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!
February may be one of the shortest months of the year, but it’s not light on submission opportunities. We had a lot of new calls for submissions and writing contests added recently. Granted…not all of them are February deadlines.
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Keşke by Jennifer A. Reimer Airlie Press, October 2022
Wistful memory, future longing, and nostalgia for unrealized possibilities, Jennifer Reimer’s Keşke joins the ancient and the modern to the intense lyric experience of self-discovery. Watery scenes rewrite Homeric myth with a feminist eye while verses unfold inner worlds with tangible sensuality. Experimental yet measured, Keşke is shaped by forgotten caves, ancient ruins, wave-battered ships, and the ragged angularity of the Mediterranean coast. Evoking desire for what is absent, Keşke traverses the slipping movement of time and attachment, hope and impossibility, with a clear eye and a passionate hunger for where and what we might have been.
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!
Chinchillas are amazing little creatures that have grown in popularity as household pets over the years. Touted as quiet, clean, and attractive, even I have been tempted to bring one into the family. But the added responsibility of supporting another life form stops me short, which is why I was all on board for the new young writer’s publication, Chinchilla Lit. Publishing poetry, prose, plays/scripts, and visual art by contributors ages 11-25, the site greets visitors with cuddly chinchilla portraits and an equally soothing graphic layout and design.
“The chinchilla perfectly represents the welcoming, cozy atmosphere we hope to foster in this community,” the Chinchilla Lit Editorial Team says. “When writers submit to Chinchilla Lit, they know they can trust us with their work. As young writers ourselves, we understand how intimidating the publication world can seem, especially for those who are just entering it. In creating our magazine, we aimed to become a friendly, accessible face that encouraged writers instead of scaring them.”
Throughout the Winter/Spring 2023 issue of Kaleidoscope: Exploring the Experience of Disability through Literature and the Fine Arts, unexpected truths are discovered through all genres. Sometimes the truth can be hard to swallow and in other cases, revelations are surprisingly sweet. The featured essay, “Awakening” by Jane Gabriel, recounts the events of a beautiful, sunny, summer day when she picks up her teenager’s phone only to discover her daughter is plotting a murder and has enlisted the help of someone online. Without warning, a fast-moving, dark storm erupts within the home, and what transpires is sure to leave readers stunned. Kaleidoscope hopes readers will enjoy the well-crafted stories, moving poetry, poignant essays, animal portraiture by Katherine Klimitas, much-needed humor, and a review of the book Being Heumann. Other contributors include Matt Flick, Fay L. Loomis, Stephanie Harper, Alpheus Williams, Sharon Hart Addy, Evelyn Arvey, Carol Zapata-Whelan, Judy Lunsford, Vesper North, Courtney B. Cook, Eric Witchey, Judith Krum, Daylyn Carrigan, Jess Pulver, Kristen Reid, Chelsea Malia Brown, Robin Knight, Hudson Plumb, Conny Borgelioen, Dawn Rachel Carrington, Hannah Sward, Kelley A Pasmanick, and Fionn Pulsifer.
Trevor Ketner’s The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire is a stunning second collection from this National Poetry Series winner. Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare’s sonnets, the book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism. The sonnets come together to form a grimoire that casts a trancelike and intense spell on the reader. Centered on love and desire in the English canon, this collection speaks to the ever-emerging and beautiful manifestations of queer love and desire. Relentless, excessive, wild, and tender, The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire sets itself to chanting from beginning to end.
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!
Jelly Bucket, the print annual of Bluegrass Writer Studio, the low-res MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University publishes creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, art, and 10-minute plays. They are committed to publishing writers from, and writing about, marginalized and under-represented communities. This special section comprises roughly 50% of the issue and is guest-edited by an established writer who is connected in some way to the community being featured. The Summer 2023 issue’s special section is Indigenous Voices and their upcoming issue will feature Nonbinary/Trans Voices. Work from Jelly Bucket has been shortlisted in the Best American anthology series, and they nominate for The Pushcart Prize and PEN America Literary Awards. First-time and emerging authors have appeared alongside Eileen Casey, Ted Kooser, Stuart Dybek, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Sonja Livingston, Frank X. Walker, and Kevin Wilson.
