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!
This is the last month to submit work to online literary magazine Oyster River Pages for their annual issue. They seek work that stretches both creative and social boundaries and particularly seek to feature artists whose voices have been historically de-centered or marginalized. They also highlight new voices in their Emerging Voices in Poetry and Fiction. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
In the online Volney Road Review Spring 2022, N.P. Stokes announces his stepping down from his role as Editor-in-Chief and passing the torch to Mallory Raider for the continuation of the biannual publication. Stokes writes, “Art comes from many places, inspiration, effort, and, not the least of these, love. In many ways, art is the expression of personal growth, it is tangible fragment insight the artist releases to the world. The communication of this flash of purpose that brings author, artist, and audience together in the shared experience of beauty.” Allowing us to share in this experience of beauty in this newest issue are works of Prose by Dianne Lee Blomberg, Dante DelBene, and Harvey James; Poetry by Amanda Hawk, W. Barrett Munn, Cassandra Lawton, and Michael T. Young; and Drama by Rose O’Keefe.
In issue 3.2’s introductory essay, “Claim What is Ours,” Club Plum online literary journal founding editor Thea Swanson writes, “Freedom and democracy are fragile. They are precious, and they shouldn’t be precious. They should be mundane. // Writing and creating, for some of us, is mundane, and for that, we should take pause and treasure our ability to write and to create, to share our words and images, knowing how closely these acts are tied to our freedom, to our democracy.” Sharing in these very acts are the contributors to this issue: flash fiction by David Hartley, Amy Holman, Jen Schneider, and Nora Studholme; prose poetry by Kevin Carey, Larua Goldin, Sophia Holme, and Nicole Flaherty Kimball; and art by Nicola Brayan, Phyllis Green and Sabahat Ali Wani.
The Bar at Twilight
Stories by Frederic Tuten
Bellevue Literary Press, May 2022
In the fifteen stories contained in this collection, The Bar at Twilight, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires — Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau — a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most. New York-based Frederic Tuten is the author of five novels, the memoir My Young Life, and two short story collections. Among other honors, Tuten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing.
Juan Felipe Herrera, former US Poet Laureate and author of numerous poetry collections, is set to act as the judge for the 2022 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Besides receiving a $1,000 cash prize and publication in Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, the winner also receives a letterpress broadside printed by Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Coining a Wishing Tower
Poetry by Ayesha Raees
Platypus Press, March 2022
Selected by Kaveh Akbar as winner of the 2020 Broken River Prize, Coining a Wishing Tower by Ayesha Raees is both story and song, a lyrical narrative that gathers and releases. There are moments of childlike wonder and of adult meditation — oftentimes one and the same. In fragments both real and unreal, this is a book of rituals, of history, of surrender. Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Asian American Writers’ Workshop The Margins and has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. From Pakistan, she currently lives between Lahore and New York City.
Promoted by the editors as their “May Day Issue,” this newest online issue of Hole in the Head re:View features “Tulips, Saturday Night Fever, fat back, Jack Spicer, utopia, a corpse flower, murmurations of starlings, old New Yorkers, bronze and string, sad boomers, some jackass jacked up on coke, a cadaver, beetles, stray mutts, Hugo & Wright, St. Therese of Lisieux, a blizzard book, tickets to heaven, stardust, a declaration of war…and so much more.” Some of the writers include Charles Simic, Stephen Gibson, Gerald Yelle, Meg Pokrass & Jeff Friedman, Seth Leeper, Richard Matta, Ace Boggess, George Perreault, Anny Jones, Martine van Bijlert, Yvonne Zipter, Hannah Marshall, Christopher Paul Brown, and GTimothy Gordon. Hole in the Head re:View also published a special Ukraine issue with their friends at Nine Mile Magazine. Check that out here.
