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!
61 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
The first full week of May is nearly over. The weather still can’t make up its mind if it wants to be warm or cold, but they we have warmer weather on the way for the weekend. If you have lovely weather forecast, pack up your laptop, head outdoors, and let NewPages help you with your submission goals while you soak up the sunshine (make sure to wear sunscreen!).
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
Announcing Wordrunner eChapbooks‘ 15th anniversary issue: Disturbances is available to read online or as a downloadable printable PDF. Wordrunner eChapbooks is a hybrid of online literary journal and chapbook collections. Their 2025 anthology and 54th issue issue marks the 15th anniversary of their opening this journal to public submission. Although no theme was announced for this anthology, many of the stories and poems are connected by disturbances small and large — whether endured by troubled adolescents, bereaved mourners, day laborers, boxers or struggling writers (including Mary Shelley).
Wordrunner eChapbook’s Editor’s Choice for this issue is “Minder Root” by Stan Kempton, a haunting tale set in a timeless rural South. Other contributors include fiction by Jim Beane, Ed Davis, Frank Diamond, Stan Kempton, Joseph Kierland and Don J Taylor; nonfiction by Jane Boch, Ann Calandro, David Hawdbawnik and Melanie S. Smith; and poetry by GTimothy Gordon, Peter Grieco, Ted Morrissey and Pamela Wynn.
Last year, Wordrunner eChapbook’s began publishing micro fiction and creative nonfiction. Their Micro Issue 2 went online January 2025. Submissions open again September 2025.
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 31st issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published — side by side — with fresh, emerging voices. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 150,000 readers in 150 countries, and over 1,000 contributors from 54 countries, already know; the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
The MacGuffin April 2025 issue sold out at the 2025 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (!) but is now available again for individual purchase — whew! This hot issue features winners of Poet Hunt 29 with commentary by Judge Michael Meyerhofer as well as a look ahead to this year’s Poet Hunt 30 including a mini-feature of poems by Judge Darrel Alejandro Holnes. The issue rounds out with a quadruplet of short memoirs; fiction selections including Margaret Willey’s family drama — as turbulent as the lake it’s set on, and Angela Townsend’s “Present Lives,” whose main character invites readers to ‘tune in, turn on,’ referencing enhanced spirituality. All of this wrapped neatly within Jennifer Rodrigues’s compelling cover art, “Switch Plate.”
Curated by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions author Simona Carini, Sheila-Na-Gig online’s spring 2025 issue is now available. This volume contains work by Editors’ Choice Award winner Vincent Caseragola along with 44 other new and returning contributors.
Started in 1990, Sheila-Na-Gig continues its mission, “to support the work of both established and emerging writers in a crisp, uncluttered space online and through the publication of individual collections and anthologies from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.”
Medieval English historian Dan Jones dramatically delivers with Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King. After broader books covering the Knights Templar, the three-century Plantagenet dynasty, and the thirty-year Wars of the Roses which led to that dynasty’s end, Jones’s first biography impresses with its depth and research. The narrative draws readers into the life and times of one of the most celebrated Medieval kings.
Though Henry doesn’t become king until around the halfway mark, Jones maintains tension by foreshadowing dramatic events like Henry’s near-death at sixteen from an arrow fired at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Writing in present tense throughout, readers get young Henry’s view of his relative, and godfather, Richard II’s famous tyranny and subsequent deposition by Henry’s father. While carefully undermining certain famous characterizations, Jones recounts Henry’s maturation from the son of a Duke not in line for the throne, to warrior prince and heir, and finally to glorious king and conqueror.
The violence common in medieval histories plays a prominent role in Henry’s military accomplishments. Exploitation of civil war in France allowed Henry’s invasion and subsequent great victories at Agincourt and Harfleur, but also led to civilian horrors. Jones is clear-eyed about the “greatness” of medieval kingship impressing us less today and includes Henry’s many faults according to modern standards. Still, though sensitive readers should pass, lovers of the genre will find it a satisfying addition. Henry V lived a dramatic thirty-five years, dying at the height of his power, and Jones tells the tale with style.
Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
The subtitle of A. Kendra Greene’s collection, No Less Strange or Wonderful, is “essays in curiosity,” an apt way to sum up this work. In essays ranging from one to thirty pages, often with illustrations Greene has either drawn or uncovered from books from the past four hundred years or so, Greene lets her curiosity run throughout the natural world.
In one essay, “Megalonyx Jeffersonii,” she writes about dressing up a model of a giant sloth, which leads to reflections on the debate in gender identification of such a species when there’s not enough evidence to determine a clear answer. Though Greene doesn’t make an explicit connection to the current debates about how one determines gender, it’s difficult to read this essay without thinking about that echo.
Greene also explores cultures most of us aren’t aware of, such as balloon twisters, which goes well beyond birthday party clowns. Greene volunteers as a model for Laura, who uses balloons to recreate the iconic Marilyn Monroe dress from The Seven Year Itch. While attending the convention where Laura crafts the dress from balloons, Greene meditates on balloon twisting as a symbolic art — “A balloon sculpture is always, obviously, made of balloons. And yet it is always, obviously, more than that.” — as well as personal space. She points out how willing people were to touch her balloons in ways that are inappropriate otherwise, with one man putting his hand on a balloon representing her breast.
As with all good essays in the tradition of Montaigne, the seeming focus of Greene’s essays is both subject and springboard for meditations on what it means to move through this world, both natural and human-created. Her curiosity leads her to places many writers never arrive.