The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker Wave Books, February 2023
In her first book of critical non-fiction, The Poetics of Wrongness, poet Rachel Zucker explores wrongness as a foundational orientation of opposition and provocation. Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their commitment to perseverance, these lecture-essays of protest and reckoning resist the notion of being wrong as a stopping point on the road to being right, and insist on wrongness as an analytical lens and way of reading, writing, and living that might create openness, connection, humility, and engagement. Expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016, Zucker’s deft dismantling of outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics feel prescient in their urgent destabilization of post-war thinking. In her four essay-lectures (and an appendix of selected, earlier prose), Zucker calls Sharon Olds, Bernadette Mayer, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Alice Notley, Natalie Diaz, Allen Ginsberg, Marina Abramović, and Audre Lorde—among others—into the conversation. This book marks a turning point in Zucker’s significant body of work, documenting her embrace of the multivocality of interview in her podcasting, and resisting the univocality of the lecture as a form of wrongness in and of itself.
In Dreamers Magazine Issue 13, readers will find the feature story, Rosalind Forster’s nonfiction, “Counselling in the Time of Covid: Healing from the Veranda”; the winning story of the 2023 Pen Parentis Fellowship, “After the Storm”; and the winners of the 2022 Dreamers Flash Fiction Contest: “There is Something in the Mirror,” “Your Every Breath,” and “The Last Shift.” Readers can purchase both the digital and print versions, as well as back issues on the publication’s website. Dreamers is “a heartfelt literary organization and writers retreat” near Sauble Beach, Ontario, Canada. Their magazine is published tri-annually and sent to hundreds of subscribers across North America and Europe.
THIRDOUROBOROS by Richard Kostelanetz NYQ Books, September 2022
Richard Kostelanetz says in his preface to THIRDOUROBOROS, “When I first heard the epithet afterimage as an honorific among visual artists, I recognized it as analogous to the strongest lines in strictly verbal poetry.” In his third installment of this series, Kostelanetz visually lays out words in circles. And just like the ancient symbol, allows them to devour themselves as much as they create themselves as afterimages are embedded in the reader’s mind. The two preceding books in this series are OUROBOROS and SECONDOUROBOROS, also from NYQ Books.
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!
Animal Afterlife by Jaya Stenquist Airlie Press, September 2022
The voices of near-extinct animals create troubled echoes in Jaya Stenquist’s debut collection, Animal Afterlife, winner of The Airlie Prize 2021. In fragmented reincarnations, these poems reach for the limits of humanity, the boundaries of species, and the laws of embodiment. Here, sensations become the mechanism for insight. With lithe lyric power, Stenquist builds a world of impossibilities, a language for the binturong, the eyeless spider, the siren of Canosa, and wild ponies of England; communications and intermingling with the human that can never be preserved, only imagined. As the Earth continues to change during its Sixth Great Extinction, Animal Afterlife creates an archive of spellbinding ghosts.
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!
River Heron Review‘s double release, Issue 6.1 and River Heron Editors’ Prize, are now live and feature their twice-yearly issue with sixteen talented poets, whose work the editors hope amaze readers, and the winner and three finalists of their recent contest. Included in issue 6.1 are Avery Gregurich, Alison Hurwitz, Lake Angela, Gary Thomas, Ann Michael, Steve Banchko, Frances Klein, Jeremy Griffin, Jane Edna Mohler, Kerstin Schulz, Lindsay Rockwell, Sharon Venezio, Gwen Hart, Violets Garcia-Mendoza, Christine Morro, and Abby Murray. River Heron is also excited to release their recent contest issue and publish the award-winning work of winner Nnadi Samuel and finalists Rebecca Brock, Christine Dengenaars, and Jen Stewart.
Lina Meruane’s novel Nervous System evokes the universal fear of illness and death on nearly every page. The story follows Ella through her struggles to finish a doctoral thesis funded entirely by her father’s savings. Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist, who is recovering from an explosion at a work site. After wishing sickness on herself – so she could concentrate solely on her thesis – Ella is suddenly overcome by an undiagnosable illness.
The story is presented in small fragments, often delving into seemingly innocuous memories, to brutal statistics about illness and the end of life on earth. These fragments match the tone of the half-formed anxious thoughts that fill the story. Death is treated as if its reality was becoming clear for the first time. There are lines that could have come from any textbook – “the heart was a muscle that could give out” – but in Nervous System, they lose their objectivity, inducing only fear. References to the ancients’ explanations of illness abound, reflecting the book’s treatment of these grim subjects; the fear and anxiety they evoke remain largely the same, despite technological advances.
