 2023: Writers of Color is a collection of short fiction from deep in the heart of America’s rural spaces. In this inaugural volume’s introduction, series editor Keith Pilapil Lesmeister points out that “people living in communities like mine aren’t simply thinking about the urban-rural divide, we’re living it.” He adds, “Pundits, political pollsters, politicians themselves all want to know…what’s going on out here in the sticks? What’s important to rural folks? What do we have foremost on our minds?”
The writers in this collection—all people of color—offer diverse answers. Their unique takes will, in many cases, startle readers who cling to stereotypical views of folks who live in rural America: Jinwoo Chong, Risë Kevalshar Collins, Jamie Figueroa, Libby Flores, Jane Hammons, Mark L. Keats, Laura Lee Lucas, Jennifer Morales, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, Jeanette Weaskus, and Erika T. Wurth.
Volume 4, Issue 2 of Club Plum online literary and art journal carries the weight of knowing the ones we love are often out of reach. Sometimes they are our mothers, right beside us, their mental illness having stolen them away. Sometimes they are our fathers, very old and wheelchair-bound, war-demon wrestling blocking us from what could have been. In this issue, characters and family, friends, and ghosts reside in shelters and nursing homes, in laundromats and restaurants, in TVs, trees, and memories, and in all these places, there is longing. Contributors include Anna Laura Falvey, Foster Trecost, Rhiannon Chavez, Jesse Curran, Narisma, Mary Wood, Jeff Bender, Kate LaDew, King Tina, Em Townsend, Sam Moe, Jeff Bender, Elizabeth Horton, Michael Moreth, and Carolyn Schlam.
In Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff, Robert Thomas presents eighty nontraditional sonnets that explore love and jealousy—the traditional obsessions of sonnets—from nontraditional angles. Other galaxies are jealous of Earth in these heartbreaking, funny, ecstatic, profound, and never boring poems. “What if creatures in other galaxies / have a vague sense that something is missing, / but don’t know it’s Little Richard, Shakespeare, / and cornbread with plum jam?”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The latest issue of Bellevue Literary Review (Issue 44) features the winners of the annual 2023 BLR Literary Prizes. This year’s winners are Lara Palmqvist (fiction, selected by judge Toni Jensen), Caroline Harper New (poetry, selected by Phillip B. Williams), and Jehanne Dubrow (nonfiction, selected by Rana Awdish). Honorable mentions are Karen K. Ford, Karan Kapoor, and Sabah Parsa. The issue also features many other talented writers, including fiction by Sara Nović, Dan Pope, Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka, and Tyriek White; nonfiction by Acamea Deadwiler, Rachel Mann, and D. Liebhart; and poetry by Martha Silano, Ellen June Wright, Rage Hezekiah, and Megan Merchant. The issue’s bright, colorful cover is by artist Alexander Gorlizki. Get your copy (or start a subscription!) by visiting the BLR website.
Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda is part coping mechanism, part magical act, and was composed while Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children, and bodies of water, it asks: What is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present—and to live.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Crimes of the Tongue: Essays and Stories by Alicia Gaspar de Alba Arte Público Press, March 2023
In Crimes of the Tongue: Essays and Stories, award-winning writer Alici Gaspar de Alba explores other “crimes of the tongue” in the essays in this volume: pochismo, or the mixing of English and Spanish, as both a family taboo and a politics of identity; the haunting memory of La Llorona, protector of undocumented immigrants and abandoned children, and her blood-curdling cry of loss and revenge; the intersection of the personal and the political in the transgressive work of Chicana/Latina artists; the sexual and linguistic rebellions of La Malinche and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; and the reverse coyotaje, or border crossing, of Chicana lesbian feminist theory translated into Spanish and visual art as a way of sneaking this counterhegemonic pocha poetic thought into Mexico. These essays and stories are always intellectually rigorous and often achingly personal.
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Bark On: A Novel by Mason Boyles Driftwood Press, February 2023
In Bark On: A Novel by Mason Boyles, Ezra Fogerty is an aspiring professional triathlete training out of his ma’s trailer in the eroding North Carolina beach town of Kure. When the recently disgraced celebrity coach Benji Newton shows up at his doorstep offering to train him for the Chapel Hill Ironman, Ezra accepts eagerly. Benji’s methods prove brutal and ritualistic, and seem connected to Kure’s abruptly climbing coyote population. As Ezra begins to question the logic behind his preparation, Benji invites the orphaned prodigy Casper Swayze to train with them. The diminutive Casper one-ups Ezra in every workout until suffering a disastrous injury that coincides with Benji’s disappearance, leaving Ezra to choose between caring for Casper and completing preparations for the biggest race of his career.
