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!
The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin Translated by Mark S. Burrows Green Linden Press, April 2023
Hilde Domin is one of the most highly regarded German poets of the 20th century. A poet of the Jewish faith, she fled political developments in Germany in 1932 and spent more than twenty years in exile, first in Italy then the Dominican Republic, which became her self-chosen namesake. Her work was deeply influenced by her time in exile and the loss of homeland. After returning to Germany, she was known as the “poet of return” and received numerous honors for her literary work, including the Carl Zuckmayer Medal, the Nelly Sachs Prize, and the Grand Federal Cross of Merit. Presented bilingually, many of these poems appear here for the first time in English. Read a sample from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 13.
It’s the final Where to Submit Round-up for December 2022! We’ll see you all in the New Year. How will your submission goals change in 2023?
Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every Monday afternoon instead of waiting for our Friday Where to Submit Round-ups? For just $5 a month, you can get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! Free subscribers get access to the latest submission opportunities on the following Monday.
In What You Wish For, Ruth Bardon uses a feminist lens to take a fresh look at wishes, witches, magic spells, princesses, sleeping beauties, and 21st century queen bees. Her poems are sympathetic both to hopeful, yearning heroines and to equally hopeful, yearning villains and minor characters. At the same time, they are darkly pessimistic about the possibility of happy endings. With subtlety and humor, these quiet poems radically deconstruct familiar stories. Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in journals, and her first chapbook, Demon Barber, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020.
Headlining the Jan/Feb 2023 issue of World Literature Today is Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop, laureate of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Also inside, Emily Doyle interviews R.O. Kwon (“On Sex, Soul Loneliness, and Walking toward Terror”), while Shoshana Bellen, Cleyvis Natera, Ana Ojeda, and Danae Sioziou provide additional conversational exchanges. Further highlights include A.E. Copenhaver’s “Eco-Lit to Read Now” booklist, a new poem by Ted Kooser, and an excerpt i9from Deena Mohamed’s forthcoming graphic novel Shubeik Lubeik (Pantheon, 2023). With more than two dozen book reviews, recommended reading lists, and other great content in the latest issue, be sure to take WLT—your passport to great reading—with you into 2023 and beyond.
In Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Rivka Galchen uses the story of Johannes Kepler’s mother, whom her neighbors accused of being a witch, to explore how easily people will bow to societal pressures. Katharina is a woman like many in the early 1600s: unable to read or write, but knowledgeable of the natural world. She is also a widow in possession of property. That combination makes her an ideal target for her accusers. Galchen also creates a seemingly innocent bystander—Katharina’s neighbor Simon, who serves as her guardian in the absence of her children—to take down her testimony. The reader watches the world through Simon’s eyes, as well as Katharina’s account of her experiences, and the reader also watches Simon react to the pressures the townspeople put on him. Through Simon, Galchen raises the question of who is willing to stand beside the accused even to their own detriment, as well as exploring what it feels like to be the accused. In her recreation of a time that seems so different from our own, Galchen reminds readers we will all have such moments—both of bearing witness and of standing up for ourselves—turning a time-bound tale into one that is terribly relevant.
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/.
Black Fire This Time, Volume 1, edited by Kim McMillon and Kofi Antwi Aquarius Press/Willow Books, September 2022
Black Fire This Time, Volume 1 is an anthology celebrating the roots and legacy of the Black Arts Movement begins with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and introduction by Margot Crawford and features the works of over 100 poets and writers, including (in no particular order) Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Amina Baraka, Eugene B. Redmond, Lucille Clifton, Haki R. Madhubuti, Wanda Coleman, E. Ethelbert Miller, Jerry Ward, Tom Dent, Michael Simanga, Quincy Troupe, Margaret Porter Troupe, Dudley Randall, Askia Toure, QR Hand, Jr., Denise Nicholas, Sonia Sanchez and many more. Michigan writer Denise Nicholas’s chapter is based on her true story as a voting rights volunteer from Michigan in 1964, inspired Michigan’s Office of the Governor to issue a Proclamation for an annual Freedom Summer Remembrance Day. Aquarius Press owner Heather Buchanan is a graduate of Wayne State University and UM-Dearborn, respectively. She was a director of the Idlewild Writers Conference and Midwest Poets & Writers Conference. Her press publishes many of the nation’s top poets and writers of color and national laureates, Including Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy (Louisiana), devorah major and Tongo Eisen-Martin (San Francisco) and Lupe Mendez (Texas). If not for yourself, consider purchasing a copy for your local public or school library.
For Issue 10 of Waxing & Waning, the editors went with their standard call: “We want what’s on the fringe. Whatever is deep and true. The moon represents this idea: what is dark, what is brooding, what is wild, what is crescent and changing. We want to feed the beast in you, the one buried beneath layers of manners and anxiety and internet induced abyss, repetition, and relative sameness. Work submitted to Waxing & Waning should be honest and well-executed. It should scream coherently; it should bring experiences and knowledge out of us that we have not seen before. It should rip out our black hearts and put them in front of our eyes. Bring us the work everyone else is afraid of. Bring us the work you’re afraid of. Bring us the work that gets at the trueness frightening you out of the routine. In a world blanketed in monotony—we seek to search outside of ourselves so we can better love, give love, and sacrifice for whatever art could bring. We hope to wax in truth and wane into poetics—to shelter ourselves from reality. To bathe in the light of the moon.”
Stepping up to meet this call for Issue 10 are contributions of poetry by A.N. DeJesus, Esme DeVault, Benjamin Green, Marian Shapiro, Taunja Thomson, and Andrew Walker; fiction by Robert Cramblitt, Max Firehammer, Joseph Morice, Chris Motto, Elizabeth Quirk, Eugene Radice, Douglas Steward, and Rebecca Wood; creative non-fiction by Mackenzie Broderick, Christie Green, Joan Halperin, Melanie Reitzel, and Anne-Christine Strugnell; art by Katie Allcorn, Karyna Aslanova, Gianna Sozzi, and Alice Teeple; a play by Paul Antokolsky; and Editor’s Note by Lance Ümmenhofer.