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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
55 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to the first submissions roundup for May 2025. The year keeps inching…or rocketing closer to being half over with and NewPages is still here to help you keep your submission goals going strong!
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
You don’t need running shoes for The Poetry Marathon, an annual, online event focused on generating new work within a set timeline. The challenge is to write 12 poems in 12 hours (a half marathon) or 24 poems in 24 hours (a full marathon) at the rate of one poem per hour.
This free, international event draws hundreds of poets from around the world, and like any endurance challenge, it takes true commitment and perseverance. Do you have what it takes?
This year’s marathon will start at 9AM ET on May 17 and end at either 9PM ET (half) or at 9AM ET on May 18 (full). Half Marathon participants can also choose to start at 9PM ET on May 17 and take the overnight shift until 9AM ET. The organizers post optional prompts on the hour, and participants can post their poems immediately, or, if having all-day online access isn’t feasible, the poems can be written on the hour but posted to the community later.
The event will be hosted in a private, member-only space on Circle, a community platform that allows participants to read and respond to one another’s works.
The Spring 2025 issue of The Missouri Review (Sprint 2025) is themed “Outsiders” and includes the winners of the 2024 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, plus debut fiction by Jeffery Brady, new fiction by Phuong Anh Le, William Torrey, Drew Calvert, and Mark Labowskie. New poetry from Rebe Huntman, Liane Strauss, and Amanda Gunn, and new essays by Sarah Mullens and Justin Thurman. Also, an art feature on James Ensore, and a new “Curio Cabinet” on Theda Bara, and a omnibus review of four novels about becoming a mother by Cynthia Miller Coffel.
This is also the first issue that will be available worldwide on Project MUSE via Open Access here.
In a world that can feel overrun with digital content, print still holds its own and can, in fact, provide some much-needed relief from tech fatigue. This can be especially important for young people, which is where Tween Magazine shines like a beacon in the night. “As parents learn the negative effects of social media and devices, they are returning to more traditional media,” says Founding Editor and Creative Director Mary Flenner. “Tween Magazine offers girls a screen-free chance to engage, learn life skills, build confidence, and find inspiration.”
Tween girls are those in that “in between” stage of life, the preteen years where they are leaving childhood and entering adolescence. “We aim to fill the content void for young girls 8 to 12 who have outgrown children’s magazines but aren’t ready for the mature content in teen magazines,” explains Flenner.
When the famous novelist Mira Wallacz goes missing at the festival devoted to celebrating her work, the attendees assume the worst—and some hope for the worst. Ten years after the festival, Geneva Finch, an ideal reader, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to Mira Wallacz. A twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest, Wrongful explores the many ways we can get everything wrong, time and again, even after we’re certain we discovered the truth.
In For Today, Carolyn Hembree chronicles the life of a woman navigating the challenges of the sandwich generation — simultaneously caring for her aging father and nurturing her young daughter. Throughout the first quarter of the collection, Hembree draws upon traditional forms such as the sonnet crown, villanelle, and haiku to explore the nature of responsibility and the complex interplay of time. Those poetic structures invite readers to consider how form reflects the weight and nuances of modern life’s emotional “cargo.” The poet poses a compelling question: What form can truly encapsulate the pressures of living amid competing demands? The poet’s answer takes shape in a dynamic, en plein air-style walking poem that maps the tender and evolving relationship between the woman and her daughter, all set against the culturally rich backdrop of their New Orleans neighborhood.
The title poem, spanning sixty-one pages and comprising the collection’s remaining three-quarters, immerses readers in a near real-time narrative detailing the woman’s dynamic internal and external experiences. Here, we witness mother and daughter as they stroll their vibrant neighborhood, play an I-Spy-like game, and delight in the small details of life. The mother’s thoughts also wander to weighty concerns, such as an ill friend, climate disasters, and lockdown drills. Memories of her father merge with reflections on influential poets, like Inger Christensen and Rainer Maria Rilke, prompting her own poetic inquiry and responsiveness.
This expansive poem resists controlling containment and neat endings, instead insisting on a journey that allows tangents and moves “onward.” The poem embraces the totality of existence, affirming that every experience holds significance and deserves recognition. By doing so, the poem “sings exultant,” showing “poetry’s long tongue / licking life’s contours” of love and grief. Hembree’s desire “to touch everything, at once” is an acknowledgment of the intricate beauty of life. For Today reminds us that in the tapestry of life, every thread matters.
For Today by Carolyn Hembree. Louisiana State University Press, January 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
65 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to the final submissions roundup for the month of April! Time keeps marching on and NewPages is here to help you march on with your submission goals. Weather seems to be taking a turn for the better, so if you are finally able to enjoy sunshine and warmer temperatures, take your laptop outside and soak up the sun while working on your writing, editing, and submitting.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
A name like Silly Goose Press can’t help but attract such comments as “Have you seen that egg?!” or “What a honking good time they are to be around!” which the editors would take as high praise, along with recognition for knowing how to use an Oxford comma. Puns (mostly) aside, Silly Goose Press is a new, online magazine publishing poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, art, and photography roughly every four months. Readers can enjoy accessing each piece individually online or via PDF which can be downloaded – all for free.