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$1000 and publication with Ashland Poetry Press for an unpublished manuscript of original poetry. No aesthetic preference or requirements; we’re happy to publish someone’s first book or their tenth. We just want books we love. 2023 Judge: Mark Doty. Full guidelines and submission at our website.
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Deadline: June 1, 2023 We’re dancing in the street, celebrating our new poetry anthology! Help us celebrate the Motown legacy, both past and present. The crossover label made rhythm and blues the soul of American popular culture. Honor the artists connected to Hitsville, USA, and 30 years’ worth of “The Sound of Young America.” View full guidelines.
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Inspire your writing with our Irish Poetry trip to Ireland. Our immersive writing program includes classes and guided tours on the literary history of Ireland, visits to the local landscapes of famous Irish writers, workshops and one-to-one sessions to help you with your own creative work, and readings by Ireland’s top poets – including Paula Meehan, Theo Dorgan, Annemarie Ní Churreáin. Visit website to learn more.
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Deadline: August 1, 2023 Hone your craft and pursue writing with your Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Belmont University. To learn more, visit the program’s website, view our flyer, or email [email protected].
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Registration Deadline: April 30, 2023 Sure, you know the world’s Emily… But do you know our Emily? Find inspiration and delight by immersing yourself in Emily Dickinson’s life, poems and obsessions. In this “active retreat,” we’ll explore her surroundings and her obsessions, and write work acknowledging that shared poetic DNA. This retreat includes time to think, explore, and enjoy the company of kindred spirits. Visit website or view flyer to learn more.
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Exile Editions, an eclectic and engaging small press, publishes literary and speculative fiction, indigenous fiction, nonfiction, poetry – and our annual fiction and poetry competitions have awarded over $125K the past decade. Visit website and view flyer to learn more about upcoming submission opportunities.
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Sign up for the next virtual story catalyst classes! Lyric Essays taking place at 6 PM Mountain Time on Tuesday, April 2. Available live, virtual, and on demand. Sign up here. The lyric essay is one of literature’s most elegant forms, but what is it, and how can you write one? It may resemble poetry more than prose, and it may experiment with forms, such as the braided essay or the hermit crab essay. But its guiding force is the emotional truth. View flyer for more information.
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Scarcely published in his lifetime, Hyatt’s work survives thanks to the intervention of poets and friends who saved his manuscripts and kept his poems in circulation. Queer in the decades before Gay Liberation; Romani; incarcerated in prisons and asylums; illiterate into adulthood: it’s tempting to read Hyatt according to the familiar script of the doomed poet, resounding with loneliness and isolation. But his poetry—“hot and tender,” funny and sad—tells another story: of love, liberatory commitment, and desire.
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Deadline: May 25, 2023 Livingston Press is pleased to announce its new annual writing contest: the Changing Light Prize for a Novel-in-Verse. There is no fee to enter. $500, publication, and 20 copies awarded to winner. View our flyer for more information.
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Application Deadline:April 30, 2023 Applications are open for the Tremont Writers Workshop, a five-day experience for a select group inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Join renowned author workshop leaders Frank X Walker (poetry), Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle (fiction), Janet McCue (nonfiction), and guest novelist Richard Powers for a writers conference like no other. Apply at writers.gsmit.org. View full flyer.
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57 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Spring in Michigan…or the Midwest in general. You go from Winter to Summer and back again. Hopefully you were able to enjoy any good weather this week. If you’re like us and due for cold weather, rain, and snow, stay inside and work on your submission goals. NewPages is here to help with our weekly roundup of calls and writing contests for the second week of April 2023.
Don’t forget that NewPages Newsletter subscribers with a paid subscription get early and first access to our submission opportunities and events, the majority before they go live on our site. Consider subscribing today.
Last call for the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction and Essay Contest. Winning Writers’ 31st annual Fiction & Essay Contest has an April 30 deadline. Submit published or unpublished work. Max 6,000 words. Prizes: 2 X $3,000, 10 X $300. Top 12 entries published online. Entry fee: $22. Final judge: Mina Manchester. Co-sponsored by Duotrope and recommended by Reedsy. See guidelines and enter online on our website.