Waxing & Waning is published under the April Gloaming Publishing imprint, which includes a special focus on Southern literature as well as novels, memoirs, poetry collections, and anthologies. Print copies of Waxing & Waning and the Waxing & Waning Presents Series can be purchased here: www.aprilgloaming.com/shop
NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
About Place, December 2022 Aji Magazine, 17 Atlanta Review, Fall/Winter 2022 The Baltimore Review, Fall 2022 Blink Ink, 50 Bomb, Winter 2023 Boulevard, 110 & 111 Brick, 110 Cave Wall, Number 17 Communities, Winter 2022 Cutleaf, 2.24 december, Fall/Winter 2022
instead, it is dark by Cynthia Hogue Red Hen Press, April 2023
Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.
Jody Keisner’s Under My Bed and Other Essays explores the ritualistic aspect of fear, the summoning of anxiety’s ghosts, and what it means to be a woman living under the promise of male violence. Although Keisner speaks truth to power on what it is like to live with anxiety, it is the exploration of fear and her grandmother that ties the themes of womanhood, illness, and survival. Keisner’s three-section arrangement (Origins, Under the Skin, and Risings) plays an intricate role in how the work is both read and experienced. The reader could interpret the three sections as a balanced academic and creative essay of the Genesis of anxiety, the kinesthetic journey of a disabled body, and the resurrection of Self, which are all ideas Keisner studies deeply about herself.
In “Origins,” the opening essay, Keisner explores her fear as her partner asks, “Why does your mind go down such dark corridors?” This is the premise of the collection of essays in which Keisner, while realizing her own body has an autoimmune disorder, is also realizing that the world is constantly telling women that there is always a threat. Learning how to coexist with this notion, Keisner offers an exploration of female-bodied anxiety through beautifully curated pieces with profound research that both enriches and empowers the reader. Always paying respect to queer and disabled bodies, Keisner unites her voice as part of a symphony of those trying to survive in an increasingly antagonistic world.
To offer a counter point to the deeply embedded fear, Keisner devotes beautiful moments and lyrical prose to speak of her beautifully messy and human grandmother, Grace. Always studying the power behind language, Keisner speaks of her paternal grandmother with admiration and fondness, “My grandmother protected my joy-filled childhood, but to do so, she had to keep a part of herself from me: her pain and suffering.” It is through Grace, ironically, that the readers find a form of respite and the goal that, regardless of how much this world tells us we’re not welcomed, there are ways to not be afraid.
Reviewer bio: Olga Montenegro is a grad student at Bridgewater State University. She splits her time between Mexico City and Massachusetts. You can find her @ActuallyOlga on Twitter.
Chaos, Crossing by Olivia Elias Translated by Kareem-James Abu-Zeid World Poetry Books, November 2022
In her English-language debut, with a foreword by Najwan Darwish, acclaimed French-language poet of the Palestinian diaspora Olivia Elias probes deeply into the upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chaos, Crossing—translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid—is a powerful chronicle of uprootedness, of times marked by inequality, injustice, and disconnection. These poems—presented here in a bilingual edition—seek the calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos. Poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until she was 16 years old in Lebanon where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal-Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse, laconic language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees and human suffering in general. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, has been published in numerous journals and in anthologies.
From the Department of English at Auburn University, this Southern Humanities Review is a double issue and their 2022 Witness Poetry Prize Issue, featuring the winner, “Tulsa Triptych” by Daniel Donaghy as well as poems from finalists as judged by poet Rick Barot. The rest of the issue is filled with nonfiction by Kate Lister Campbell, Gage Saylor, Caroline Sutton, and Justin Jannise; fiction by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Rachael Fowler, Max Hipp, John Kim, Greg Tebbano, Neal Hammons, and Stephanie Macias; poetry by Nicole Stockburger, Ashley Kunsa, Tennessee Hill, Desiree Santana, Jubi Arriola-Headley, M. Cynthia Cheung, Jacob Griffin Hall, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, emet ezell, Marissa Davis, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Jai Hamid Bashir, Benjamin S. Grossberg, Jamie L. Smith, Helena Mesa, Zoë Fay-Stindt, Julia C. Alter, Aneeqa Wattoo, Adam J. Gellings, B. Tyler Lee, Ajay Sawant, Piedad Bonnett, and Karen McPherson; with cover art by Doris Alexander Thompson.
Night by Ennio Moltedo Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz World Poetry Books, November 2022
Written during the Pinochet dictatorship but not published until democracy’s return, Ennio Moltedo’s Night is a masterpiece of controlled rage, mourning, resistance, and astonishing humor, and the first of his books to appear in English translation. Moltedo, whom Raúl Zurita called “one of the finest, greatest, most curious and honorable poets of Chile,” is at once lyrical and political, a dramatist, a historian, and a critic. Ennio Moltedo (1931-2012) spent his life in the small Chilean coastal cities of Valparaíso and Viñ a del Mar. Born to Genoese immigrants, he is a poet of the New World Mediterranean: inspired, chastened, and challenged by the ancients, and in conversation with his contemporaries, including Huidobro, Girondo, Neruda, and de Rokha. A revered “poet’s poet,” he published eight individual collections of poetry, as well as an anthology of Romanian poetry co-translated with Neruda, and a chronicle of Neruda’s life (Neruda: poeta del cerro Florida). Longtime director of the University of Valparaíso Press, Moltedo also wrote criticism, journalism, and text for books of visual art and cartoons.