Silly Goose Press was inspired when the editors attended their first AWP conference. “We are best friends who love flocking together,” says Editor-in-Chief Rhiannon Fisher, “just a group of silly geese and always have been. The publication name is an inside joke amongst writing friends that has evolved into something magical.” After the conference, Fisher says, “We challenged ourselves to expand our knowledge of and place in the literary world. We wanted to be a part of something bigger than our individual literary careers, make friends, and build community. Also, now we are legally bound to maintain a friendship.”
In his debut, award-winning collection, Book of Kin, Darius Atefat-Peckham explores the “haunting” intersections of his life as an “only child of grief” with a mother he describes as someone “who will die, many times, over” in life and imagination. Atefat-Peckham’s poems are infused with “[hush] music” that oscillates between “breaking” and “accumulation.” His poem “They Wake Me” poignantly asks, “How many beloveds in me will I survive?” This unveils the dialogue between the poet and the fragments of self that emerge from grief. Both poet and son “want / To see what, at the tongue of a cracked bell, survives.”
Book of Kin has three sections: “The First Sound,” “Book of Kin,” and “The Outer Reaches.” Each section seeks kinship with the mother and brother Atefat-Peckham lost in a car accident, his Iranian heritage and language, his artistic life and “perennial living.”
Atefat-Peckham’s poetry is arresting, self-aware. The narrative and emotion in the poems are intricately tied to formal choices. For example, in the poem “Heathcliffs,” the poet often makes line breaks on words with glottal-stopped consonants, such as “lost,” “meant,” “wait,” “night,” and “want.” This end-word consonance creates a repeated plosive sound, evoking themes of fragility and mortality. Right-justified poems convey the “staggering” loss of family members. Concrete poems shaped like portholes offer an “ethereal lens” to other realms of consciousness. Bracketed words within poems connect to reveal additional meanings and new perspectives.
Each line of Atefat-Peckham’s poetry is wrought with celebration and sorrow, a combination reminiscent of both the poetry of Rumi and Susan Atefat-Peckham, the poet’s mother. Book of Kin serves as both a mourning ritual and a celebratory hymn, “teaching” readers “something about worship” while inviting us into an intimate conversation between spiritual, physical, and artistic realms.
Book of Kin by Darius Atefat-Peckham. Autumn House Press, October 2024. Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize as selected by January Gill O’Neil.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Inspired by a post-dinner conversation in 1988, Thema offers writers a target theme to inspire poetry, stories, art, and photography. While the premise does not have to be a central element, it also cannot be “merely incidental.” Walking that fine line in this newest Spring 2025 issue with the theme “My Favorite Bookmark” are contributors Tytti Heikkinen, Cheryl Matthis, Casey Lawrence, Judy Penz Sheluk, Cezanne Waid, Sunayna Pal, Jill Munro, Elizabeth Raum, Pamela Hobart Clark, Lynda Fox, Tom Schmidt, Linda Berry, Matthew J. Spireng, Lynda Fox, Frank Markover, Allan Lake, Orman Day, James B. Nicola, Stacey Alderman, and Kathleen Gunton, with cover artwork by Aria Marotta.
Forthcoming themes include “I Wish I’d Said That,” “Today’s Onerous Task,” and “While the Snowstorm Was Raging…” Visit Thema‘s website for submission information and deadlines. Thema does accept previous published works that fit the theme.
In You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty, longtime anti-poverty activist and Presbyterian pastor, Liz Theoharis, a veteran of the welfare rights movement and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and writer-organizer Noam Sandweiss-Back, have written a powerful denunciation of the established truism that tells us that “the poor will always be with us.” Instead, the pair offer a detailed and often-poignant look at the ways poor people have, for many decades, mobilized on their own behalf to win respect and demand access to high-quality public education, healthcare, affordable housing, and other family supports. The book, part memoir, part polemic, part theological discussion, and part policy guide, zeroes in on wide-ranging organizing efforts and charts strategies, tactics, and goals used in grassroots campaigns. While not every effort they present was successful, the lessons learned make the book an essential primer for anyone working for progressive political change.
That said, while there are no formulas for movement building, Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back believe that anti-poverty efforts should mobilize around human rights and demand political, civil, and economic equity. Moreover, the book argues that all three are necessary components of human dignity – or should be. They also favor multi-issue campaigns, writing that it is imperative to integrate the “fight for food, water, clothing, housing, health care, and good jobs…Our power rests not in any one issue but in the multiplicity of our demands and communities coming together.” Finally, the authors remind readers of the necessity of hope. As they conclude, “successful movements never just curse the darkness; they offer new ways of illuminating the future.”
They are wise words. And despite the fact that the Right is currently ascendant, neither Theoharis nor Sandweiss-Back seems discouraged. “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress,” they conclude. Time will tell how this will play out.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Thorn & Bloom: A Bold New Literary Magazine Cultivating Self-Care as Resistance Published by redrosethorns Ltd. Liability Co., March 2025
Thorn & Bloom is a quarterly literary magazine that reimagines self-care as an act of resistance, reclamation, and radical honesty. Through a curated collection of essays, poetry, fiction, and expert insight, the magazine explores personal healing as a catalyst for collective liberation.
Launched last month, the debut issue features a diverse range of emerging and established voices who offer grounded self-care practices, challenge internalized narratives, and illuminate the social conditioning that distances us from our authentic selves. Thorn & Bloom brings a fresh voice to the literary landscape—one that dares to treat self-care not as luxury or aesthetic, but as essential, intentional, and deeply political. The magazine is rooted in a commitment to inclusivity, empowerment, and truth-telling, offering a platform for stories that are both tender and transformative; inviting readers to embrace storytelling as a healing practice and self-care as a radical path to liberation.