Nervous System concerns itself with issues that are hard to accept, but there is solace to be found in hearing another voice confront the hard facts of life on our behalf.
Nervous System by Lina Meruane, translated by Megan McDowell. Atlantic Books, February 2022.
Reviewer Bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton and a range of Latin American writers.
The February 2023 issue of The Lake poetry journal is now online and features works by Michele Bombardier, William Ogden Haynes, Mary Beth Hines, Julie Allyn Johnson, Haro Lee, Juan Pablo Mobili, J. R. Solonche, Sarah White, Rodney Wood. The One Poem Review – which helps authors with new publications reach a wider audience of readers by publishing one of their poems on The Lake – features work from Clare Shaw’s Towards a General Theory of Love and Stephen Massimilla’s Frank Dark. The Lake is free and accessible to read online.
It’s About Time by Barry Wallenstein NYQ Books, February 2022
Barry Wallenstein’s poetry, from his first book in 1977 to now, addresses his awareness of time’s swift passing. The poems in It’s About Time continue this time-honored theme and its attendant thoughts and emotions. Now in his eighth decade, this theme is paramount. While time is explicitly central in the first and eighth sections, other sections speak of desire, music, current events, creatures of all sizes, and states of mind. Poems in each of the groups reflect the anxieties of our current period including references to the ongoing pandemic and quarantine, as well as overriding reflections on temporality. These poems also are full of appreciation and gratitude for life’s bounty. While avoiding the “personal” or autobiographical, Wallenstein’s emotional life is more apparent here than in his work of the past.
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!
Walloon Writers Review is an annual collection of short stories, poetry, and other forms of creative writing, along with nature photography inspired by the natural beauty and uniqueness of northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. Michigan authors and photographers and those who live here seasonally, have ties to the region, or have visited celebrate the incredible experience of being here.
A Call For Submissions is posted annually, and in 2023, the Eighth Edition of the magazine will be released. Walloon Writers Review print journal is designed to share on the reading table at the cottage, on the bookshelf of the cabin, on hand at camp, and can be found on the Michigan shelves of independent bookstores throughout the state. Writers and photographers are welcome to submit their best “up north” materials; editors welcome contributors “where they are” in their craft. The publication attracts both nationally recognized contributors alongside those just getting underway. The passion for the region is clear in each accepted selection.
Happy Friday and happy February. It’s time to discover new and ongoing submission opportunities with our Weekly Roundup for the week of February 3, 2023.
It’s our first official roundup for February so that means there are quite a few new opportunities to explore.
Want early access to these opportunities, many before they go live on our website? Become a paid subscriber to our weekly newsletter. The cost is just $5 a month or you can subscribe for a year for only $50.
Publishing open access online in cycles of eight to ten weeks with short breaks between, the newly established Intrepidus Ink lives up to its name. From the Latin, intrepidus characterizes resolute fearlessness, fortitude, and endurance. Editor-in-Chief Rhonda Schlumpberger wanted to showcase “alarmingly individual characters through a distinct lens of intrepid culture, not subordinate to other themes, with words that are gutsy and characters who overcome in big and small ways. Our stories tell our tale.” To that end, the publication focuses on flash fiction 300–1,000 words and short stories of 1,500–2,500 words.
Schlumpberger’s background is its own intrepidus tale, as she shares, “I’m a Midwest farmer’s daughter who liked climbing silos to watch the sunset and later joined the Air Force and watched setting suns around the world. I completed my career in the military and worked in molecular diagnostics sales and sales leadership for eight years before abandoning my traveling ways to pursue writing.” She earned an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University (emphasis: speculative fiction, romance) and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University, where she also studied professional editing. She was an Editor at Orion’s Belt Magazine, a Priority Editor at Flash Fiction Magazine, and an intern at Entangled Publishing. She currently reads for Space and Time Magazine.
Under Sleep’s New Moon: Rescued Poems 1970-1990 by Joseph Hutchison NYQ Books, September 2021
The road a poet travels is often littered with unrealized fragments, half-realized drafts, and unfinished poems that found their ways into a magazine but never earned their way into a book. If a poet is lucky, a few such left-behinds might be “rescued,” released into their true form thanks to abilities that have ripened over many years of practice. In Under Sleep’s New Moon, Joseph Hutchison (Colorado Poet Laureate, 2014-2019) offers a range of such poems, all rescued from twenty years of writing between 1970-1990. The poems in this new/old collection are by turns personal and public, surreal and naturalistic, musical and plain-spoken. But all explore the liminal regions we live in every day, too often unconscious of what we’re finding there. What this poet found there he has lifted into new configurations, where at last the poems can speak for themselves.