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Our Lady of the Lake University’s 100% online Master of Arts-Master of Fine Arts (MA-MFA) and Master of Arts (MA) in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice prepare critically engaged and socially aware scholars, writers, educators, and professionals. This nationally unique, virtual program combines creativity with practical skills and critical knowledge, while keeping in mind the pursuit of social justice. View flier or visit website to learn more.
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Recalibrating and Other Poems by Christopher Norris Parlor Press, February 2023
These poems in Recalibrating continue Christopher Norris’s spirited exploration of the paths by which contemporary poetry might find its way out of the self-enclosed sphere of lyric subjectivity into the larger air of philosophical, ethical, political, scientific, and environmental debate. They do so through a range of formal resources, among them rhyme and meter, which Norris regards as portals of creative-intellectual discovery. Norris also deploys a great range of stanza forms and verse structures to demonstrate the variety of ways in which technique and prosody can serve not only to emphasize, deepen or qualify a point but to express thoughts and feelings beyond the communicative reach of prose discourse. These aspects of his work are subject to commentary in a concluding essay where Norris talks about his passage from literary theory to philosophy and thence to poetry, although—as the reader will soon discover—without having left those earlier interests behind.
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Diving at the Lip of the Water, Karen Poppy’s debut full-length collection of poetry, explores the mystery and beauty of nature alongside the human potential that lives somewhere beyond our imposed boundaries. While the collection shows the author’s ability to move from precise individual worlds to political critique and macro ideas about human nature, each poem offers something of a contemplative nudge. Poppy’s gentle call to action is summarized as she writes, “The poetic voice has / Invisible instructions: / Crack open in case / Of emergency.”
Perhaps we are all living that emergency and in need of the voices that stand up for the magic of existence and refuse to over-define and confine. These poems offer philosophy, relational stories, and appreciation for the natural world. They invite readers to look to the wisdom around us, in all that nourishes, urging, “Growth will come Don’t let / This slowness burden you.” Anyone looking to remember the beauty of life or hear the sweet song of voices that do not shout will find a journey and a gift in Karen Poppy’s collection.
Reviewer bio: Jen Knox is a writer based in Ohio. Her work appears in Chicago Tribune, Chicago Quarterly Review, Room Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post. She was the recipient of the Montana Prize for Nonfiction from CutBank. Jen’s first novel, We Arrive Uninvited, was released in March 2023. Jenknox.com
NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry The Boxer of Quirinal, John Barr, Red Hen Press Brother Poem, Will Harris, Wesleyan University Press Chariot, Timothy Donnelly, Wave Books Dear Outsiders, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, University of Akron Press A Duration, Richard Meier, Wave Books The Flowers of Buffoonery, Osamu Dazai, New Directions Publishing Fulgurite, Catherine Kyle, Cornerstone Press Hydra Medusa, Brandon Shimoda, Nightboat Books Iggy Horse, Michael Earl Craig, Wave Books Imaginary Sonnets, Daniel Galef, Word Galaxy Press In Deep, Judith Sanders, Kelsay Books Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets, New Directions Publishing
The poems of Ron Slate’s Joy Ride look for the connections and listen for the echoes between world events, family lore, work, mortality, and art. Slate examines the intangibility of the past by exploring the notion of storytelling itself—the stories we tell ourselves, our families, and our communities about the events that have shaped our experience.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
805 online literary magazine welcomes readers to their first issue of 2023 (9.1), just in time for spring to unfurl itself in front of our eyes, much like the gorgeous flowers on our cover art by Annalee Parker. Inside this petal-graced issue you’ll find art, prose, and poetry by seasoned writers as well as several debut creators we are excited to celebrate. Anthony Alegrete’s debut poem, “家族 (Kazoku),” beautifully shows how our cultural heritage acts as a creative force guiding us forward. “Our Guide to Girlhood, for the Curious Boys,” Alyson McVan’s debut nonfiction essay, cheekily summarizes the impossible double standards girls are taught. Sierra Tufts’ debut flash fiction, “I Won’t Say It’s Okay,” touchingly describes the last moments with a loved one, and Kirby Michael Wright’s debut art “Dog Art” closes out this issue with a colorful burst of canine love.
Newly added to our Contests for Young Writers is the ambitious 2023 Quills and Keyboard contest for high school writers ages 14 and older. Contest organizer Nikhita Thakuria [pictured] recognized the many hurdles teen writers face, exacerbated by the pandemic and the rise of Chat GDP. Setting the standard of encouragement, Quills and Keyboard is open to sixteen different categories of writing with four winners selected in each category. And, eliminating barriers, there is no fee to participate in the contest. The deadline is May 20, 2023, so please help spread the word and encourage young writers in your life to submit their best work.