The April 2025 issue of Plume (164) features works by Tiana Nobile, Marilyn A. Johnson, Olga Maslova, Jen Karetnick, Dai Weina, Phillis Levin, Harry Martinson, Daniel Tobin, Doug Anderson, Carol Muske-Dukes, and Jean Nordhaus, a conversation with Phillis Levin by Frances Richey, a review of Virginia Konchan’s Requiem by Heather Treseler, and commentary from this issue’s contributors.
On one level, the title of Pico Iyer’s latest book, Aflame, refers to the wildfires in California that have taken at least one of his family’s homes and threatens the Hermitage, a monastery he visits quite often for solitude. On another, though, it describes the monks and other seekers of solitude he meets at the Hermitage over the more than three decades he’s been visiting, as they are alive in a way he doesn’t see in many people.
Iyer’s work is not concerned with chronology, as he doesn’t provide the readers with specific dates or times of his visits. Instead, as one might expect from a meditation on silence and solitude, he isn’t concerned with the way the world moves outside of the Hermitage. In fact, he says little about his life when he’s traveling for work or home with his wife and children, referencing them from time to time, but centering his thoughts on the monastery and the interactions he has there.
He presents the monks and other seekers as human, not saints, all wanting only to learn from a retreat from the concerns of the world. Iyer himself spends much of his time reflecting on what he’s reading, but, also, somewhat ironically, talking with the other people who are there. He develops deep friendships, intimacy that develops from sharing the solitude as much from those conversations.
The Hermitage is always in danger of being destroyed or even lacking the funds to continue, but the monks don’t seem that concerned. They know, and Iyer learns, that the lessons they’ve all learned will follow them elsewhere, should they have to leave. Iyer ultimately understands that, while he needs solitude, he can see the world differently no matter where he is, if he only continues to pay attention.
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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
In her debut collection, The Dove That Didn’t Return, Yael S. Hacohen delivers a poignant exploration of her lived experiences as a female commander in the Israeli Defense Forces from the front lines of the Middle East conflict. Hacohen’s poems scrutinize the nature of warfare, interrogate the concepts of violence and peace, navigate “a different shade / of Judaism,” and traverse the fine line between humanity and brutality to highlight the “constellations of combat” endured by both soldiers and civilians.
In the genre of war poetry often dominated by male voices, The Dove That Didn’t Return stands out by presenting the unique perspective of a female soldier who has “shot an M-16.” Hacohen weaves her personal experiences of military service with biblical and rabbinic themes, framing her reality as she seeks her “own olive tree… own truth, / …own kind of country.”
Many of the poems reimagine biblical narratives. “Pillar of Cloud” reflects on the fears surrounding military service, and “Moriah,” a conversation with Isaac, raises questions about sacrifice. “The Western Wall” contemplates whether the wall is merely “a wall, / nothing more,” a place to “bang… [a] head,” or a site of prayer.
The collection’s title references the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, where the dove bearing an olive branch typically symbolizes peace and hope. However, in the title poem, Hacohen critically reflects on the meaning behind the dove not returning, asking: What peace can exist in isolation? Who suffers from the consequences of war? This inquiry captures the complexities of striving for peace in an unstable region.
While grappling with the complexities of establishing a state in a land also home to others, Yael S. Hacohen’s narrative, declarative poems address the complex realities of family and duty, faith and sacrifice, war and peace without the pretense of easy resolution.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
The Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature, Blue Collar Review Winter 2024-25 opens with an editorial documenting the political state of our country in the context of a global history of dictatorships. Writing as witness, this issue documents the role of creative expression, “We know they are coming for us and we are as enraged as we are frightened. In typesetting this issue, we note a proliferation of expletives. Working class writing often evokes our class mood and these poets are pissed!”
Joining the paper protest in this issue are poets Dave Roskos, Dan Grote, Robert Cooperman, G.C. Compton, Darrell Petska, Cathy Porter, Fred Voss (R.I.P), Thot King, Andrew Slipp, Gregg Shotwell, Christopher Buckley, Gregg Shotwell, Dan Grote, Bill Mohr, R.M. Yager, Chris Butters, Manry Franke, Shirley Adelman (R.I.P.), Al Markowitz, Angelo Mesisco, Steweart Acuff, many more.
Visit the Blue Collar Review website for subscription info and sample poems from the newest issue.