In his introduction to issue 111 of The Greensboro Review, Terry Kennedy writes of how he came to be the editor of this long-standing, esteemed publication under the apprenticeship of former editor Jim Clark. “I believe each great apprenticeship starts with someone believing in a person before that person believes in themselves. . . These days, what I want to do most is read. Discovering that one story, that one poem that really sings is what brings me the most joy, what gives me the most satisfaction. Put another way, I delight in believing in writers who may not yet believe in themselves.” Contributors to this issue in whom Kennedy believes include fiction by Clancy Tripp, Ellen Rhudy, Akshay Shrivastava, Molly Guinn Bradley, Robert Wood Lynn, Kevin McWilliams Coates, Kanza Javed, and poetry by Peter Kent, Nicole Adabunu, Natalia Conte, Emily Cinquemani, Melissa Studdard, Jeremy Halinen, Matt W. Miller, Jed Myers, Julia Edwards, K.R. Segriff, Emily Herring Wilson, L.A. Johnson, and Alyx Chandler.
Greyhound Americans
Poetry by Moncho Ollin Alvarado
Saturnalia Books, March 2022
Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, this collection is “dazzlingly queer, inclusive, celestial, with indigenous ancestral heart.” Through his verse, poet Moncho Alvarado confronts a family history of borderland politics by discovering a legacy of violence, grief, trauma, and survival through poems that have an unmistakable spirit, tenderness, intimacy, and humility. These poems’ persistent resilience creates a constellation of songs, food, flowers, family, community, and trans joy, that, by the end, wants you to feel loved, nourished, and wants you to remember to say, “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.”
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 20th 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 from around the globe, including Andrew Cusick, Bracha K. Sharp, Christina H. Felix, David Axelrod, Elaine Fowler, Feiya Zhang, Grant Chemidlin, James Barnes, John Muro, Karen Poppy, Lana Lehpamer, Linda Michel-Cassidy, Lorrie Ness, Maryam Imogen Ghouth, Michelle McMillan-Holifield, Patrick Dawson, R.B. Smith, Robert Rinehart, Samantha Liu, Sarah Normandie, Sera Gamble, William R. Stoddart, and many more. 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 100,000 readers in 145 countries already know; the finest new writing is here, at your fingertips.
How We Disappear
Novella & Stories by Tara Lynn Masih
Press 53, September 2022
In this collection, Masih offers readers transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone – runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium. Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes. Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of numerous other book awards. She is the author of My Real Name is Hanna and editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction.
Guest Post by Kevin Brown
Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel, How High We Go in the Dark, doesn’t have a plot per se, as it reads more like an interconnected collection of short stories than it does a novel. A character’s wife from one chapter will show up in a later chapter as a friend to the girlfriend of another character, a minor characters in one chapter becomes the focus of a later chapter or vice versa. What the characters do have in common is a tenuous existence, as Earth has become less and less habitable. Throughout much of the book, a pandemic is ravaging the world, killing people by mutating their organ cells, causing hearts to behave like livers or brains to change into lungs. Even after that tragedy becomes more controllable, there is still environmental disaster, as wildfires rage constantly, the Arctic is quickly melting, and sea levels rise by feet, not by inches. What Nagamatsu is most interested in exploring, however, is how people avoid one another, even in the midst of suffering, and how they might still be able to connect to one another. Though technology — perhaps even space travel — could save people’s lives, only true connection has a chance of healing their souls.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. William Morrow, 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. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter at @kevinbrownwrite or http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
I’m a huge fan of the 9×9 format South Dakota Review and the luxury of poetry that doesn’t have to be font-shrunk to fit the page and the double-column prose. This lovely new installation includes poetry by Brandon Krieg, Hollie Dugas, Laura S. Marshall, Sunni Brown Wilkinson, Samantha Padgett, Lana I. Ghannam, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Annette C. Boehm, Charlie Clark, and Adam Scheffler, essays by Lee Ann Roripaugh, E. J. Meyers, Oakley Ayden, Lori Horvitz, Margaret Erhart, and short stories by Suzy Eynon, Cassandra Woodard, Jenny McBride, and Katie Schmid.