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!
Steam Ticket: A Third Coast Review Spring 2022 is the newest issue of the annual, nationally-distributed journal from the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. Founded by the English Department in 1996, a dedicated staff of student editors and readers publish the best poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction they can get their hands on. Volume 25 features a craft talk from Joy Harjo, as well as excerpts from craft talks given by numerous writers who have visited U. Wisconsin LaCrosse over the years, such as Brian Turner, Jaki Shelton Green, John McNally, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Robert Lopez, Sam Ligon, and Max Garland. This issue also features new work by authors from six countries, including work from Ukrainian poet Dmitry Bilzniuk, and 22 U.S. States. Award-winning authors and first-time writers are published side by side.
The Kenyon Review’s Winter 2023 issue marks their return to a quarterly publication schedule and the debut of their new magazine design [Gorgeous!], with cover and logo by Janet Hansen and interior design by Sebit Min. It includes a folio of fiction guest edited by Laura van den Berg and Paul Yoon, who selected stories by Tom Comitta, Anna Hartford, Amina Kayani, hurmat kazmi, Danny Lang-Perez, and Sarp Sozdinler. Readers will also find nonfiction by Robert Finch and Diane Mehta; poetry by Megan Fernandes, William Logan, and Maria Zoccola; plus the winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest judged by Maggie Nelson, and so much more. The vibrant cover art is a detail of Justify by Krista Franklin, and inside the issue is a ten-page, full-color portfolio of art by Jordan Seaberry.
Swallowing Stones by Lisa St. John Kelsay Books, January 2023
Swallowing Stones is Lisa St. John’s debut book of poetry in which she explores the process of finding a space for grief and regaining joy. Free verse and formal poems collaborate with philosophy and art to tell the story of a widow’s discovery in finding her place in the world again. From “Stomping My Foot,” St. John begins, “I want to channel some of this horror into poetry.” And later, “Give me back the world / of Mexican beaches / and the two of us dancing / alone / late at night / before bed.” Poems that beckon, beg, promise, and deliver.
Lisa St. John lives in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York, where she calls the Catskill Mountains home. Her chapbook, Ponderings, was published by Finishing Line Press, and she has published her poetry in many journals and anthologies. Her poems have won several awards such as The Bermuda Triangle Prize and New Millenium Writing. Her essays and memoir excerpts have been published in magazines and nonfiction collections.
Posit: A Journal of Literature and Art issue 32 offers readers much to cozy into as the winter months settle in around us: new poetry and prose by Michael Brosnan, C Culbertson, Elisabeth Adwin Edwards, Sean Ennis, Peter Gurnis, Dennis Hinrichsen, Andrew Levy, Rahana K. Ismail, Jean Kane, and Julie Marie Wade; text + image by Francesco Levato and Laura Moriarty; and painting, collage, and ceramic sculpture by Ron Baron, Sue Havens, and Jill Moser.
In Easy Beauty: A Memoir, Chloé Cooper Jones shares that she was born with sacral agenesis, a congenital condition that affects her stature and the way she walks. While her memoir focuses on the physical pain she suffers, she is more interested in examining how others see her and how she sees herself. She travels to a variety of locations, often under the guise of doing research—as when she travels to Cambodia to explore why people visit monuments to horrific events—but really to think through her self-image, largely shaped by how others see her as different and lesser-than. Her son’s view of her complicates this search, as she doesn’t want to communicate her emotional discomfort at moving through the world to him (doctors had told her she was unable to get pregnant, so her having a child at all was not a development she expected). Throughout the work, she explores beauty and the myths that have accrued around it, whether that’s through classical art or watching Roger Federer play tennis. While her writing and travels help her develop an idea of beauty that includes her and her view of the world, ultimately her relationships help her find the beauty she already possesses.
Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones. Avid Reader Press, April 2022.