As fearless as she is creative, Chelsea Stickle reaches deep into her bag of tricks to “wow” her readers with every story in her debut chapbook, Breaking Points. Many of these stories captivate the reader in such a way that it feels criminal that they’re only flash fiction pieces, but it’s beautiful enough to accept them as the art forms they are. The courage to experiment with various styles of writing, including a multiple-choice quiz and a flow chart, reveal Stickle’s hidden genius by telling deep stories in unorthodox ways, one that might even spark the beginning of a writing revolution! A standout piece, “How Mature Are You: A Quiz,” exemplifies the glories of pushing conventional boundaries within flash fiction formatting through its whimsical and ironically hard-nosed approach to storytelling with a choose-your-own-adventure type of beat. These kinds of structures, while puzzling at first glance, expand a reader’s view of how effectively a writer can tell a story without falling into familiar patterns. It would not be surprising to see a wide range of unique, personalized styles born from Stickle’s innovation. Ultimately, this collection is more than just an ensemble of witty tales but a mosaic of brilliant artistry.
Breaking Points by Chelsea Stickle. Black Lawrence Press, April 2021.
Reviewer bio: Matthew Rodriguez is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University pursuing his English MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) and currently works as a freshman English teacher at B.M.C. Durfee High School.
The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone is a collection of distinguished and diverse writers gathered in a volume of unifying isolation narratives, a wonderful contradiction illustrating the affliction or privilege of solitude. Editor Natalie Eve Garrett aimed “to summon cathartic personal essays illuminating the experience of being alone” to challenge the shame and the taboo aspect of discussing one’s loneliness. Collected and crafted before and during the worst of pandemic lockdowns, the stories act upon the hard-learned lessons of the times, showing our isolation was not some passing phase.
Writing can be a punishingly lonely craft, so it’s the writers themselves that tie this collection together best. Each entry is a mosaic showing the complex solidarity of feeling alone. It’s in the “utter brownness” of Claire Dederer’s West Texas landscape and in the silenced pain of Yiyun Li, who “disowned [her] native tongue.” We feel the despair of it in Imani Perry’s hospital room, described as “a funhouse of refracted and repeated loneliness,” and the “different texture” of loneliness in the pre-internet era of Lev Grossman’s “Maine Man.”
Each contribution is a flare sent out of the darkness. In their glare, we see the individual reflections of loneliness. In their glow, we bask in the rebuttal.
Reviewer bio: Sam Tarr is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University and writer living in Weymouth, MA. His work has appeared in 86 Logic and The Bridge.
The weather outside is truly frightful across the country as winter storms sweep the nation. We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season. Hopefully you can stay inside safe and sound and work on ending 2022 by hitting the submission goals you set for yourself in January. NewPages is here to help with our Where to Submit Round-up for the week of December 23, 2022.
Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every Monday afternoon instead of waiting for our Friday Where to Submit Round-ups? For just $5 a month, you can get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! Free subscribers get access to the latest submission opportunities on the following Monday.
Waxing & Waning publishes one print and one online issue per year, along with one special edition contest, the Waxing & Waning Presents Series, that amplifies voices of underrepresented populations.
For the 2022 Blackout Edition, the writers’ prompt was:
“As 2021 draws to a close, George Floyd’s killer behind bars, Breonna Taylor’s still enjoying their time of freedom, and countless other BIPOC people’s deaths still without justice, our humble literary and arts journal is seeking writing and art that exemplifies the BIPOC experience worldwide. In a time of racial unrest, where privileges are being called out and people are being asked to change their behaviors to make the world we live in accountable for its unfairness and injustices, we at Waxing & Waning are looking for creative work that both includes this aspect, but we are also looking for any and all work about the modern BIPOC experience, even outside of race. Give us your poems about sunsets, stories that strike a chord in the human experience, art that screams to be heard. Be deep, true, honest. Here is not where limits lie. We want it all.”
The contributors for The Blackout Edition Prose: Winner Rim Chon, Runner-up Emil Rem, Marian Fredal, Leslie Grover, and Patrice Washington; Poetry: Winner Shamon Williams, Runner-up Glenn Marchand, Biman Roy, and Sabrina Spence; Art: Winner Christina Sayers.
The 2023’s special edition contest will be titled The Pride Edition and will be open to all writers and artists in the LGBTQIA+ population. Submissions for this will open at the beginning of the year.
Waxing & Waning is published under the April Gloaming Publishing imprint, which includes a special focus on Southern literature as well as novels, memoirs, poetry collections, and anthologies. Print copies of Waxing & Waning and the Waxing & Waning Presents Series can be purchased here: www.aprilgloaming.com/shop
Trouble Funk by Douglas Manuel Red Hen Press, April 2023
The speaker of Douglas Manuel’s Testify, a book of elegiac interrogations of race in America, returns to divulge his parents’ love story in the forthcoming poetry collection, Trouble Funk. Set in Anderson, Indiana in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism. Eschewing the “lyrical I” in favor of a third person omniscient point of view, Manuel exhibits how the latter half of the twentieth century rhymes with our current moment when it comes to political division, the hardships that Black folks face, and the rise of toxic right-wing policies. In many ways, Trouble Funk serves as a prequel to Testify, in which Manuel seeks to better understand and love himself, his family, and his country.
In her heartfelt memoir of four chapbook essays, Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone, Emily Pittinos animates familial memories and the personal process of grief. This collection pays tribute, not only to the memory of our passed loved ones, but to the exponential growth of their children in their absence. As we learn the details of her ancestral losses, the narrator weaves in and out of time and space. Through the iterative process of processing her father’s unexpected death we “[become] squires of each other’s grief.” Pittinos’s familiar trauma is rendered stark and bare in this “summary of his body.”