Registration Deadline: June 1, 2025 Join us for the Aspen Summer Words Writers Conference June 22-27 in Snowmass Village, CO! Three different workshops to ignite your creativity. Generative Writing to prompt the writer in you. Book Branding for guiding authors through a successful launch and beyond. Readers Retreat for the book lover. A week full of panels, community and inspiration. All in a beautiful, rocky mountain location. Open flyer to scan QR Codes for more information.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: Rolling Pictura Journal is open for submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art. General submissions are always free, and expedited responses are available for a small fee. We pay $5 per contributor; issues are available online and in print. See our website and our flyer for guidelines and more info.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: Rolling Stone Circle Review publishes a new poem every Saturday and Sunday on a website designed to foreground each poem on the page. We will respond within 28 days, and we make it as easy as possible to submit. We prefer poems containing striking imagery and language that are unexpected without being indecipherable. You will find more information at our website.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: September 1, 2025 Open now until September 1, 2025! Last Syllable wants submissions of books of poetry or prose published in 2023-2025. Prize includes $1,000, travel expenses to San Diego (up to an additional $1,000), and a headlining feature in the PLNU M.A. in Writing program’s Visiting Writer Series. $25 entry fee. View flyer for more information. Full submission details at our website.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: Rolling Realize your vision with acclaimed novelist, memoirist, editor Kate Moses, as invested in your story & your growth as you are. Taking writers under her wing for 3 decades. Recent mentees have won Pushcart Prize, Narrative Prize, Independent Book Publishers Association Medal, finalists for Greywolf Nonfiction Prize, Next Generation Indie Book Award. Substack: The Museletter with Kate Moses. For more information view flyer or visit website.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
“I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I’ve always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories, supernatural stories, ghost stories, surrealistic and allegorical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized ‘realistic’ story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its ‘realistic’ style.”—STANLEY KUBRICK, “Kubrick Country”
View flyer to learn more. Get your copy of D. Harlan Wilson’s Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousnesshere.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: May 25, 2025 Livingston Press announces it is seeking unpublished manuscripts preferably between 90 to 160 pages for its annual Changing Light Prize for a Novel-in-Verse. Past winners include Nicelle Davis and Michael George. No fee to submit. See flyer for more information and a link to the Livingston Press website.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
64 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! April is already half over with. Hard to believe, isn’t it? If you have the day off or an extended weekend this week, NewPages has tons of submission opportunities in our weekly roundup to keep you busy so you can keep your submission goals going strong.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Enjoy our April 2025 eLitPak here.
Laynie Browne pays homage to veteran poet Mei-Mei Berssenbruge in her latest poetry collection, Apprentice to a Breathing Hand. While eschewing Berssenbrugge’s fascination with light and quantum physics, many of the poems in this book feature the long lines and the phenomenological focus on which the elder poet relies. The resulting poems idolize and interact with Brussenbruge’s work while adding a fine addition to Browne’s oeuvre.
Poems featuring long lines of wrapped text appear throughout the collection, but the title poem of Browne’s second section, “Euphoric Rose,” forms the heart of the book. It consists of fourteen poem sections over fifteen pages, each with a first line that builds on words from the title poem of Berssenbrugge’s iconic Hello, the Roses (New Directions, 2013). Shorter and acrostic poems relating to the topic round out the section.
Though Browne borrows in this collection, her own unique experiences and interests still feature. A four-section late poem titled “The Self-Combed Woman” follows Browne’s feminist leanings alluding to a “cultural phenomenon of marriage resistance” in China’s Pearl River Delta, eventually abrogated by the rise of the Communist Party. The poetry in this collection is beautiful and evocative, but readers may need to work in understanding. Those who enjoy a poetic challenge or are fans of Berssenbrugge’s work and style will enjoy it, but casual readers may falter. Still, I recommend it.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
Assistant Fiction Editor Lauralee Leonard opens Bellevue Literary Review Issue 48 with reflective inquiry for readers and writers alike, “Where does a story bring us? Where do we get when we read a poem to its end for the first time, the second time, the third time? How is it that a person we are likely never to meet, through only words arranged on a page, can enter our consciousness so fully? And how does it happen that we surrender so completely to a created place that we are jolted, at the end, to find ourselves still in our own chair, suspended momentarily between worlds?”
Offering readers the opportunity for further contemplation, this issue offers fiction by Fiona Ennis (Winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction), Chinaecherem Obor (Honorable Mention), Nandini Bhattacharya, Ronald Niezen, Yuya Hattori, Michael Welch, Marcia Walker, TW Dalton, Sabrina D. Wang; nonfiction by Pia Jee-Hae Baur (Winner of the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction), Liesel Hamilton (Honorable Mention), Carlos Rafael Gómez, Veronica Cano, Diane Zinna; and poetry by Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador (Winner of the John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry), Cedric Rudolph (Honorable Mention), Laura E. Garrard, Karen Zheng, Maya Klauber, Laurie Sansom, Michael Montlack, Christopher Stewart, Timothy Kelly, Won Lee, Brett Warren, Kelly Grace Thomas, Bridget Bell, Cecil Morris, Wendy Wisner, Becky Nicole James, Xinyue Huang, Joseph Radke, Judith Fox, Alexandra Ozols, and Rob Macaisa Colgate.
In earthwork, Jill Khoury’s second poetry collection, a sight-impaired daughter navigates her complex relationship with her chronically ill mother. Following the mother’s death, the daughter confronts the lasting impact of having a critical, impatient, and judgmental mother while also tending her “holy ardor” and grief.
earthwork unfolds in three parts. The first section begins near the time of the mother’s “can’t eat / won’t eat” and her eventual death. The second section returns to the daughter’s childhood, providing the historical context by “rattling the traces.” In the third section, readers witness the daughter’s “heptahedron” of grief and her “going a-hunting / for the part of [her] / that can live through this.” Adjacent to its exploration of “a bad luck message / encoded in the genes,” the poems consider the inheritance of failure among women — how a mother’s inability to be loving can lead to a daughter’s struggle to love herself. Additionally, they address broader societal questions: What constitutes female failure, and by whom is it designated? Does this prevent open discussions of abuse?