The Fall 2021 issue of Zone 3 just hit the stands, celebrating thirty-five years of continuous publication! Editor Amy Wright opens the volume with a retrospective look at events from the founding year, 1986, and extols, “For our 35th anniversary issue, we are united in our resolve to create a safe space to hear, heed, and uplift BIPOC issues, joys, struggles, and stories. We are invested in equity. As editors, we want the conversations generated by our pages to demonstrate a full range of human experiences and intend to follow this special issue with additional themed issues dedicated to underrepresented voices.” The opening essay, “This is My American Country” by Allen M. Price is intended to “upset assumptions about what America has meant and can mean, because when our concepts, illusions, and projections break down, we see ourselves as we truly are and are becoming.” and can be read on the Zone 3 website.
Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual
Memoir by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press, June 2022
If you’re a poet, how are you going to survive if you can’t get a teaching job? McIntosh offers the answer: You need a Plan B if you want to put food on the table, wear shoes without holes in the soles, and stop living with roommates before you turn sixty. Taking readers through his own experiences in the world of commercial writing and publishing, McIntosh asserts that it is possible to have a successful career as a poet while holding down day jobs that make us better writers. Sandy McIntosh is publisher of Marsh Hawk Press. He has published fifteen collections of poetry and prose as well as three award-winning computer software programs.
Deadline: May 31, 2022
The 2022 Autumn House Press Prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction are open! Winners of each prize receive publication of their full-length manuscripts. Each winner also receives a $1,000 honorarium and a $1,500 travel/publicity grant to promote the book. The submission period closes on May 31 (Eastern Time). Please submit online, through our online submission manager. The reading fee is $30 (we will waive the submission fee for those undergoing financial hardship or living with limited means). Submission should be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions permitted. The judges for the 2022 prizes are Carl Phillips (poetry), Venita Blackburn (fiction), and Lia Purpura (nonfiction).
Tribar
Poetry by Andra Rotaru
Translated by Anca Roncea
Saturnalia Books, March 2022
Winner of the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, translated from Romanian by Anca Roncea, Tribar starts from the geometrical concept of an impossible triangle whose three sides do not connect but still exist in the form of a triangle, creating a direction for movement. Andra Rotaru’s poetic work has developed from some of her encounters with modern dance choreography: her poems simultaneously mimic and track the body in motion. Her “connections” become joints or articulated bones that work together to carry the body along. This translation recreates this embodiment in English by focusing on the minute details of movement and sound in Andra’s language and on the “kinetic air” of Romanian.
The Editor’s Statement in the newest issue of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry begins, “An explicit goal of Presence is to publish contemporary poetry that continues the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Church’s long history of recognizing the value of art as a way of leading us to God through its truth, beauty and goodness.” The featured poet in this annual issue is Julia Alvarez, along with featured translations of Juana Rosa Pita’s work translated by Erin Goodman. Over five dozen poets are included in this issue as well as interviews with poet, psychologist, and publisher John Cusack Handler and poet, teacher Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, two dozen poetry book reviews, and a section called “Life’s Work” with essays that focus on Jane Hirshfield (by Vivian I. Bikulege) and Sally Read (by Pat Destito). Cover art: Transmutation, acrylic on ceramic by Beth Shadur. The next submission period for Presence is August 1 – October 1, 2022.
Publishing four issues per year from pieces collected during two open submission periods, the newest issue of Change Seven features fiction by Rebecca Andem, Joseph Ducato, Megan Lucas, Michelle Spencer, and Josh White; poetry by Randy Blythe, James Cochran, Robert Detman, Peter Grieco, Mark Hammershick, William Heath, and Virginia Laurie; non-fiction by Stuart Baker Hawk, Lillian Brion, Saila Kariat, Anna Oberg, and Joshua Thusat; and art by Kailee Bal, Lawrence Bridges, Greg Clary, Rachel Coyne, Mark Rosalbo, Max St-Jacques, and Karah Tull. The next open reading period starts June 1.
“It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I can change seven.”