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 or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Field Guide to the Human Condition by Adrian S. Potter CW Books, November 2022
In this newest poetry collection, In Field Guide to the Human Condition, Adrian S. Potter explores how one rebuilds oneself after grief, heartbreak, and challenges. He offers poems that focus on the setbacks and struggles that have the capacity to mold a person into a different version of themselves than the one they once knew. The poems are about grappling with histories, both personal and collective. Potter uses hallmarks from modern life – pop music, discrimination, shifting identities, and toxic relationships – to construct a hall of mirrors, in which each viewpoint reflects a different possibility. Sample poems are available to read on the publisher’s website.
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 Winter 2023 issue of Months To Years marks its five-year publishing anniversary! The editors express, “We are so grateful to you and the community that has grown around Months To Years. When we began, we sought to create both a literary community and a resource for those facing grief. We hope you have found some comfort in what we’ve created.”
This issue brings readers the work of twenty-six creators, consisting of ten pieces of nonfiction, twelve poems, and four visual works. All explore both the universality and unique-to-each-person aspects of death, grief, and loss. Months To Years can be accessed in a variety of digital versions—which include an online flip book, a downloadable PDF, and a web-based experience of each creative work—all available for free. Glossy magazine hard copies can be purchased on the publication’s website via third-party vendor Blurb. A small portion of each hard copy sale helps support the magazine’s work as a nonprofit.
In the War Zone of the Heart: Willie Cuesta Mystery Stories by John Lantigua Arte Público Press, September 2022
This collection of twelve stories featuring private investigator Willie Cuesta illuminates the histories and issues of the numerous Latin American communities that call Miami home—and how the past continues to haunt them. There’s a family concerned that their mother’s new fiancé isn’t the former Cuban political prisoner and hero he claims to be; a heavily tattooed Salvadoran gang member in hiding from the vicious former colleagues hunting him; a beautiful Haitian woman being stalked by a killer who uses voodoo to stoke her nightmares; and a wealthy American who made his fortune in Guatemala on the backs of its people and is now receiving death threats from his victims.
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!
Black Women Writers at Work ed Cladia Tate Haymarket Books, January 2023
Long out of print, Black Women Writers at Work remains a vital contribution to Black literature. Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after. Responding to questions about why and for whom they write, and how they perceive their responsibility to their work, to others, and to society, the featured playwrights, poets, novelists, and essayists provide a window into the connections between their lives and their art. Finally available for a new generation, this classic work has an urgent message for readers and writers today.
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!
Taking the F Train by Linda Lerner NYQ Books, October 2021
In Linda Lerner’s Taking the F Train, a New York City poet rides the F Train through the final years of the 20th century into the 21st; both gentrification and technology are rapidly transforming life as she has known it. Her old haunts – cafés, bookstores, diners, are being replaced by luxury co-ops. There are also losses due to illness and aging – those of others as well her own. And it’s not ok, she cries out! At the same time, for every push forward into the future, she’s witnessing an opposite push back into the past by the so-called leader of the free world. Nothing makes sense to her anymore. There’s only what can be salvaged by art…the act of creation.
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!
Jem Calder’s collection of interlocking short stories in Reward System follows a group of British Millennials, focusing on Julia and Nick, as they try to navigate relationships, technology, and jobs during the approaching pandemic. Calder renders his characters with sympathy and compassion, even when they make poor decisions, given the challenges they face. Julia and Nick (and their friends) live with roommates or their parents, move from one job to the next—sometimes by choice, sometimes not—and try to find ways to truly connect with those around them. Society exacerbates all of these problems, whether the structural oppression women (especially) push against or the technology that more often separates than connects (though not always). This focus on technology works especially well in the stories “Distraction from Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness” and “The Foreseeable.” In “Distraction” a female user of a dating app connects with and meets a male user (Calder uses no names), exploring the new dating landscape, for good and ill. “The Foreseeable” ends the collection, as Julia and Nick are both sheltering with their parents during the pandemic—one more enjoyably than the other—while talking via FaceTime. The connection keeps breaking in and out, a metaphor for all of the relationships in this collection.
Reward System by Jem Calder. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, July 2022.
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 or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Happy Friday. It’s that time of the week again. Check out new and ongoing submission opportunities with our Weekly Roundup for the week of January 27, 2023.
It’s our last roundup of January. Hard to believe February is here next week already. Don’t forget to take a gander at our Big List of Writing Contests so you don’t miss an early February deadline.
Want early access to these opportunities, many before they go live on our website? Become a paid subscriber to our weekly newsletter. The cost is just $5 a month or you can subscribe for a year for only $50.