The emotional depth of the poems is marked by specific images and recurring punctuation on the page. Each punctuation choice contains a contrapuntal argument. Forward slashes suggest separation or alternative. Brackets suggest isolation or interjection. Caesura enacts breaking hearts or bonds. Central images also contain counterpoints. The recurring figure of a horse symbolizes both the mother’s “rigid rein” and the daughter’s free spirit. The collection’s title acts as a “metonymic vessel,” representing not only the mother’s life and the daughter’s life, but also the clay pots the mother created, a funeral urn, and even the poetry collection itself.
Written in all lowercase, Jill Khoury’s poems strive to “break the code” of poetic, familial, and societal conventions. They avoid easy explanations and quick resolutions, recognizing the ongoing nature of grief.
earthwork by Jill Khoury. Switchback Books, February 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
The Spring 2025 issue of the Apple Valley Review features flash fiction by Madison Ellingsworth and Luke Rolfes; short stories by Peter Newall, Zehra Habib, and Tony Rauch; and poetry by Miriam Van hee (translated from the Dutch by Judith Wilkinson), Athena Kildegaard, Mark Lilley, Mickie Kennedy, and David Armand. The cover artwork is by painter John Singer Sargent. An international literary journal, Apple Valley Review publishes short fiction, poetry, personal essays, and translations in online open access, semiannual issues. The journal was founded in 2005 by its current editor, Leah Browning, and welcomes submission year-round.
It’s no secret that many mass shootings in the United States have been carried out by white men whose fury has been bolstered by Christian nationalist organizations and websites. How and why this hateful worldview has enticed so many young men is at the center of Angela Denker’s latest book, Disciples of White Jesus. Denker, an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as well as a journalist, is an adroit storyteller. And while the book focuses more on individual examples of teens and young adults who’ve been lured by rightwing hate groups than it does on probing how denominations can undermine these ideologies, it is nonetheless a valuable contribution to understanding boys and men as both victim and menace.
Denker is well-versed in the lies and misrepresentations that ground Christian nationalism, including the near-universal mainstream Christian presentation of Jesus as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, hunk who is violent, macho, and tough. “Most pernicious,” she writes, “is that weakness is to be avoided at all costs, that showing vulnerability and emotion is a recipe for disaster, a potential upheaval in a society that has placed white Christian men at the top of a teetering house of cards.”
For white males who are themselves teetering, or who see themselves as outcasts, feelings of isolation or shame typically lead to depression. Predictably, websites that blame feminism, DEI, or CRT can appeal to their perceived sense of entitlement and victimization. Add in reinforcing messages from racist-sexist-homophobic-xenophobic evangelical and fundamentalist preachers, and the mix is potent. Still, it’s in finding like-minded others that their youthful fury is stoked. As one former skinhead told Denker, he joined a hate group for the camaraderie; the politics came later. It’s a valuable insight for anyone working with disaffected young people.
All told, Disciples of White Jesus is a crash course in the marketing of toxic masculinity for white supremacist and Christian nationalist ends. It’s a powerful indictment.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
When Emile Suotonye DeWeaver was 13, he dropped out of junior high school and began selling drugs. By 18, he’d murdered a man.
This egregious crime led to DeWeaver’s conviction, and he was sentenced to 67 years to life. It was a sobering event, but this son of a respected Oakland medical doctor determined that incarceration would not be the end of his story. Instead, he would “write himself out of prison.” As unlikely as it sounds, DeWeaver succeeded, and after 21 years of incarceration, California Governor Jerry Brown commuted his sentence in 2014. The reason? As the co-founder of the first Society of Professional Journalists chapter in a prison, his work as a reporter for the San Quentin News, and his co-creation of a group called Prison Renaissance, the state determined that he had been “rehabilitated.”
Ghosts in the Criminal Justice Machine is DeWeaver’s deeply felt story, part memoir and part polemic. Although the former is more effective than the latter, he clearly situates the perpetuation of white supremacy at the heart of carceral and “law-and-order” policies and cogently outlines the ways the criminal legal system uses prison-based educational and recreational programs to keep racist, hierarchical power structures in place. Similarly, his delineation of the ways policing fails to keep communities safe is well-wrought and provocative.
Not everything in the book is as effective, though, and his depiction of a restorative justice model to help perpetrators come to terms with the impact of their crimes can best be read as aspirational. Still, DeWeaver is a terrific writer and bold thinker. His self-reflection and observations about prison, policing, criminal injustice, and the foundational racism that undergirds many US social policies make Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine a valuable contribution to debates about personal responsibility. Moreover, by showcasing the limits of individual, rather than systemic, change, the book makes a clear argument for rethinking crime, punishment and retribution.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Broadsided Spring 2025 celebrates National Poetry Month with a folio of eight new broadsides — eight new original collaborations between writers and artists for readers to enjoy online or download and print to hang up and share in their communities. Together, the words and images of each broadside combine to a unique expression, a dance of meaning and significance between artists and mediums.
Poets in this issue are Livia Meneghin, Amanda Quaid, Lex Runciman, Amílcar Santanan, Emily Light, Isabel Acevedo, Jennifer K. Sweeney, and Katharine Whitcomb. Artists in this issue are Michele L’Heureux, Bailey Bob Bailey, Sandra Vega, Daniel Esquivia Zapata, JoAnne McFarland, Stacy Isenbarger, Janice Redman, and Jennifer Moses.
Broadsided Press also shares “Collaborators’ Q&A” for each broadside, in which artist and writer share responses to each other’s work and the process of bringing them together, books and art that have recently inspired them, responses to the folio as a whole, creative prompts, and more.