~ Dorothy Parker, The Paris Review, 1956
They Don’t Want Her There: Fighting Sexual and Racial Harassment in the American University
Nonfiction by Carolyn Chalmers
University of Iowa Press, April 2022
Decades before the #MeToo movement, Chinese American professor Jean Jew M.D. brought a lawsuit against the University of Iowa, alleging a sexually hostile work environment within the university’s College of Medicine. As Jew gained accolades and advanced through the ranks at Iowa, she was met with increasingly vicious attacks on her character by her white male colleagues. After years of demoralizing sexual, racial, and ethnic discrimination, finding herself without any higher-up departmental support, and noting her professional progression beginning to suffer by the hands of hate, Jean Jew decided to fight back. Carolyn Chalmers was her lawyer. This book tells the inside story of pioneering litigation unfolding during the eight years of a university investigation, a watershed federal trial, and a state court jury trial.
Published by the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte with an editorial staff comprised of current students Qu Literary Magazine publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and script excerpts. Payment upon publication is $100 per prose piece and $50 per poem. The Winter 2022 contributors include Nathan Alling Long, G.G. Silverman, Naomi Anne Goldner, Mariah Lanzer, Susan Comninos, Alex Dodt, Susan Comninos, Michelle McMillan-Holifield, Brent Ameneyro, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Kate Horowitz, John Leonard, Seif-Eldeine, Lisa Summe, Neal Adelman, Jake Alexander, and Kristin Dombek. Each new issue is free to read online and also available to purchase in print.
A Song by the Aegean Sea
Poetry by Mohamed Metwalli
Translated by Gretchen McCullough
Egret Chapbooks, 2022
From the Introduction: “Mohamed Metwalli was recognized as a poet in the Arab world at a young age in 1992, when he won the prestigious Yousef el-Khal prize by Riad El-Rayyes Books in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. He was only twenty-two. The Yousef El-Khal prize was a highly coveted award for the best first collection for poets in the Arabic-speaking world. Once, with a mischievous grin on his face, he told me how he rolled up at the ceremony in Beirut, clad in jeans and sneakers to pick up the prize – it was his first trip out of Egypt. A little over fifty now, he has published four collections of poetry. . . This book celebrates the underbelly of the city: the gypsies selling flowers, the roving musicians, the mussel-sellers, and the protesters. The elements of the city’s coastline are merged with the characters in an impressionistic, yet surreal canvas from a stranger’s point of view. The Traveler, i.e., the poet, or the singer of the Aegean song yearns to become part of the scene. Through this yearning, the poetry becomes lyrical.” – Gretchen McCullough
Providing an international “platform for works of art that challenge conventions of form and format, of voice and genre,” the newest issue of Anomaly continues to deliver on that challenge. April 2022 issue contributors include Matthew Klane and James Belflower, L. Nichols, Jesse Lee Kercheval, J.I. Kleinberg, Wylde Parsley, Tim Tim Cheng, Stephanie Kaylor, Sihle Ntuli, Roy Wang, Ros Seamark, Prince Bush, Olúwatamílọ́re Ọ̀shọ́, Nicole Callihan, Maija Haavisto, Lisa Creech Bledsoe, Upasana, Stephanie King, Scott Pomfret, Suzanne Martin, Leslie Lindsay, Cassandra Lawton, and many more. Submissions for their next issue open June 1, 2022, and while there is a small fee to cover operational costs, this fee is waived for all Black and Indigenous writers “to support those most targeted by state violence.”
NewPages receives many wonderful literary 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” tag under “Popular Topics.”
4×2, April 2022
Adanna, Issue 11
American Writers Series, Fall 2021
Apple Valley Review, Spring 2022
Arc Poetry Magazine, 97
Bellevue Literary Review, Issue 42
Bennington Review, Issue 10
bioStories, April 2022
Blue Collar Review, Winter 21-22
Brilliant Flash Fiction, March 2022
Carve, Spring 2022
Cleaver, Issue 37
Club Plum, 13.2
May is just around the corner. Don’t miss out on some of these contest and general submission periods with April 30 and early May deadlines! And don’t forget that if you haven’t already subscribed to our weekly newsletter, you get first glance at ads and opportunities before they are live on the site, so subscribe today.