Our relatable Gen-X protagonist, a wry wit demonstrating vulnerable frankness, reminds us that, “We’ll live in cardboard boxes until we die poor and alone” in the inevitably “promise-less future.” Pittinos’s voice powerfully echoes generational attitudes of frustration and hopelessness without getting bogged down. “Nothing will ever be the same,” and we are “always preparing for the worst,” but these essays gracefully illuminate that “the mind abuses its license to change.” In the face of trauma and loss, the mind finds a way to connect back to its natural state, one of peace, gratitude, and remembrance.
Reviewer bio: Alice Verlezza, educator, writer, and mother of two was raised in Rhode Island. An MS graduate of Queens University in Sociology, Alice continues her scholarly work earning an English Masters at Bridgewater State University where she researches gender identity and mental health in narrative.
“A literary legacy since 1958,” December‘s newest issue (33.2) features the 2022 Curt Johnson Prose Award Winners: “Goodnight, Irene” by Miriam Gallou, Fiction Winner; “Slow Dance” by Garnett Cohen, Fiction Honorable Mention; “On Her Waters Summoning Us Down” by Gisselle Yepes, Nonfiction Winner; “Of Cats and Men” by Anjanette Degado, Nonfiction Honorable Mention. Other contributors to this issue include poetry by Joanne Allred, David Axelrod, Nancy Botkin, Mary Crow, Kim Ports Parsons, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Dan Rosenberg, John Schneider, Steven Schreiner, Heidi Seaborn, Mark Smith-Soto, Carole Stone, Florence Weinberger, John Sibley Williams, Erin Wilson; fiction by Quinn Adikes, Bruce Kilstein, A.C. Koch, Jenna-Marie Warnecke; nonfiction by Jacob Aiello, Jiadai Lin, Neha Potalia; art by Joy Curtis, Basil Kincaid; illustration by Sherry Shahan; and cover art by JJ Manford.
Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 by Irena Klepfisz Wesleyan University Press, December 2022
A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz’s A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: “[Klepfisz’s] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless.” Irena Klepfisz taught Jewish Women’s Studies at Barnard College for 22 years. She is the author of four books of poetry, a collection of essays, and was co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology. An advocate of the Yiddish language and active in its renaissance in the United States, she has published poetry and essays have appeared in Jewish Currents, Tablet Magazine, In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, The Manhattan Review, Conditions, The Georgia Review and Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures.
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful by Abigail Chabitnoy Wesleyan University Press, November 2022
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful, poetry by Abigail Chabitnoy, is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the “current.” Abigail Chabitnoy is a Koniag descendent and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. Her first book, How to Dress a Fish, won the Colorado Book Award in the Poetry category and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She is an assistant professor at UMass Amherst.
Grief and loss in Sin City. Erin Langner’s debut essay collection, Souvenirs from Paradise, hits on the allure and beauty of one of America’s favorite tourist destinations – Las Vegas. The backdrop of the classic Vegas casinos led Langner to receive the Wendy S. Walters’ 2021 Creative Nonfiction Book Award from publisher Zone 3 Press. Weaving in the city’s history – the fabled old strip, various casino myths, and celebrity stories – with her own experiences and emotions are what makes this collection so hard hitting. Langner convinces the reader of all the charm and complexity of Vegas’s most popular casinos, driving us with her when she writes about her first road trip into town. She captures the outsider-moved-in perspective seamlessly while reconciling the irreparable pain of loss: “People had been telling me for years that I would love Las Vegas, but I refused to believe them.” Neon lights, ringing slot machines, musical impressions, mob memories, and painful history. . . what’s not to love? Langner expresses a complicated and scintillating love in brilliant lyrical prose.
Reviewer bio: Shauna Briggs is an English teacher on Cape Cod and is currently pursuing her MA in English at Bridgewater State University. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, dog, and two cats.
Wordrunner eChapbooks‘ 47th issue, Winter 2022 fiction echapbook, is Death in the Cathedral: A Novella in Five Stories by Malcolm Dixon. These five linked stories immerse readers in the turbulent, disturbing and sometimes hilarious misadventures and rivalries of Catholic schoolboys in late 20th century Liverpool—Stephen Mattimore, the boy who tries to play by the rules, his rebellious and scornful classmates who torment their cassocked teachers, the misfit who runs the campus sundries shop. Death, lurking in the title story, whether sudden or anticipated, alters everyone. Outside the confining Cathedral College flows “the inky black waters of the Mersey, opaque to the point of invisibility, like the dark unwritten page of [Stephen’s] future.” This collection may be read free online or you can purchase an ebook edition for only $2.99. Authors receive 50% of all royalties, it’s a way to support a small press, and they make thoughtful gifts during the holiday season!
If you’re in search of some new media outlets, The Conversationalist is a nonprofit feminist media outlet publishing online journalism focused on a global perspective, from the personal to the political. The Conversationalist is a platform for original reporting and commentary from writers with under-amplified perspectives. The publication takes an empathetic approach to increase media literacy and inspire conversation around sensitive challenges in global affairs. Recent articles include “Made in Pakistan” by Anmol Irfan, “Buffalo and Uvalde, Six Months Later” by Raina Lipsitz, “Russia’s New Anti-LGBTQ Legislation is Just More of the Same Authoritarianism” by Chrissy Stroop, “Freedom to Want” by Melissa Chadburn, “Can We Writer Our Way to a New Word?” by Racel Pafe, and numerous others on topics like adult friendship, climate change, books, travel, community, abolition, food, and more. “Feminist stories. Global Perspectives. Zero BS.” Find more great reading at the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines.
The newest issue of Jewish Fiction .net is its Chanukah issue, which includes 12 stories originally written in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. This brings to almost 550 the number of works published by Jewish Fiction .net, that were either written in English or translated from 18 languages. Readers can find works by Tsilye Dropkin, Wayne Karlin, Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Peter Alterman, Avital Gad-Cykman, and many more. All available to read free online. And some exciting news: Academic Studies Press will be publishing an anthology of fiction from Jewish Fiction .net – 18 stories, each translated into English from a different language! This book will come out this fall, so keep your eyes open for updates.