59 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
April will be half over with next week. We are still waiting for gentle spring showers to help the flowers grow, instead we had snow and wintry mixes. A great excuse to curl up with a book and a blanket…or perhaps your laptop to keep working on those submission goals. NewPages is here to help you meet them with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our next eLitPak is set to be emailed on Wednesday, April 16!
The April 2025 issue of The Lake, an online journal of poetry and poetics, is now online featuring Gareth Adams, Jean Atkin, Deborah H. Doolittle, Neil Elder, Sharif Gemi, Norton Hodges, Mike O’brien, Audell Shellburn, J. R. Solonche, Yucheng Tao, Bhuwan Thapaliya, Lori Zavada.
David Mark Williams reviews I Sing to the Greenhearts by Maggie Harris, and Charles Rammelkamp reviews Sonnets for My Mother as Lear by Martin Malone and Still Motion by Jianqing Zheng and Leo Touchet.
“One Poem Reviews” give authors the opportunity to share a poem from a recently published collection. This month’s contributors are Mark Belair, Daniel Hinds, K. S. Moore, Annie Stenzel, and Sue Wallace-Shaddad.
Do you love great stories? If so, you’ll be delighted by the 15 terrific ones in the new issue of Jewish Fiction! Issue 39 contains 15 fabulous stories originally written in Italian, Polish, Hebrew, and English. Contributors Shulim Vogelmann, Sagit Emet, Yuval Yavneh, Mikołaj Łoziński, Anna Rosner, Richard E. Marshall, Jaime Levy Pessin, Warren Hoffman, Maya Ben Yair, Adolf Rudnicki, Aaron Goodman, Karen Zlotnick, Shelly Sanders, Hannah Glickstein, Jill Siebers invite readers to feast on their works and enjoy!
South Dakota Review continues their commitment to cultural and aesthetic diversity, publishing exciting and compelling work that reflects the full spectrum of the contemporary literary arts. This newest issue (59.1) features poetry, short stories, and essays by Stella Wong, Mackenzie Carignan, Anthony D’Aries, Michael Leal Garcia, Michael Meyerhofer, Vivek Sharma, Andy Bodinger, Camille Carter, DS Levy, Sappho Stanley, Tiffany Graham Charkosky, Bernadette Geyer, Susan L. Leary, Brooke Sahni, Emily Seibert, Josiah Nelson, Teresa Milbrodt, Joel Fishbane, and a review of Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies by Joanna Acevedo.
Opening issue 46.1 of New England Review, Editor Carolyn Kuebler writes about ecosystems and survival, commenting on the proliferation of literary publications, “. . . if you see magazine publications as an artistic practice that contributes to the literary ecosystem, and if you see them as part of a community rather than as random and unrelated, they look more like a sign of vitality than of diffusion.”
Contributing to the vibrancy of our literary landscape, the newest New England Review invites readers to enjoy engrossing prose by Nilou Panahpour, Tom DeBeauchamp, and Julie Marie Wade; poetry by Cathy Linh Che, Derrick Austin, and Amy Dougher-Solórzano; translations from the Portugese and Spanish; and much more, wrapped in captivating cover art by Brian Flinn.
59 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
March is over and done and here we are in April. A month which should be bursting with warming weather, rain, and the start of seeing flowers starting to blossom. What we are getting is a blustery start to the month complete with an entire year’s worth of seasons in a single day. If you are also living through this depressing whiplash of wacky weather, what a great excuse to throw on your favorite comfy sweater and stay home writing and submitting. NewPages is here, as always, to help you meet submission goals with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
In Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries, Journalist Abigail Leonard, a mother of three, blends the personal and political in her astute look at how motherhood is supported (or not) in four countries: Finland, Kenya, Japan, and the United States. Her up-close-and-personal portrayals of four cisgender women track the physical toll of childbirth, post-delivery adjustment, and relationship strain. The result is powerful. “Many of the big decisions, like how much time to spend with the children and how to divide the emotional and physical labor with their partner, are heavily determined by the social structure of the place women give birth,” she writes.
Finland comes closest to an ideal, not only providing cost-free prenatal care that includes therapy to break intergenerational trauma in expectant moms but also utilizing midwives for most deliveries. During the birth itself, medication is promoted to reduce labor pain. Then, after the no-cost-to-them birth, moms like Anna get nearly a year of paid leave from their jobs; paid paternity leave is also encouraged. This has made Finland the only country in the industrialized world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers. Still, it’s not utopia, and Leonard chronicles the custody drama between Anna and Masa, her newborn’s dad.
That said, Anna has access to robust social supports, including professional daycare, which makes navigating single parenthood possible, if difficult. Nonetheless, compared to Chelsea in Kenya, Sarah in the US, and Tsukasa in Japan – mothers who have to juggle post-partum anxiety and depression with a relatively quick return to work – Finland seems like the gold standard. For the other three, the stress of unaffordable childcare, lack of breastfeeding support, and frustration with partners who either vanish or are clueless, makes this immersive portrayal heartbreaking, albeit compelling.
Sadly, Leonard notes that the visionary feminist goal of egalitarian parenting, a once prominent demand, remains unrealized. But we know what’s needed. While Four Mothers does not make policy recommendations, its case studies serve as a potent directive.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The Winter/Spring 2025 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review is now available in print for readers to enjoy stories, essays, poetry, and a novella. Online, readers can access over forty years of Alaska Quarterly Review in their archive with the content of the most recent twenty years available with no paywall.