Copy
Poetry by Dolores Dorantes
Translated by Robin Myers
Wave Books, April 2022
“Without the copying process,” the poet Dolores Dorantes has said, “there would be no life, no reality.” Through deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person’s disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration. This displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being—and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, Copy asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.
Literary nonprofit journal West Trade Review is seeking to fill two editorial positions: Associated Fiction Editor and Reviews Editor. Please do note that all staff are volunteers.
Our mission is to perpetuate the work of artists both well known and yet-to-be-known, simultaneously enriching our world through the written word and visual arts. We strive to reflect diversity in style, content and perspective throughout prose, poetry, photography and other artwork.
Our focus is to simply present to you the best art possible by both emerging and established creative minds.
If you resonate their mission, please consider applying. Work for all positions is completed remotely. Training provided if needed (in some cases).
American Writers Review is a multi-genre literary journal published by San Fedele Press welcoming writers, artists, and photographers of all backgrounds, styles, and experience levels who want to explore their art. Their 2021 issue was the first they had themed and was grounded in the turmoil of the past two years and the hope for an eventual recovery. Submissions of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, photography, and other art for their 2022 themed issue “The End or The Beginning” are being accepted until May 31, 2022, and Wayne Benson will be their poetry editor, joining the team of D Ferrara, Pat Florio, and Dale Louise.
Continue reading “Magazine Stand :: American Writers Review – Turmoil and Recovery”
Reading submissions and posting works on a rolling basis, CRAFT publishes fiction, creative nonfiction, and various craft articles. CRAFT does not charge fees for writers or readers and is a paying market with “no capacity limits.” They also offer editorial feedback on short and flash fiction and offer a “fast response” category as well. Recent contributors to the site include Pete Stevens, Amina Gautier, Tara Isabel Sambrano, Rosaleen Lynch, Oktavia Brownlow, Zoe Ballering, Jane Marcellus, Bryan Okwesili, “Never Rush a Rabbit: Prey Animals & Choices in Fiction” craft essay by Lee Upton, and “Conversations Between Friends” with Gale Massey and Louise Marburg. CRAFT also provides a page of Resources on Racism in Publishing.
Deadline: May 31, 2022
$2,000 in prizes. Enter by May 31! Flying South 2022, a publication of Winston Salem Writers, is accepting entries for prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Best in Category winners will be published and receive $500 each. One of the three winners will receive The WSW President’s Favorite award and win an additional $500. All entries will be considered for publication. For full details, please visit our website: www.wswriters.org/flying-south.
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight
Poetry by Lynn Xu
Wave Books, April 2022
Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, this book-length poem by Lynn Xu holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: Ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate. Born in Shanghai, China, Lynn Xu is the author of the full-length collection Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013) and the chapbooks June (Corollary Press, 2006) and Tournesol (Compline, 2021). She has performed cross-disciplinary works at the Guggenheim Museum, The Renaissance Society, Rising Tide Projects, and 300 S. Kelly Street. She teaches at Columbia University, coedits Canarium Books, and lives with her family in New York City and Marfa, Texas.
Every two months, Barrow Street Press editors choose four new and emerging poets who have not yet published a chapbook or full-length book of poems and then features one of their poems on the 4×2 website. Current poets include Laura Dixon, Sean Burke, KT Herr, and Kristen Holt-Browning. Past spotlight poets include Susan Kay Anderson, Miranda Beeson, Bryce Berkowitz, Pune Dracker, Pete Follansbee, Henry Goldkamp, Caroline M. Mar, Emily McKay, Pablo Medina, Nicole Melanson, James Funinami Moore, Darren Morris, Heather Newman, Doug Ramspeck, Belinda Rule, Thomas Schwank, Mahtem Shiferraw, Andy Sia, Jordana Solomon, Arthur Solway, Sophia Starmack, Hillery Stone, W.R. Weinstein, and Rachel Willems.