Steinbeck’s Imaginarium: Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters by Robert DeMott University of New Mexico Press, November 2022
In Steinbeck’s Imaginarium, Robert DeMott delves into the imaginative, creative, and sometimes neglected aspects of John Steinbeck’s writing. DeMott positions Steinbeck as a prophetic voice for today as much as he was for the Depression-era 1930s as the essays explore the often unknown or unacknowledged elements of Steinbeck’s artistic career that deserve closer attention. He writes about the determining scientific influences, such as quantum physics and ecology, in Cannery Row and considers Steinbeck’s addiction to writing through the lens of the extensive, obsessive full-length journals that he kept while writing three of his best-known novels – The Grapes of Wrath, The Wayward Bus, and East of Eden. DeMott insists that these monumental works of fiction all comprise important statements on his creative process and his theory of fiction writing. DeMott further blends his personal experience as a lifelong angler with a reading of several neglected fishing episodes in Steinbeck’s work. Collectively, the chapters illuminate John Steinbeck as a fully conscious, self-aware, literate, experimental novelist whose talents will continue to warrant study and admiration for years to come.
apocrifa poetry by Amber Flame Red Hen Press, May 2023
apocrifa imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom. The developing intimacy between a lover and their beloved is propelled by a compendium of words for love, romance, sex, relationships, and affection that do not lend to direct translation in English. Serving as both titles and markers of the progression of time, these poetically defined words highlight the growing tension of one who claims “i cannot love you enough / to unlove the wide world” and yet is inextricably drawn to the offer of “a place of sustenance, rest, and my delight in your very bones.” Heavily inspired by the metaphors and structures of Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), from the Apocryphal books of the Bible, the characters speak to each other with contrapuntal call-and-response while letting readers into their private thoughts through epistles, sestinas, odes, and other poetic forms.
Margaret R. Sáraco’s solid debut poetry collection, If There Is No Wind, begins with a paean to a once-imposing, now-deceased maple tree, skillfully interweaving emotions and memories: “we sat on the stump remains, holding vigil, wishing her well in the afterlife.” It ends with a poem that transforms her into a seabird, exchanging the anguish of being shut in for the joy of freedom, “swimming in warmth, bathing my afterimage away.” In between are 77 pages of sometimes melancholy, sometimes uplifting, but always affecting, poetry. With a personal bias toward surrealism, perhaps my favorite poem in this collection is the lightly surrealism-tinged “Lifeline,” in which Saraco considers that her life has been spent “seated in a kayak / paddling rivers I’ve never seen.” She is waiting for her turn
To pull the kayak ashore, climb out discover what is buried in my dense weeds.
In the next-to-last poem in this book, “Quiet Moment,” Sáraco views a reflected moon in a puddle on a clear night and is waiting “for a message / to tell me what this means.” It is indeed a feeling that many of us have had.
If There Is No Wind by Margaret R. Sáraco. Human Error Publishing, September 2022.
Reviewer bio: R. Bremner has been writing of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1960s in journals and anthologies including International Poetry Review and Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry. Eight published books and chapbooks bear his name, including Hungry Words (Alien Buddha Press).
What Small Sound by Francesca Bell Red Hen Press, May 2023
Francesca Bell’s second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers an exacting view of the audiologist’s booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss of her own hearing and the mental illness spreading its dark wings over her family. This is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities. What Small Sound wrestles with some of the broadest, most complicated issues of our time and also with the most fundamental issue of all: love. How it shelters and anchors us. How it breaks us and, ultimately, how it pieces us back together.
In Borealis, a stunning long form essay published by Coffee House Press, Aisha Sabatini Sloan reckons with the vast expanse of nature, simultaneously negotiating her relationship to queerness, blackness and the Alaskan landscape. Written lyrically with the use of white space as a conduit for understanding solitude as a person of color in an overwhelming white population, Sloan wonders “when there is no Black figure, what am I supposed to like looking at?” She artfully explores interactions as intimate collisions and reconciliations, whether that be a lover or the way color displays in the sky; all experiences are showcased as this prismatic aurora. Sloan paints her images with dazzling natural light, calling us to take a moment to look and listen to the world around us. Borealis is one great luminous moment, a meditation of self-reflection in contrast to the wilderness. What is similar and what is starkly different becomes resigned to the mystery of images, the way they mimic and shift: “The fog has lowered itself like haunches over a toilet across the tops of mountains.” This essay is as concerned with music as it is silence; we hear “The opening strains of Bjork’s ‘Bachelorette’ play as a bald eagle opens its wings above a lamppost on the spit,” or how “Beaches tend to mean your ear hurts a little; the wind is loud.” Lists give way to observations and letters to a nephew in jail expose how captivity is not just the body in a physical place. Sloan creates collages of color and revelations, “Now I think crying is like touching time. A half-hearted attempt to crash into now.” Sloan’s essay encourages readers to spend time with nature in a way that is patient, humorous and imaginative, with the reminder to not look past any moment, as there is magic and horror everywhere.
Borealis: An Essay by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Coffee House Press, November 2021.
Reviewer Bio: Alexandria Machado is a graduate student studying English at Bridgewater State University and a writer living in Providence, RI. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Boshemia, Vagabond City, The Merrimack Review, 86 Logic and other publications.