NewPages Contest for Young Writers and Publications for Young Writers are carefully curated, ad-free resources for young readers (K to college undergrad) to find great content as well as for young writers to find places to submit their work without being preyed upon. Please check out these wonderful resources and share them with young readers and writers in your life, parents, teachers, librarians – anyone who can help encourage the continuation of the arts for the next generation!
Named for the glassy, mazelike structures that can form underground when lightning strikes sand, Fulgurite weaves together reality and myth. Informed by fairy tales, domestic fabulism, and environmental concerns, Catherine Kyle examines gender on large and small scales. Patriarchal influences in domestic spaces are compared to patriarchal influences on national and global levels, and identity is made complex by the fusion of survival, dissociation, and promise. The collection bears witness to the grief of the everyday while simultaneously pursuing hope.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Superpresent’s submission theme for the Spring 2023 Issue was Speculation and Spectacle. Contributors were up for the challenge of speculating, in all its splendors. Thinkers and artists have understood the value of speculation. “When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing,” says Montaigne. Sometimes we need to consider and sometimes we need to know. “Questions for Titian,” by Duncan Forbes, like several other entries, revels in the questions. Sometimes the speculation is darker. What happens when a family member … disappears? Robert Lunday’s “Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness” provides one person’s clues. What thoughts are in a man’s head who has lived decades on the street? Miao Jiaxin answers with selections from his ongoing monumental series Albert Bushwick. The ‘Spectacle’ reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances. In this issue, works like “Perception: A Curse,” by Lindsey-Ann Chilcott, offers a reminder of Debord’s idea that “[t]he reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation.” Similarly, Daniel Bauer’s photographs of brutalist architecture, with their undulating curves and dramatic light, may reveal “the nightmare of imprisoned modern society…” Visit Superpresent‘s website to download a free PDF of the issue as well as order a print copy.
The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe Dzanc Books, April 2023
When seventeen-year-old Nani loses her older sister and then her father in quick succession, her world spins off its axis. Isolated and misunderstood by her grieving mother and sister, she’s drawn to an itinerant preacher, a handsome self-proclaimed man of God who offers her a new place to belong. All too soon, Nani finds herself estranged from her family, tethered to her abusive husband by children she loves but cannot fully comprehend. She must find the courage to break free and wrestle her life back—without losing what she loves most.
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Catherine Pioli’s medical graphic memoir Down to the Bone: A Leukemia Story will make you cry. Much like Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Illych,” you already know how the story ends before even turning the first page. Pioli, an illustrator and graphic designer, chronicles her journey from the diagnosis of acute leukemia to her metaphorical last breath – a touching scene where her partner leans over her in bed with a worried look but is relieved, when Catherine snores loudly, to realize she is still alive. The next two pages are blank except for the text: “Catherine drew her last breath on July 31, 2017.” Niagara Falls – because readers cannot help but follow her hope with each new diagnosis, each technical nuance explained, and drawings of cute plump little characters: red and white blood cells, platelets, stem cells, and those blasted blasts. Her self-characterizations express her range of attitudes and emotions through various stages: stubbornness, physical illness, exhaustion, not-telling-the-whole-truths to protect other’s (as well as her own) sense of hope. The lack of frames captures the lost sense of time throughout, one event melding into another. Backgrounds are simple line sketches with color on main characters and objects, the overwhelming white space a constant presence of the sterile medical environment. There is humor but far more humanity in Pioli’s story about a ‘rare’ cancer, but one that takes away a beautiful life and leaves sorrow in its wake. Pioli’s book helps touch this sweet spot in us all while educating readers about cancer and how they can help.
Down to the Bone by Catherine Piolini. graphic mundi, December 2022.
Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.