Alaska Quarterly Review has launched a YouTube Channel, with recent videos featuring craft conversations with Jane Hirshfield and Dorianne Laux, and readings with Jason Brown, Jessi Lewis, Joan Murray, Maura Stanton, Doug Ramspeck, and more.
The Dissident Club, a graphic memoir by award-winning Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui, opens with his attempted kidnapping by military officers in 2018, presumably under orders from government officials who were displeased with his near-constant reporting about government corruption. As someone on the country’s “Kill List,” Siddiqui had long attracted official enmity. But this beautifully illustrated and evocative book is more than an account of Siddiqui’s political resistance: It is also a deeply felt reflection on his childhood and a potent critique of fundamentalist religious viewpoints and restrictions.
As the oldest son of deeply conservative religious parents, Siddiqui began life in Saudi Arabia, then returned to Pakistan where his parents attempted to keep him and his siblings from Western media and culture. The book chronicles Siddiqui’s attempts to come of age — drinking, smoking weed, and hiding a Shiite girlfriend from his Sunni parents — and asserting his independence by refusing to work in his father’s business. Not surprisingly, this took a toll, as his family never accepted his vocational choice or lifestyle.
It’s a sad, if not uncommon, denouement, but one that comes with a relatively happy ending.
Shortly after the kidnapping attempt, Siddiqui, his wife, and son emigrated to France where he set up The Dissident Club, a thriving Paris-based gathering place and bar for refugees and their supporters. The Dissident Club tells the site’s story, along the way zeroing in on religious hypocrisy, the War on Terror, the uses and misuses of propaganda, and the ways many government officials promote repressive policies for personal, financial, and professional gain. It’s a powerful indictment and an ode to free expression.
The Dissident Club by Taha Siddiqui; co-author illus. Hubert Maury; trans. David Homel. Arsenal Pulp Press, April 2025.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Lemonade, the captivating chapbook by Catalina Vargas Tovar, attentively translated by Juliana Borrero, invites readers on an ecological inquiry that “is not a book of poetry” but an engaging “Paranormal Investigation.” At its core, this work explores the enigmatic presence of a mountain from Bogotá’s eastern range. Tovar describes the mountain as a sentinel that “keeps watch… observes / attunes.” Then notes its geological, hydrological, and transformative powers; the mountain “separates this plateau / from the world” and “absorbs water / in excess / turns it into language.” In contrast to the mountain’s enduring existence and transformative powers, we — “a great ensemble of / disoriented / out of tune / apocalyptic / crows” — illustrate the fleeting and “incoherent” nature of humanity.
Tovar’s exploration focuses on relationships between humans and the land, presenting the mountain through a feminine lens: “she… / receives / compensates / transforms.” The collective human presence is conveyed through a first-person plural perspective, presumably including the speaker: “we will be mummies / piled on mummies,” the “ghosts / that drink lemonade on the shore of a Black Sea.” The complexity of our existence and the mountain’s supernatural essence can only be “understood through investigation.”
Parts paranormal, philosophical, and poetic, Lemonade is a vibrant site for experimental conversation “under the sun of climate change” where “we [have] turned to shadows.” The chapbook endeavors two things: To “undo the spell / move in reverse”; To cast a new spell that encourages readers to listen to the land with fresh ears, to “see without tongue.”
Lemonade reflects Catalina Vargas Tovar’s inquiry into the interplay of ecology and culture while also challenging readers to consider how these elements shape our own ways of listening to the “promise” of the land where we live.
Lemonade by Catalina Vargas Tovar; translated by Juliana Borrero. Ugly Duckling Presse, November 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Housed in and published from Suffolk’s English Department, Salamander is biannual print magazine of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and works in translation. Founded in 1992, Salamander aims to publish work by writers deserving of a wider audience at any stage in their careers as well as to focus intentionally on inclusivity and outreach to marginalized writers.
This newest issue features an Art Portfolio (including the cover image) by sculptor Dale Rogers; Creative Nonfiction Andrew Bertaina; Fiction by R. S. Powers, Caroline Fleischauer, Michael Welch, Danny Lang-Perez, Gillon Crichton, Taylor Melia Elyse Mahone; Poetry by Marcy Rae Henry, Sharon Lin, Despy Boutris, Cynthia Atkins, James Davis, Cecelia Hagen, John A. Nieves, Jane Newkirk, Justin Groppuso-Clark, Benjamin Paloff, Alexandra Malouf, Lindsay Clark, Kate Hubbard, Susannah Sheffer, Donna Vorreyer, Moriah Cohen, Alice White, Sara Watson, Lisa Summe, John Gallaher, Jason Fraley, Amy Roa, Leah Umansky, Lindsay Younce Tsohantaridis, Julie Danho, Anthony DiPietro, Gabrielle Grace Hogan, Mary Rose Manspeaker, Katrina Madarang, and A. Molotkov.
64 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
March is almost at its end already! This means that there are a host of submission opportunities ending soon with March 31 and April 1 deadlines. As always, NewPages is here to help you keep chugging away at your submission goals so you don’t miss out on the opportunities with our weekly roundup. Check out calls for submissions from literary magazines, anthologies, and even a poetry calendar! And if you enjoy writing contests, we have a wide range to choose from, including opportunities from literary magazines, indie and university presses, and more.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