The Iowa Review Editor Lynne Nugent introduces contributions to this 2022 double issue as diverse, including “an ode to a drag queen, an account of growing up with a Chinese last name in small-town Minnesota, and a meditation on a cane used as a mobility aid.” Nugent emphasizes The Iowa Review‘s evolution while also acknowledging its inheritance: in their first issue, The Iowa Review featured Donald Justice’s poem “ABC”; this issue features his letters, edited by Jerry Harp. Though that first issue was made up entirely of white, cisgender, heterosexual men (“brilliant men, mind you,” Nugent reminds us: “Donald Justice, William Stafford, Robert Coover, Galway Kinnell”) to her, Justice’s “poem reads like a manifesto for TIR. To launch a literary magazine in 1970 meant asserting against larger cultural forces the value of syllables, words, stanzas. Each of the diverse array of writers in this issue takes up the same cause. A, then B, then C, and building a new world from there.” Works in this issue include fiction by Pallavi Wakharkar , Serkan Görkemli, Rajnesh Chakrapani, Ernesto Barbieri, Kenneth Tanemura, Nikki Ervice, Lindsey Drager; nonfiction by Alison C. Rollins, Lisa Argrette Ahmad, Xujun Eberlein, Christopher Kempf, Michael M. Weinstein, Jonathan Wei, Michaela Django Walsh; poetry by Donald Platt, Sarah Heston, Alisha Dietzman, Samyak Shertok, Derek A. Denckla, Alisha Acquaye, Gunnar Wærness, translated by Gabriel Gudding, Meghan Maguire Dahn; and artwork by b. Robert Moore. Some content is available to read free online.
Secret Waltz by Karen Lee Brown Flexible Press, June 2022
Secret Waltz by Karen Lee Brown follows the coming-of-age journeys of three teens whose lives are turned upside down by the secrets they keep. Four best friends, Will, Kirstin, Leo, and Emelia, are growing up together, finding themselves and what it means to be a budding adult. They do all the things teens do—hang out at the pool, bike everywhere, and discover their bodies. But this growing up thing is hard. On her 16th birthday, Emelia receives stunning news from her aunts who raised her. Seems they’ve been keeping a secret from her for her entire life, one that forces Emelia to re-evaluate everything she thought she know about her family and herself, sending her on a journey of discovery with few tools and no idea what she might find along the way. Meanwhile, Leo is struggling with his abusive father, who leads a polka band, drinks too much, and cheats on Leo’s mother. Leo plays the guitar. He’s good, too. But his father wants Leo to stay away from that so-called music of rock and roll. Their relationship is complex: Leo both looks up to and hates his father for the control he has over his music and his life. All that is hard enough, but then Leo and Emelia and their friends Will and Kirstin stumble across Sonya, someone they’ve seen at school but don’t really know, doing what to them is an inexplicable and horrifying act. What should they do? What can they do? This begins a chain of actions that escalate and spiral out of their control. In the end, Secret Waltz asks, what does it mean to be a “good girl” or a “good boy”? If you have a secret, do you get to still be “good”?
Orphaned from the age of 19, James Wrexham finds himself employed in a dreary office. Without friends or family, he is merely “a spectator in life”. James’ humdrum existence comes to an end after being hired as secretary to Mr. Jonathan Scrivener, an independent gentleman soon leaving England. He is set to receive a lavish salary and live in Scrivener’s flat while he is away. Scrivener remains a shadowy figure throughout; details about him come from a cast of his friends who in turn come to know James. Initially, they are all unaware of each other, and all describe Scrivener as a completely different person.
I am Jonathan Scrivener revolves around two central themes, the first being the existence of an untapped potential in the men and women of inter-war Britain. Instead of painting his characters as gloomy hollow men (seemingly well adjusted and successful people, yet spiritually bankrupt), Houghton is more optimistic. Wrexham writes countless formulaic job applications, but what he submits to Scrivener is a long epistle about himself, which he doesn’t reread. There is something in Wrexham that Scrivener appreciates, even if he is blind to it himself.
Houghton protects his characters from material constraints, because “leisure reveals us”. Work and physical necessity don’t allow us to understand ourselves: “of course people behave themselves on a treadmill; what the hell else can they do?” Wrexham was a shell of a man before being hired by Scrivener. The job he is hired into plays a minor part in the story. It simply functions as a springboard to leisure, the realm in which introspection begins, as well as life’s “real” problems. Though no doubt controversial, it is a profound thesis.
Although Valancourt Books have republished six of Houghton’s novels, there remains a dearth of content out of print. He wrote essays, theatre, poetry and plays; reprinting these would be a good way to show a newfound audience the other strings to Houghton’s bow. Many of his works are nearing their centenary; as the copyright is coming up for some of his underrated pieces, hopefully someone will resurrect them.
There is no biography on Houghton, and little else remains to pad out his life beyond a brief interview given to a writer’s directory in 1950. I Am Jonathan Scrivener was eventually dramatized in 1953, but this was 22 years after the book’s release, and by then Houghton’s fame had already begun to dwindle. He shared an agent with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie and William Faulkner (to name a few), and had a host of celebrity admirers. Whatever the reason for his lost fame, it will be obvious to his readers that it has nothing to do with literary merit.
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.
Topical Poetry contributors share poems based on a recent public news/event, preferably from the previous or current week. Editors select the best ones and publish them on the website twice a month, on every other Sunday. “Poetry on current events can be transformational, thought-provoking, and everlasting.” Recent works include “Always” by Dustin Brookshire, “Carrier of Souls” by David Chorlton, “None of This Had to Happen- Channeling Jane Hirschfield” by Lynne Kemen, “A Tale of Black Friday” by Lois Perch Villemaire, “On the Many Shades of Protest (& Prayer)” by Jen Schneider, and “The Pen” by Bänoo Zan. All content is free to read online.
