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Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun 's "Christy Clark and the Kinder Morgan Go-Go Girls" draws readers to the Winter 2016 cover of The Malahat Review, with guest editors Philip Kevin Paul (poetry), Richard Van Camp (fiction), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (CNF) making selections for the theme "Indigenous Perspectives."
I was mesmerized by Ann Manuel's "Blur I" on the Winter 2017 cover of The Fiddlehead, Atlantic Canada's International Literary Journal.
And just one more splash of color to brighten a winter's day: "Gouache on Newspaper" by Elizabeth Doran on the cover of Suffolk University's Salamander #43. 
Able Muse Press publishes poetry and short story collections, and novels from emerging and established authors. Though not exclusively, their focus has been primarily formal poetry. They have just announced the launch of the imprint Word Galaxy Press, which Editor Alexander Pepple says "will be somewhat more inclusive, relative to Able Muse Press, toward poetic styles, and will lean especially toward fiction. Pictured: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - a new Modern English translation by John Ridland. 
With the annual Brick Road Poetry Contest, Brick Road Poetry Press seeks a collection that fits their mission of publishing poetry that entertains, amuses, and edifies.
Winner Susan J. Erickson’s Lauren Bacall Shares a Limousine was published this past December. The collection explores the lives of women across centuries and continents, including narrators like Lady Godiva, Lucy Audubon, Janis Joplin, and Marilyn Monroe, and gives voice to the critical moments of women’s lives.
This is Erickson’s first full-length collection. Sample poems can be found at the publisher’s website.
Prime Number Magazine runs a free monthly contest for writers to flex their skill at length limits. Published by Press 53, Prime Number holds entries to 53 words and a monthly prompt. Winners are published on the Prime Number website and receive a free book from Press 53. For December, the prompt was to write a 53-word story about 'chill,' and the winner was "The Last" by Greg Hill. New judges are named for each month's contest, and winning authors also get to submit a 53-word bio. The prompt for January is to "write a story about a penny" with the deadline being the final day of the month. Winning stories appear within a week of the contest end. Click here more information about the contest. 
In February, Autumn House Press is scheduled to release the 2016 winners of their annual Autumn House Press Contests in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry.
Nonfiction winner, Run Scream Unbury Save by Katherine McCord, offers brief meditations on family, language, art, and the act of writing.
In fiction, Heavy Metal by Andrew Bourelle took home the prize. This is Bourelle’s first novel and is set to the soundtrack of Metallica, Def Leppard, and Iron Maiden. Readers are pulled into the struggle of Danny, an adolescent dealing with extreme tragedy and the everyday conflicts of high school.
And in poetry, Jane Satterfield won with her debut collection Apocalypse Mix, which was selected by David St. John. Of his pick, St. John says, “these poems balance their raw psychological undercurrents with a calm and masterful stylistic authority.” The collection weaves the reader “into its fabric of individual and historical circumstances, as well within the dense foliation of personal experience.”
Check out the Autumn House Press website for more information about these titles, or stop by the contest page where submissions are now open.
The Writing Disorder online quarterly literary journal continues to publish some of the most provocative artwork from emerging artists. Paintings by Cameron Bliss are featured on the Winter 2016-17 cover as well as within the issue.
"My Beating Heart" by Rossitza Todorova welcomes readers to Superstition Review's issue 18, a fully accessible online literary magazine produced by creative writing and web design students at Arizona State University. 
Next month, readers can look forward to the publication of Novena by Jacques J. Rancourt, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry. The poems are formed after the novena, a nine-day Catholic prayer seeking intercession from the Virgin Mary (recast as a drag queen in this collection). Rancourt invites “prayer not to symbols of dogmatic perfection but to those who are outcast or maligned, LGBTQ people, people in prison, people who resist, people who suffer and whose suffering has not been redeemed.”
Advance praise for Novena can be found at the Pleaides Press website, where copies can also be preordered. The Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry is currently open for submissions.
Able Muse Write Prize for FictionFinal Judge Stuart Dybeck
Winner: "Passerthrough" by Victoria Mlyniec
[pictured]
Able Muse Write Prize for Poetry
Final Judge Patricia Smith
Winner: "Shamrock" by Scott Ruescher
Runner-up: "From the School of Hard Knocks" by Fran Markover
Honorable Mention: "Not" by Colleen Carias
March 15, 2017 is the deadline for the 2017 contest with Judges Annie Finch (poetry) and Jill Alexander Essbaum (fiction).