Until All You See Is Sky by George Choundas EastOver Press, February 2023
This collection of essays by George Choundas is a report from the front lines of a first-generation American life: growing up as the outsider, parenting without a clue, and persevering in plague times. Choundas’s award-winning writing has appeared in over 75 publications. His story collection, The Making Sense of Things (FC2), won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. He is a former FBI agent who worked public corruption in the Bureau’s New York Office. His mother, born in Cuba, was a flyer at Macy’s Manhattan flagship until she saved enough to travel Europe for a year. His father, born in Greece, was a tanker captain who, aboard a passenger ship transporting him to his next command, met an engaging American tourist with a Cuban accent.
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!
Tending Iowa’s Land: Pathways to a Sustainable Future ed Cornelia F. Mutel University of Iowa Press, December 2022
In the last 200 years, Iowa’s prairies and other wildlands have been transformed into vast agricultural fields. This massive conversion has provided us with food, fiber, and fuel in abundance. But it has also robbed Iowa’s land of its native resilience and created the environmental problems that today challenge our everyday lives: polluted waters, increasing floods, loss and degradation of rich prairie topsoil, compromised natural systems, and now climate change. In a straightforward, friendly style, Iowa’s premier scientists and experts consider what has happened to our land and outline viable solutions that benefit agriculture as well as the state’s human and wild residents. Mutel is author of The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa (Iowa, 2008) and A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland (Iowa, 2016). She is the former senior science writer at IIHR–Hydroscience & Engineering at the University of Iowa College of Engineering and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
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!
As new publications cross our screens daily here at NewPages, we are always on the lookout for what makes this newest venture noteworthy. Turns out, New Note Poetry leaps the bar for being a publication readers and writers will want to explore. Publishing seasonal quarterly issues online, New Note Poetry is free for readers as well as writers.
Founding Editor Nathan Nicolau shares the dual inspiration behind the publication and the name. “’New Note’ is a riff on Blue Note Records, the popular jazz record label that was my biggest inspiration, and I wanted to make a publication that added a ‘new note’ to poetry, reflecting the experimental, avant-garde nature of the magazine.”
I was expecting Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book to bring back vivid memories from the decade I spent in college and graduate school; what I wasn’t expecting was how Klosterman would present the decade’s events, culture, and people differently than I remembered them. Klosterman covers what most readers would expect: the elections—ranging from Ross Perot’s role in 1992 to the Supreme Court’s role in 2000—the rise of the internet; the music that changed the decade, whether Nirvana or Tupac; the stereotypes and reality of Generation X; the video store’s impact on movie making; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire; major news events, such as the Anita Hill accusations, the Columbine shooting, and the O.J. Simpson trial. Where Klosterman shines, though, is in repositioning what he discusses, asking questions about why nineteen percent of the country voted for Ross Perot (full disclosure: I was one of those, and, yes, I regretted it within a year), how the nineties were more about the potential of the Internet than the Internet itself, and how George H.W. Bush lost the 1992 election after having the highest approval rating in history the year before. Rather than a walk through nostalgia, Klosterman helps redefine how we should view the nineties.
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman. Penguin Books, January 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Complete Poems 1965-2020 by Michael Butterworth Space Cowboy Books, February 2023
Across Michael Butterworth’s work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured – hitchhiking girlfriends, elm trees, the moon, astronauts, the space race, collage artists, misophonia, marriage, divorce, beached whales, clifftops, the sea, the seasons, mental block, ale houses, the chemical laboratory, ambition, madness, pain, death and impermanence, silver birch trees, suicide, Zazen, riots, train seating indicators, camping, the Welfare State, crows and seagulls, the racist English and Canada geese… are some of his subjects. The subjects of destruction – war, the consumer society, ‘progress’, humanity’s inhumanity, the doings of men (and the necessity of a new woman), galactic war, drug wars, hunting – are never far away, hopefully countered by the tone of optimism found in his later poems inspired by Buddhist philosophy. The effect is at once familiar and yet profound, in language that has the confessional qualities and simplicity of early influences such as Sylvia Plath and the Beats, and the later influence of Zen poets such as Ryōkan. Occasionally the writing is startlingly radical – a reminder of the poet’s beginnings in the New Wave. A collection such as this one from Space Cowboy Books is overdue, and Complete Poems: 1965-2020 brings to more deserving attention a less-heard voice in modern poetry.