Secret Agent Gals by Richard Gid Powers Livingston Press, February 2023
Called “the female version of a bromance,” Richard Gid Powers has created a world in which quick-witted Secret Agent Gals outwit bumbling Nazi assassins, boneheaded Communist spies, and slick Irish manure cart bombers, and must rescue dimwitted FBI Directors, fellow secret agents, crazy Presidents and First ladies from the dumb messes they get themselves into. Peggy Guggenheim and Baroness Hilla Rebay, both famous art collector/museum directors, are recruited by the FBI to plow through the painters the two women have been helping escape the Nazis, to see if there are any spies. That’s their start as counterspies, and how the story begins. In the end, they win the war and have lots of laughs doing it. They go through Special Agent basic training, bond with each other against their drill sergeant, learn to march, tie knots, practice jabs and jiu-jitsu, shoot John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd targets, work their Secret Decoder rings and get fitted for designer G-girl suits. The plot starts to get complicated à la Indian uprisings, revolts in the Japanese-American internment camps, and Irish terrorists. The Nazis kidnap General Eisenhower’s girlfriend, and Ike refuses to invade France until he gets her back. The G-Girls are sent to England, where they meet James Bond’s dad, Jonquil “Junk” Bond. Ike’s girlfriend is also a secret agent, in fact almost everyone in the book is a secret agent, and she has a plan to rub hair remover on Hitler’s moustache and steal his mojo. There is a supervillain, who is, by turns, a rogue FBI agent, an atomic spy, a Nazi traitor, an agitator at the Japanese-American internment camps, and finally head of a terrorist campaign by rebel FBI agents disguised as Irish manure cart bombers to kill Hoover and take over the Bureau. These Gals have seriously got their hands full, which makes for a rollicking read!
Betcha can’t eat just one! Reading the flash fictions in Luke Rolfes’s Impossible Naked Life, winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press, you’ll tell yourself: Okay, maybe just one more. . . and then read another half-dozen of them. These stories are, by turns (and turns of the pages that keep you wondering what the author will think of next) heartfelt and hilarious. The first sentence of each is a runway from which Rolfes takes an imaginative flight, and the only regret is that sometimes the ride seems too short. Some of the best of these stories are the longer ones—longer, in this case, meaning about ten pages.
One of the funniest, “My Neighbor, Ray,” begins: “On day three of the global crisis, a person crawls out of my mouth. The person is small at first—the size of a marble—but then he grows and grows until full sized.” The person is essentially the narrator’s (Luke’s) alter ego; he befriends the next-door neighbor, who moves in with Luke and his family. Covid cabin fever induces late-night discussions on subjects such as what the concerns of the toothbrush and razor might be if inanimate objects had feelings; and an afternoon when Luke’s kids use some of the overstock of toilet paper to wrap Ray up like a mummy in the backyard.
Not all the stories are surreal but, as does the one described above, all have an emotional accuracy. You aren’t sure where you’re going in Impossible Naked Life, but you’re enjoying a Denis Johnson kind of trip.
We invite Northern California authors to submit book-length poetry manuscripts. All manuscripts will be read blind. Sixteen Rivers values diversity. We encourage poets of color, young poets, and LGBTQ writers to submit. Sixteen Rivers Press is a shared-work collective, with a three-year commitment. PDF email submissions from November 1, 2022 to February 1, 2023.View flyer and see complete guidelines on our website.
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.
The Woven Tale Press editors for Vol 10 No 8 promise readers “haunting images, eco-friendly sculpture, unusual mixed media, poetry, fiction and more!” Contributors include Craig Cotter, Stacey Fletcher, Jana Harris, Nell Jungyun, Kenneth Kesner, Roberto Loiederman, Joseph A. Miller, Natalie Oliphant, Craig Palmer, Sara Joyce Robinson, Susan B. Wadsworth. The Woven Tale Press welcomes fiction and creative nonfiction prose writing, poetry, and all mediums in the visual arts, including installation works; galleries are invited to submit the work of artists they represent. For their site, The Woven Tale Press seeks posts by both visual artists and writers, on any aspect of their creative process. Artists can submit their website URL for review consideration. If you are interested in becoming an art correspondent for The Woven Tale Press — to report on your local art scene— WTP would love to hear from you! Visit their website for full details.
Deadline: March 31, 2023 The 17th annual National Indie Excellence® Awards (NIEA) are open to all English language printed books available for sale, including small presses, mid-sized independent publishers, university presses, and self-published authors. NIEA is proud to be a champion of self-publishing and independent presses. Monetary awards, sponsorships, and entry rules are described in detail on our website.
Losing the Precious Few: How America Fails to Educate Its Minorities in Science and Engineering by Richard A. Tapia Arte Público Press, April 2022
A professor for almost 50 years in Rice University’s Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, nationally acclaimed scholar Richard Tapia is struck by the number of Chinese students in the hallways and wonders how the United States can remain globally competitive. Tapia asserts it is critical to the nation’s health and well-being to improve the representation of “the precious few,” or domestic minority groups, in STEM education and careers. African Americans and Latinos alone make up 31% of the population, and he writes the country cannot maintain its economic and scientific health when such a large part of the population is left out of science and engineering. In addition, he contends the United States will not have racial justice without educational justice. Underrepresented groups must have equal access to higher education. Providing a road map to increase the representation of domestic minority learners in academia and STEM fields, this is a must-read for university administrators and professors who want to attract and retain a diverse student body. In addition, Tapia includes advice for students, their parents and teachers, who will also benefit from his wisdom and years of experience serving as a mentor to those from diverse backgrounds.
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 flyer or visit website to learn more.
Sorry for the long delay in getting back to doing our Weekly Where to Submit Roundups! I am including all opportunities from the end of November until now. We were working hard on getting our site ready for its updated launch. We hope you are enjoying the new look and feel of NewPages. Enjoy the round-up of submission opportunities below for the week of December 16, 2023, and earlier.
Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every Monday afternoon instead of waiting for our Friday Where to Submit Round-ups? For just $5 a month, you can get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! Free subscribers get access to the latest submission opportunities on the following Monday.