Books :: 2015 Robert C. Jones Short Prose Contest Winner
Published January 19, 2017 Posted By Katy Haas
Pleaides Press annually holds the Robert C. Jones Short Prose Book Contest in honor of Robert C. Jones, a former professor of English at the University of Missouri.
While Robert Long Foreman has seen his work published in magazines since 2006, Among Other Things is his first collection. Find out more information and pre-order copies from the Pleaides Press website.
[Quotes from publisher’s website.]
During the tail end of 2016, Southeast Missouri State University Press released the winner of the 2015 Cowles Poetry Book Prize: Everyone at This Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin. Advance praise dubs the collection “Poignant, quirky, troubled” (Larissa Szporluk), “[a]n impressive debut from a poet who is as interesting as he is unpredictable” (J. Allyn Rosser). While this is Modlin’s first collection, his poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Florida Review, Indiana Review, and DIAGRAM, among others.
Read more about Everyone at This Party Has Two Names at the SEMO Press website, where you can also find more information about the Book Prize, which has an upcoming annual deadline of April 1st.
Editor Nathaniel Perry [pictured] of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review considers in the Winter 2016 Editor's Note "that poetry is both a serious lifeblood and something seriously fun." And further questions, ". . .how many poets are still willing to admint that it's the fun of poetry that maybe primarily attracts us to the art? . . . why must we always take ourselves so seriously? What's wrong with an occaion for poetry?" And so, Perry set out to creat both the occasion and the invitation to have fun. "I thought if an issue of the magazine could empahsize the fun of the moment, the pleasure in working out draft - it might be a tonic kind of enterprise and, who knows, soemtimes something bigger happens anyhow. In that spirit, this year's issue was commissioned specifically for the magazine. Writers, both solicited and unsolicited, were told they could write on one of five themes - A Walk, Silence, Water, Frames and Containers. Each poet only had an hour to compose a poem . . . and 'sonnet,' formally, could be in interpreted in whatever way was useful to the writer."The contributions fill this annual issue of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, including A.E. Stallings. Stephen Dunn, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Mira Rosenthal, Bob Perelman, Katrina Vandenberg, Jon Pineda, Laynie Browne, Rob Shapiro, Eamon Grennan, and many more.
It may not seem that far a stretch for a literary journal published at Mississippi Valley State College to theme an issue on the Mississippi Delta, but indeed, since its inauguration in 2000, Valley Voices has been a publication renown for presenting a global perspective of thought and voice. Past issues have focused on New York School and Diaspora, Michael Anania, Perspectives on African American Literature, Poetic Translation in a Global Context, and issues on southern writers. So, indeed, it is a 'special issue' of Valley Voices when the content is fully dedicated to the Mississippi Delta. Editor John Zheng writes in his introduction to issue 16.2, "The Mississippi Delta isn't a region where tourists can easily seek out natural beauty as they do in Yellowstone or in the Smoky Mountains; its beauty remains to be discovered with a little exploration. . . . We run this special issue for literary or artistic expression, for doumenting the region, for people deeply rooted here or having moved elsewhere. It is hopeful that these voices, literary or visual, will tell interesting stories." See a full list of the issue's content here. 
Arroyo Literary Review recently announced an exciting addition to their website. A new Excerpts page has arrived with selections from past issues now available as PDFs, and with more on the way. Read six pieces from the current Spring 2016 issue, or travel back in time a few years for Pushcart Prize nominees and other noteworthy work. Writers considering submitting to the magazine can now get an idea of what the editors are looking for without a physical copy. There’s a lot there to keep both readers and writers busy as more winter weather rolls in. 
This week's theme for covers seems to be 'the fantastical from the literal.' Philippe Pirrip's "Curved Plan" is featured on the cover of Zone 3 Fall 2016. Pripp describes his artistic approach as "a visual play of identities" and "a resistance to conform to literal figurations of what is and what has been depicted as being queer."