Lifeline to a Soul: The Life-Changing Perspective I Gained While Teaching Entrepreneurship to Prisoners by John McLaughlin was released this month in celebration of Second Chance Month: “On March 31, 2023, President Joseph R. Biden proclaimed April 2023 as Second Chance Month and called for observance of the month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.” For John McLaughlin, this was the perfect time to share his experiences with others. After devoting half of his lifetime transforming his start-up business into a multi-million dollar industry leader, McLaughlin set out in a new direction: to teach what he had learned to others. Due to a lack of teaching experience, his only job offer was to teach entrepreneurship to prisoners at a minimum-security camp in North Carolina. McLaughlin gradually built an effective program until a scandal involving prison officials blindsides his progress and threatens to bring his teaching career to an unceremonious end. Lifeline to a Soul takes readers inside the fence and chronicles the victories and challenges one man faced as a first-time teacher in the strange world of prison life. McLaughlin also works with Lifeline Education Connection, which offers low-cost classes to the public, allowing individuals “who have faced obstacles in their life achieve their aspirations in the areas of personal finance and entrepreneurship,” hosted by Founder Tavares James.
Queering the Border: Essays by Emma Pérez Arte Público Press, November 2022
The essays in Queering the Border by Emma Pérez reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López’s digital print, “Our Lady,” in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.
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A Suit of Paper Feathers by Nate Duke Parlor Press, January 2023
In A Suit of Paper Feathers, Nate Duke writes about Americana singers like Lucinda Williams and Tom T. Hall. Several poems interrogate his experiences working on farms in rural Oregon with WWOOF. The ‘farm’ poems in the manuscript are complemented by some poems about working for his mother’s environmental mitigation company in Arkansas. Duke engages these experiences through an ecocritical lens, which he also turns to broader cultural referents such as installation artist Christo.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Flowers are blooming and so is the Spring 2023 issue of The Writing Disorder, budding new fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art for all to enjoy! This newest online issue includes FICTION: “A Letter from the Batcave” by Charles Joseph Albert, “The Best Detective There Was” by Leila Alliu, “A Cat in a Box for Mom” by Joe Cappello, “The Best We Can” by William Cass, “Selling Out the Nation” by Stephanie Daich, “The Sad Princess” by Cara Diaconoff, “Dream On” by CL Glanzing, and “The Scarecrow Cross” by Erik Priedkalns; POETRY by Lorelei Bacht, John Cullen, Shae Krispinsky, James McKee, Sloan Porter, and David Sapp; and NONFICTION: “Zone Valves” by Graeme Hunter, “Father’s Day” by Kate E. Lore, and “What the F*ck is Going on?” by Arlene Rosales; and the art of Courtney Parsons.
55 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
The first week of April is officially behind us… and also the first quarter of 2023 is done. So hard to believe. Don’t let your submission goals pass you by this year. Take a look at our Where to Submit Roundup for the first week of April 2023 to help keep your goals going strong. And take note that several contests extended their March 31 and April 1 deadlines!
Don’t forget that NewPages Newsletter subscribers with a paid subscription get early and first access to our submission opportunities and events, the majority before they go live on our site. Consider subscribing today.
This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth- place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would know what was going on. . . [Read the rest at Poetry Magazine.]
Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder Button Poetry, June 2023
In Sierra DeMulder’s melancholic yet beautifully hopeful poetry collection, Ephemera, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose. Each poem reads delicately and elegantly, just fleeting memories on the page. Split into four sections detailing intimate experiences from the painful deaths of family members who clung to life, to passionate love she feels for her own mortal wife, DeMulder plays a sweet song by pulling on her own well-worn heartstrings. DeMulder ruminates on what will come and what will fade. Despite this impermanent nature, you can feel the tender warmth DeMulder holds for her family in every line, even the moments she wishes she could forget.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
This powerful collection of poems draws on American and African-American experimental lyric traditions, pushing language and form to their limits. Geoffrey Jacques’s poetry inspires deep thought, taking up themes of music, psychology, and literature. This work embodies the potential of poetry to forge new connections between aesthetic expression and the often onerous facts of human existence. Poems such as “Still Life” and “Detour Ahead” produce a juxtaposition of inspired poetic form and rich, complex realities of life, addressing topics of joy and love, race, class, politics, and the aesthetics of the everyday. With a contemporary and sophisticated tenor, Jacques lends his uniquely moving and provocative perspective to advancing discourse in these critical topics.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The April 2023 issue of The Lake online poetry magazine is now live and features work by Angela Arnold, John Bartlett, Clive Donovan, Tim Dwyer, Tom Kelly, Phil Kirby, Mercedes Lawry, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Charles Rammelkamp, and Shane Schick. Charles Rammelkamp reviews Deborah Landau’s Skeletons, and Dorothy Wall reviews Stewart Florsheim’s Amusing the Angels. “One Poem Reviews,” in which one poem is featured from a poet’s newly published collection, this month spotlights Angela Arnold, John Bartlett, and Karen Poppy.