Our Missing Hearts by Celest Ng is a dystopian novel in the vein of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Ng says she drew everything in her fictional world from real life, which makes her United States scarily believable. The government has passed the PACT act, which prohibits discussion of un-American ideas; targets people of Chinese descent; and uses the government’s right to remove people’s children as a means of control. This law leads to rampant discrimination and violence against Asian Americans, ultimately forcing the mother of the main character to flee. While there are parts of exposition to explain this alternate America, the heart of the book is Margaret’s difficult decision to leave Bird when he was nine. He has spent several years without her, but he ultimately goes looking for her, partly because of a cryptic note he receives, but also because of the disappearance of one of his classmates, Sadie, who has been removed from her family and relocated. By centering the novel on these relationships and the effects of such a law on parents and children, Ng reminds readers that laws don’t exist in a vacuum: there are always real individuals who suffer, whether we choose to see them or not.
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. Penguin, 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/.
Published in the summer 2022 issue of Brick, “Porous” by Jessica Moore investigates motherhood and imagines the many types of containers in and around pregnancy, birth, and life. Moore opens by stating, “I have an affinity for the liminal.” This fascination of “spaces between” opens an exploration of moments and feelings “beyond the physical.” Reflecting on motherhood, both years before and after giving birth to twins, Moore muses on the space love contains and the boundaries, containers for love, that also grow with motherhood. A car crash eight years before giving birth results in a head injury which causes Moore to pay closer attention to losses and to memorize a passage from John Berger that sparks an unintended attention towards how the mind “alter[s] and appropriate[s]” our own words—memorized words are, themselves, unable to be contained. The containment of words read and memorized culminates in an observation that words, like fetal cells from a pregnancy, live in the body long after birth. The essay itself is a container of Moore’s words blended with other writers’, a container that goes on to live within the reader, revealing the liminality of language.
Reviewer bio: Megan Eralie (she/her) is a nonfiction writer, poet, and graduate student living in Logan, Utah, who thinks having two cats is a personality trait. You can find her on twitter @smeggggs.
About Place Journal editors invite readers to their December 2022 issue themed “Center of Gravity” with these comments: “Justice is the center of gravity and resistance is how we get there. While the fight for social justice, reproductive rights, and the environment has been an ongoing struggle, the present moment demands an even more urgent response to these grievous times. As James Baldwin reminds us, ‘the role of the artist…is to illuminate that darkness [and] to make the world a more human dwelling place.’ In this light, the Center of Gravity issue explores poetry, prose and visual art that articulate the possibilities of resistance and envision worlds in which justice is a reality.” Contributors include Natiq Jalil, Gerburg Garmann, Michele Reese, Alison Palmer, Helen Stevens Chinitz, Joe Milazzo, Cheryl Byler Keeler, Jeremy Paden, Cristina Correa, Hannah Dierdorff, Lisa Kwong, Mary Newell, Joanne Diaz & Jason Reblando, H. E. Riddleton, Petra Kuppers, Akua Lezli Hope, Ingrid Wendt, Allison Cummings, Carla S. Schick, Joseph Ross, Evelyn Reilly, Julie Runacres, Ariel Resnikoff, Allison Cobb, Mariana Mcdonald, Cassandra Rockwood Ghanem, Gail Folkins, Gerburg Garmann, Jorge Losoya, Bunny McFadden, RBD, Mary Edna Fraser, and Jack Bordnick.
Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books Edited by Henry Israeli and Rebecca Lauren Saturnalia Books, December 2022
Twenty years ago, Saturnalia Books opened its doors for business, and soon thereafter published, The Babies, an astonishing collection of poetry by Sabrina Orah Mark. Since then, Saturnalia Books has published some of the most innovative new voices in the poetry world, including poets Sarah Vap, Catherine Pierce, Kathleen Graber, Kristi Maxwell, Natalie Shapero, Peter Jay Shippy, Martha Silano, Timothy Liu, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Hadara Bar-Nadav, and Kayleb Rae Candrilli, as well as the groundbreaking Gurlesque anthology. This collection gathers poems from all of our poet’ s books, giving readers a good taste of twenty years’ worth of Saturnalia Books publications. With an introduction by poet and founder Henry Israeli and managing editor Rebecca Lauren.
We will begin scheduling interviews on December 16, 2022.
PRODUCTION EDITORS: As an integral part of the managing editor’s office, production editors are responsible for layout and formatting of all content prior to posting at MAYDAY. In addition to an interest in literary publishing, strong applicants might also have experience with digital journalism, publishing, and/or proofing or editing copy. MAYDAY is published on WordPress, so experience with this platform will be helpful, but it’s not prohibitively difficult to learn, either. We provide staff training and ongoing support. Familiarity with the Chicago Manual of Style will also be helpful, though it is also not an immediate requirement.
POETRY EDITORS: In addition to reading submissions and selecting work for publication, poetry editors will be encouraged to solicit work for the magazine and help develop various feature series and ongoing projects in collaboration with other editors on staff. Ideal candidates for the poetry editor positions may or may not have an educational background in writing or literary studies, but should have experience publishing their own work and/or editing the work of others.
A succinct nonfiction essay by Catherine Sinow, but one that will sit in the mind long after you’ve finished reading it, “Tom Is Dead” is about tragedy befalling a family and the complications of grief that come from no longer being close to that family. The work, published in Issue 3 of Marrow Magazine, is about rifts between people but also about closeness, and how those two things can co-exist sometimes in strange and painful ways. Sinow utilizes the small space the essay takes up well, and while the word count is low, the content is packed with effective language, like these opening lines, “Once I was friends with two brothers. I had a falling out with both of them. Eight months later, their dad was hit by a car and killed.” The blend of craft and content makes the essay a real brain-worm of a piece, and it’s a slightly morbid, slightly bittersweet, altogether powerful read.
“Tom Is Dead” by Catherine Sinow. Marrow Magazine, Issue 3, 2022.
Reviewer bio: Virginia is an English graduate student at Utah State University. They like talking with cats better than talking with people.