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Able Muse, Winter 2022/2923 American Poetry Review, January/February 2023 Anomaly, 35 Arkansas Review, August 2022 Blue Collar Review, Fall 2022 Brevity, January 2023 Catamaran, Winter 2022 Chestnut Review, Winter 2023 Cleaver, 40 Concho River Review, Fall/Winter 2022 december, Fall/Winter 2022 Five Points, v21 n3 Camas, Winter 2022 Cholla Needles, 74 Communities, Winter 2022 Corvus Review, 19 Driftwood 2023 Anthology
Palooka is an international literary magazine of unique fiction, poetry, nonfiction, artwork, photography, and graphic narratives. They’ve featured writers, artists, and photographers from United States, Canada, Australia, India, United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, Pakistan, China, France, Ireland, South Korea, Israel, Finland, Croatia, Brazil, Italy, and Austria. This newest issue features fiction by Jack Harrell, Shome Dasgupta, Michael Loyd Gray; poetry by Rachel R. Baum, Joel Peckham, Pamela Manasco, Sage Ravenwood; a graphic essay by Naomi Rhema Edwards; artwork by Avery Bursey, and cover art by Tomislav Silipetar. Palooka is available for purchase in print or digital format. Visit their website for more information.
When Your Sky Runs Into Mine by Rooja Mohassessy Elixir Press, February 2023
When Your Sky Runs Into Mine by Rooja Mohassessy is the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Press Poetry Award. Shara McCallum had this to say about it: “Rooja Mohassessy’s debut collection belies any notion of a first book. It is a work of expansive vision and formal achievement, sounding an assured and unforgettable voice in poetry. Ekphrasis is at the core of Mohassessy’s poetics, resplendent in her responses to works of visual art and in the richly textured images she creates with intricate diction and syntax.” Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet. She is a 2022 MacDowell Fellow and a student of the Pacific University MFA program in Oregon. Having published broadly in numerous literary magazines, this is her debut collection.
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!
Taking the reins of their previous bi-annual literary magazine, Driftwood 2023 Anthology is the first of a new annual, double-the-punch publication! This inaugural release brings readers over 150 pages of fiction, over 50 pages of poetry, and around 80 pages of comics. The anthology is also filled with dozens of thoughtful, craft-focused interviews that take a dive deep into these well-curated pieces of writing and art. The 2023 anthology features the work of Michael Hugh Stewart, Johanna Povirk-Znoy, Vincent Panella, Izzy Buck, Rebecca Starks, Victor McConnell, Jenna Abrams, Marcie Roman, Mason Boyles, Bazeed, Luke Burton, Kimberly Sailor, Margaret Yapp, Bader Al Awadhi, Shaoni White, Anthony Immergluck, Rebert Laidler, Derek Annis, Caroline Harper New, Sarah Levine, Robin Walter, Ana Prundaru, Qiyue Zhang, Kimball Anderson, Yaronn Regev, Dave Youkovich, Stefanie Jordan, Ben Montague, and Olivia Sullivan. Due out at the beginning of March, readers can hop up and pre-order their copy today!
In issue 4.1 of Club Plum online literary journal, an array of characters and narrators try to find their way in rooms and spaces–orange rooms and roughed-up houses, bathroom stalls and bath drains, bedroom mirrors and dating sites and freezers. The places are sometimes ominous or unsure, but they are familiar. And we need that: the familiar and the familiar in the uncanny because then we will understand that we are not alone. Contributions to this issue include flash fiction by Lynn Bey and Sophie Panzer; flash nonfiction by Kayla Pica Williams; prose poetry by Ken Anderson, Kathleen Hellen, D.M. Richardson; and art by Richard Baldasty, Joseph A. Miller, and Doren Robbins.
Into the Good World Again by Max Garland Holy Cow! Press, March 2023
The poems in this collection are of remembering, not only the anguish and isolation of the global pandemic, during which most were written, but also remembering as a creative or restorative force. Max Garland’s poems walk on a wire of remnant faith that even in the news-glutted age of social media, there’s a role for poetry, “…news that Stays news,” as one poet put it nearly a century ago. There’s an evocative range: from the surrealistic conjurings of a child’s mind at bedtime, to the fragmented memory of an aging widow, struggling to recall the details of her life, or if not the details, at least the emotional truth of that life, realizing that for her, “Memory is more like poetry than poetry.” A first-generation college student, Garland left a ten-year career as a mail carrier to pursue his love of poetry. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 1989 and has been teaching since 1990; currently, he is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Garland was Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2013-2014.