Of the cover of Winter/Spring 2017 The Southampton Revi Editor-in-Chief Lou Ann Walker comments: "Because this issue's theme is the muse, all of the art in this issue was chosen for its emphasis on story and the fantastical places imagination can go. Take, for example, the cover, 'Stopping by Woods,' created by Corinne Geertsen. How did that ballerina in her tutu come to be juxtaposed with that extraterrestrial spaceship?" Indeed.
The Chattahoochee Review Fall2016/Winter2017 cover art "War Bonnets: Never Out of Style for Long" by Lucy Julia Hale is representative of her artistic approach, which she describes: "I am drawn to see deeply into paper artifacts / mass-produced photographic images of our interiors and exteriors - / where we have lived." 
"Why our continuing attraction to Greece?" writes Keith Taylor in his introduction to the newest issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. "There is something in that small country out there on the edge of Europe that doesn't feel like the rest of the continent. Part of the attraction is certainly to the very different modern history, and to a landscape shaped by human use yet still oddly wild. . . . And, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, we continue to be drawn to Greece by the weight and presence of the classical tradition. We have tried to expand our canon and assume the influence of other traditions, but whether we like it or not, Western ideas continue to reflect the ideas first thought on those dry hills."
Michigan Quarterly Review Fall 2016 presents Returning to Greece: A special section of poetry on Greece with work by Lauren K. Alleyne, Christopher Bakken, Natalie Bakopoulos, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, and Allison Wilkins.
With its Fall 2016 issue, The Wallace Stevens Journal celebrates 40 years of publishing scholarly articles, poems, book reviews, news, and bibliographies. In his Editor's Column, "The Wallace Stevens Journal in the Age of Electronic Reproduction," Eeckhout is able to quantify the popularity, and correlating usefulness, of the journal being made accessible via Project Muse five years ago. Sifting through massive amounts of data, Eeckhout is able to distill numerous points of meaning and their impact on the journal's continuing success. What works have been most downloaded, from which institutions - and finding among the names Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and North Hennepin Community College, which are the top-most universities downloading, the popularity of specific issues (often themed), full-issue download vs. table of contents only, and more. Eeckhout comments on the how this data provides insight into, not only the world's continued interest in Stevens's work, but in the impact of The Wallace Stevens Journal in providing a place for a community of like-minded people to share their interests, explore them, and perhaps discover them for the first time. Four decades of worthwile effort we hope to see continued long into the future. 
With their Winter/Spring 2017 issue, Gulf Coast celebrates its 30th anniversary. "Preparing for this milesone issue," write the editors, "we too tracked the past, interviewing Phillip Lopate and exploring the works of Donal Barthleme. We lingered over Barthelme's collage. They are inventive and uncanny, encouraging you to look closer and see differently. In that spirit, Digital Editor, Michele Nereim, embarked on the project of creating the small art-pieces featured throuhout this issue, scouring the Library of Congress digital archives, combining and refashioning old images so they might say something new, connect to now. Like how the wedding of unfamiliar words can forge new ideas. Or bring to light what's already there." Readers can enjoy these contributions along with a full content of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews - including a Q&A with Phillip Lopate - and the section "Art Lies: Art & Critical Art Writing." 
Thrice Publishing, from the editors of literary magazine Thrice Fiction, have published their first book: Our Dolphin by Joel Allegretti. In an interview with Thrice Publishing’s Editor-at-Large RW Spryszak, Allegretti discusses the inspiration for the novella, naming it a tribute to a few of his literary obsessions, including the works of Gabriel García Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, and Fellini.
In Our Dolphin, Emilio saves a dolphin that’s trapped on the beach, an act of kindness the dolphin does not forget. To learn more, check out the Thrice Publishing website for the full interview and ways to pick up some copies of the debut collection.
The most recent issue of Concho River Review: Literature from Texas and Beyond features a photograph by Tim L. Vasquez, Ziva-Gato Impressions, that provides me with a ray of warmth during just the start of our coldest months of winter here in the north.
With cover art by Ric Best, the color scheme of issue 19 of Skidrow Penthouse is another kind of warming image - one that invites readers into what Editors Stephanie Dickinson and Rob Cook consider "our best issue yet."
The reproduction can't quite seem to do justice to the vibrancy of the blue, red, and orange hues on the Fall 2016 cover art of Crazyhorse. "City" by W. Case Jernigan provides a unique perspective, as does the content of this publication. A full list of contents for the current issue can be found here. 