Enjoy a week of craft talks, lectures, panel discussions, and readings (not to mention daily workshops in fiction, poetry, songwriting, or creative nonfiction) at the 2022 Chesapeake Writers’ Conference. This year’s conference takes place June 19-25. Registration is rolling. They do have college credit and scholarships available for participants.
Work closely with award-winning faculty Jerry Gabriel, Patricia Henley, Matt Burgess, Matthew Henry Hall, Elizabeth Arnold, Crystal Oliver (Brandt), Angela Pelster, Nadeem Zaman, and Heather Green and practice a wide range of genres and styles. Presenters include Sara Goodman and Kayla Lightner with Tre Johnson as guest author.
Deadline: June 30, 2022
Now in its eighth year, the North Street Book Prize is sponsored by Winning Writers. Self-published books in seven categories can win up to $8,000 plus additional benefits. Submit online or by mail. Winning Writers is a partner member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, and this contest is recommended by Reedsy. Entry fee: $70 per book. Free gifts from our co-sponsors for everyone who enters. winningwriters.com/northnp22
There’s still a little winter left before we turn the corner, plenty of time to catch up on the newest issue of The Courtship of the Winds online literary and art journal. New to the staff with this installment are drama editors Bill and Judy Plott. This issue is packed with poetry by Margaret B. Ingraham, Lowell Jaeger, Ken Poyner, Joseph Hardy, Hannah Jane Weber, Gordon Kippola, J. Tarwood, Sam Ambler, Gail Nielsen, DS Maolalai, Eleanore Lee, Charles Elin, Esme DeVault, Don Thompson, Jay Carson, J. R. Forman, Frederick Pollack, Alise Versella, Stephen Mead, Doug Van Hooser, and Murray Silverstein; essays by Robert F. Harris, Madhurika Sankar, Fabrizia Faustinella, David Sapp; fiction by Christie Cochrell, Benjamin Harnett, Tom Eubanks, Anne Michaud, Alex Clermont, Rin Kelly, William Hayward, David Obuchowski, Catherine Parilla, P. C. Allan, Geoffrey Heptonstall; Drama by David Brendan Hopes and Judy Klass; and artworks in concrete [including cover image] by Mario Loprete.
Deadline: June 15, 2022
Lynx House Press seeks submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts for the annual Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. The winner will receive $2,000 and publication. Entries must be at least 48 pages in length. The fee for submitting is $28. Previous judges include James Tate, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorianne Laux, Dara Wier, Melissa Kwasny, and Robert Wrigley.
Harsh Realm: My 1990s
Poetry by Daniel Nester
Indolent Books, May 2022
This collection of poems centers on the decade of fax machines and grunge through the lens of a speaker coming to terms with young adulthood and trying to make their way as a writer in New York City. In other words, the 90s are having a moment. In his foreword to the collection, Matthew Lippman writes, “this book is a conduit to that time and space vortex of love. Nester, with these poems, folds that piece of paper in half, sticks that pencil through, and fires up the rocket ship and there we are, immediately, in that wormhole, cavorting with cultural icons the likes of Vince Neil, Gary Coleman, U2, Mazzy Star, Sugar Ray, Live, David Lee Roth, De La Soul, Smashing Pumpkins, Sleater-Kinney, Dr. Octagon, even KISS. Even the title is a reflection on the era, coming from the infamous Megan Jasper interview in which she made up “grunge speak,” with “harsh realm” being fake grunge-speak for “bummer.”
Adanna is a literary journal dedicated to women that welcomes contributions that “reflect and speak to women’s issues or topics, celebrate womanhood, and shout out in passion” The 2021 annual is now available and features poetry by Emmaline Bristow, Carol Casey, Angie Dribben, Lisa English, Ariel Fintushel, Virginia Bach Folger, Deborah Gerrish, June Gould, Maryanne Hannan, Elaine Koplow, Michelle Lerner, Heather Lee Rogers, Kelly R. Samuels, Dipanwita Sen, VA Smith, Thea Swanson, Janet Tracy-Landman, and Kelley Jean White; fiction by Elayne Clift, Diane Lederman, Kelsey McWilliams, Nneamaka Onochie, Terry Sanville, Tanya E. E. E. Schmid, and Ted Shaffrey; essays by Susan Frattini, Nancy Gerber, and Lola Wang, with cover art by Linda Murphy Marshall. Submissions for the 2022 annual print edition are open until May 31, 2022.