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 central contention in Leon Fink’s Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since WWII is that US foreign policy in the decades following the Second World War had an important component of liberal idealism. Fink presents readers with examples of these progressive ideals in practice. Thus, we learn how, after the end of the war, the US promoted democratic decision-making structures for German workers in the industrial sector to thwart Communism in the areas occupied by the Allies.
In Central America, US liberals found an ally in Costa Rica’s President José Figueres Ferrer, who pursued significant social democratic reforms while remaining anti-Communist. Meanwhile, the liberal US ambassador in New Delhi, Chester B. Bowles, coordinated US aid for India’s agricultural development with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Fink is more convincing in arguing that the role of progressive ideals in US foreign policy declined during the last decades than he is in proving that these kinds of ideals were important in the first place. The examples presented in the text are largely in line with the book’s thesis, but readers may legitimately ask themselves whether these cases are representative of a significant trend or the result of very specific conjectures.
Reviewer Bio: Marc Martorell Junyent graduated in International Relations and currently holds a joint Master in Comparative Middle East Politics and Society at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the American University in Cairo. His main interests are the politics and history of the Middle East (particularly Iran, Turkey and Yemen). He has studied and worked in Ankara, Istanbul and Tunis. He tweets at @MarcMartorell3.
Unexpected truths are discovered throughout this issue, in all genres. Sometimes the truth can be hard to swallow and in other cases, revelations are surprisingly sweet. Kaleidoscope magazine publishes literature and artwork that creatively explore the experience of disability. Submit your best work to us today! Visit our website and view our flyer for more information.
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 23rd issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 125,000 readers in 145 countries and over 700 contributors already know; the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
Registration Deadline:March 12, 2023 Novelists, memoirists, and nonfiction authors: Map Your Book from Start to Finish the supportive opportunity you need to finish, polish, and prepare your book for publication, get personalized coaching feedback, and meet other serious writers. Our three-part format ensures you’ll track real progress throughout the program. Includes in-person workshop in Annapolis, MD in March 2023. Early-bird registration ends Feb 28. View flyer or visit website for more information.
Minotaur Snow by Ryan Quinn Flanagan NYQ Books, January 2022
Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s Minotaur Snow is an urban menagerie of very human poems. Difficult situations, individual foibles, that unescapable rush of the modern city; the sights and sounds and smells and touch, all told with great humor and at times, compassion. Flanagan peoples the landscape in such a way that his experiences become your experiences, his revelations and perspectives a busy populous of comings and goings all captured in a language that is both highly accessible and littered with odd notions or turns of phrase. Minotaur Snow above all else is a book that captures what is timeless to our shared experience, but with a fierce individuality that washes over everything like a heavy falling snow.
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 author of four award-winning books and a decades-long editor and book coach/marketer, John Sibley Williams can assist with everything from individual poem to manuscript critiques; regular book coaching; 1-on-1 workshops; the creation of pitch letters, press kits, and book proposals; agent/publisher research; and more. His passion is assisting poets and writers by tailoring all strategies to their individual needs. View flyer or visit website for more information.
Registration Deadline: Year-round Caesura Poetry Workshop aims to support, inspire, and energize poets through affordable monthly Zoom workshops hosted by award-winning poet, editor, and teacher John Sibley Williams. All workshops include poem analysis, active group discussion, and writing prompts. Upcoming class themes include experimenting with punctuation, sharpening poem titles, erasure poetry, New Year’s poetry, building a chapbook, monthly critique workshops, and more. View flyer and visit website for more information.
Join Writing Coach & Author Lynne Golodner July 24-28, 2023 for an intimate oceanside writers retreat in Nova Scotia, for a week of writing, workshopping, community, and connection. This retreat accepts only 8 writers and will focus on how place impacts identity. To apply, send a writing sample along with an explanation about why you would be an ideal participant, and why the theme of place & identity appeals to you, to [email protected]. View flyer for more information.
Deadline: March 13, 2023 Have you ever wished you could attend your own private writing workshop that would teach you exactly what you need to know, at the right pace for you, and provide feedback and guidance in extensive one-on-one sessions? That’s Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. It’s an intensive, personalized, one-on-one online workshop experience combining advanced lectures, expert feedback, and deep mentoring. View flyer or visit website for more information.