Buy a broadside; plant a tree.
I can’t imagine a more unique approach to both printing poetry to share with the world and planting trees to renew the planet. It is the creative genius of Under a Warm Green Linden, an online journal of poetry and poetics which publishes poetry (including audio recordings of poets reading their work), interviews with poets, reviews of poetry books, and poetry broadsides. Reviews and interviews are published throughout the year while the poetry journal featuring 24-30 poets is published twice a year, on summer and winter solstices.
Next month, readers can look forward to the publication of two award-winning books: Small Crimes by Andrea Jurjević and When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other by Christopher Kang.
Andrea Jurjević won Anhinga Press’s 2015 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry with Small Crimes, which begins during the early 90s, the speaker living their adolescence during the Croatian War, and then moves on to post-war years and life in America. Judge C. G. Hanzlicek says the collection “is often dark but just as often beautiful” with language that “crackles with energy.” Learn more at the publisher’s website.
Christopher Kang’s When He Sprang From His Bed . . . is a daring book that challenges on every read. Made of 880 stories, the collection won the Green Mountains Review Book Prize, selected by Sarah Manguso. From the publisher: “Each story contains a world, tilted on its own axis, strange, remarkable and bursting with heart.” Read more about the book and Kang at SPD.
Winner“Wallis-Wallace” by Myra Malkin
1st Honorable Mention
“Letteromancy” by Mark Wagenaar
2nd Honorable Mention
“Visiting Emily” by Michael Miller
A full list of finalists can be found here.
"The very concept of food, the physical presence of it, the way it triggers all of the senses is a central part or live, human and otherwise. Whether abundant or scarce it occupies a part of our daily lives. The pleasure of it, the struggle for it, the fast from it, the feast in it, the joy of it, the worry for it, the nourishment from it, the gift of it, and sadly, in these times, the poison of it. It is, simply put, the inescapable commonality for all living things." So opens Guest Editor Matthew Shenoda's introduction to the Food Portfolio in the Winter 2016 issue of Prairie Schooner."In the following pages of this portfolio, each of the contributors approaches the topic with stunning attention in an exploration of the nuanced realities of food and the roles it plays in our lives. . . . To be sure, this topic is largely unending, woven so deeply into our very existence that we may never have enough to say about it. But here you will find a small sampling of the myriad ways we can understand the food of life through the food of language."
Authors whose works are featured in the portfolio include Craig Santos Perez, Uoumna Chlala, Evie Shockley, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Quincy Troupe, Chris Abani, LeAnne Howe, Aimee Nuzhukumatathil, Patricia Smith and Afaa Michael Weaver among others.
This issue is available for purchase in the NewPages webstore, which offers single issue copies of many great lit mags and a flat rate shipping option.
Fiction selected by selected by Ayana Mathis"Destiny" by Mike Alberti
Nonfiction (Essay) selected by David Shields
"Witness Trees" by Cassidy Norvell Thompson
[pictured]
Poetry selected by Rick Barot
"Calisthenics" by Brandon Rushton
Winning author bios and a full list of honorable mentions can be read here.
Beginning January 2017, you will no longer see the familiar blue cover of The Sewanee Review on your bookstore or library shelves or in the mail. The fall 2016 issue features an Homage to George Core [pictured], editor of The Sewanee Review since 1973, overseeing the continuation of one of the longest-continuously published periodicals in the United States - dating back to 1892. Robert Benson offers an introduction to the selection of essays and notes in honor of Core's retirement, with contributing authors including Dawn Potter, Floyd Skloot, Donald Hall, Jayanta Mahapatra, Sam Pickering, Wendell Berry, B. H. Fairchild, Kathryn Starbuck, Gladys Swan, and many more.
Author Adam Ross has assumed editorial responsibility for the publication and plans to roll out a number of changes beginning in 2017. These include moving away from the traditional blue-covered publication to a cover that will vary with each issue, photo content inside the publication, and more online content for subscribers and purchasers to supplement the print copy. The staff has also expanded from three to five, and submissions are now being accepted online via Submittable.Readers can most certainly depend upon the quality of the publication to remain high end, with content enhanced from contributors with Sewanee connections - both graduates and writers affiliated with the School of Letters and Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