Founded by Michelle Tudor and Peter Barnfather in 2015 as an imprint of Platypus Press, wildness is a biannual online literary journal publishing poetry, fiction, and non-fiction works in most styles, forms, or genres. The April 2022 issue includes poetry by Qudsia Akhtar, Lory Bedikian, Aaron Coleman, Patricia Gao, Laboni Islam, Mia Kang, Kimberly Kralowec, Caroline M. Mar, Shalini Rana, Darius Simpson, RaJon Staunton, Ọbáfẹ́mi Thanni, Caitlin Wilson, Shelley Wong, Serrina Zou, and non-fiction by Sharon Lin. All content is freely accessible for online reading, and writers are encouraged to read back issues before submitting.
Women and Print Culture
Essays edited by Donna M. Kabalen Vanek and María Teresa Mijares Cervantes
Arte Público Press, November 2021
This collection of ten essays, based on the examination of publications from the US-Mexico region between 1850-1950, explores the role of women in print culture. Leading to a better understanding of women in the history of Mexican border life, the essays are organized in three thematic groupings: “Exploring the Archives: Women and Written Culture in Northeastern Mexico during the Late Nineteenth Century,” “The Cultural History of Women and Print Culture” and “A Transcultural View of Women and their Role as Activists in Northern Mexico and Texas.”
Celebrating 75 years of continuous publishing, The Georgia Review 75.1 issue is titled “SoPoCo” for Southern Post-Colonial and focuses on diasporic writing from or about the U.S. South. Editor Gerald Maa writes in the introduction of this 300+ pages, “This is a big volume, but it’s a crowded world. And we wanted to err on the side of maximalism rather than on giving anyone short shrift, given the groundbreaking nature of this volume.” The authors and artists included in this issue demonstrate that “the vibrancy of current Southern culture is made possible by critical contributions of the immigrant communities therein and exploring the ways that diasporic communities in this region differ from their more recognized sibling communities in the coastal urban centers.”
Continue reading “Magazine Stand :: The Georgia Review – Spring 2022”
The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications
Essays by Aaron Angello
Rose Metal Press, April 2022
In this genre-defying collection of short prose pieces, Aaron Angello explores the subtleties of recollection, imagination, and the connections, both momentary and long-lasting, between oneself and others. Each piece riffs on a word from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29; over the course of 114 days, Angello woke early, meditated upon a single word from the sonnet, and wrote. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and sometimes heartbreaking, accumulating into a map of a mind at work, a Gen X coming-of-age of sorts, seamlessly invoking the likes of The Golden Girls, Spinoza, Rick Springfield, and Rimbaud.
The editors of Heron Tree began posting poems for Volume 9 in February 2022. Poems are posted weekly on the site and then are collected into a free, downloadable PDF, which means all back issues are also available for free download. These are simple, well-designed publications that mimic features of a print book, making them great for personal or classroom use. Volume 9 includes works by Deborah-Zenha Adams, Karen George, Carol H. Jewell, Basiliké Pappa, K Roberts, Kelly R. Samuels, M. E. Silverman, and Jonathan Yungkans with more on the way! Subscribe – also free – to receive notification of newly published poems.
The editors of MoonPark Review: A Quarterly Journal of Short Prose open this nineteenth online issue by commenting, “we were struck by the threads of longing that weave through every story. Longing for those lost, those taken, for a larger meaning, to be special, or understood, to be recognized, simply remembered, or the longing for someone to be other than who they have always been. Perhaps it is this particular moment in time, or perhaps it is a universal truth — that we all long for something, sometime, or someone.” Contributors to this issue include Abbie Barker, Vince Montague, James Mattise, Jonathan Weisberg, Lucinda Trew, Dan Hodgson, Christie Wilson, Sarp Sozdinler, Jill Witty, Kenneth M. Kapp, Rachel Lastra, Kevin Brennan, and Kip Knott. All content is free to read online, so head on over!
Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020
By Gloria Gervitz
Translated by Mark Schafer
New York Review Books, November 2021
The story of Gervitz’s poem is an epic in itself. Migraciones began as “Shajarit,” a fifteen-page poem, which Gervitz began writing in 1976 and published three years later. So began the poem that would grow over the next forty-one years as a tree incorporates its rings, or a river is fed by its tributaries. Gloria Gervitz’s book is an epic journey in free verse through the individual and collective memories of Jewish women emigrants from Eastern Europe, a conversation that ranges across two thousand years of poetry, a bridge that spans the oracles of ancient Greece and the markets of modern Mexico, a prayer that blends the Jewish and Catholic liturgies, a Mexican woman’s reclamation through poetry of her own voice and erotic power.
Xue Yiwei is the featured author in the newest issue of Chinese Literature Today, published by the University of Oklahoma, which includes an interview by Lin Gang translated by Stephen Nashef and half a dozen works in translation. Also included in this issue is the special section, “Chinese Women Migrant Worker’s Literature,” with works such as “Caring for the Small: Gendered Resistance and Solidarity
through Chinese Domestic Workers’ Writings” by Hui Faye Xiao, “Gender, Class, and Capital: Female Migrant Workers’ Writing in Postsocialist China and Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry” by Haomin Gong, “‘In the Roar of the Machines’: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry of Witness and Resistance” by Eleanor Goodman and more. “Women Migrant Worker’s Poems: A Collection translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho” is also featured in this tremendous volume.
Online literary magazine Terrain.org is hosting an online reading on Monday, April 25 in honor of Earth Month and Poetry Month. The reading kicks off 5PM PT/8PM ET and will be hosted by Derek Sheffield.
Enjoy listening to award-winning poets Joe Wilkins, Scott Edward Anderson, and Betsy Aoki. A Q&A session will follow the reading.
Palm-Lined with Potience
Poetry by Basie Allen
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2022
Palm-Lined with Potience is New York City poet and visual artist Basie Allen’s debut collection of poems. Basie’s work is by turns political and lyrical, charting both physical and emotional landscapes, making maps of paintings and paintings of maps. While rooted in Pro-Black theory, art, and precise description, Basie makes space in the ekphrastic for the eerie and abstract. The poems in this collection search for nodes of truth in a tumultuous sea of fractured facts.
A Peculiar People
Poetry by Steven Willis
Button Poetry, May 2022
In A Peculiar People, poet Steven Willis creates an entire microcosm crafted within a cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, and underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the reader to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author’s life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.
The seventh issue of Cherry Tree annual print journal produced by the Literary House Press features work by Anum Asi, Sandra Beasley, Jan Beatty, Katie Berta, Caleb Braun, Susan Briante, Elijah Burrell, Marci Cancio-Bello Calabretta, Marianne Chan, Jennifer Chang, Victoria Chang, Christopher Citro, Nicole Cooley, Paul H Curtis, Jeff Ewing, Blas Falconer, Andra Emilia Fenton, Tanya Grae, Saúl Hernández, James Hoch, Todd Kaneko, Urvi Kumbhat, Kabel Mishka Ligot, Anthony Thomas Lombardi, Andrea Marcusa, Tom McAllister, Shane McCrae, Rahul Mehta, Philip Metres, John A. Nieves, Sarah Rose Nordgren, Carolyn Oliver, Matthew Olzmann, Donald Quist, Deon Robinson, Adam Scheffler, Charlotte Seley, Paige Sullivan, David Trinidad, Michael Walsh, Jieyan Wang, Adam Webster, John Sibley Williams, and M Jaime Zuckerman, with cover art by Gerardo Villarreal.