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The eleventh annual August Poetry Postcard Festival is open for 2017 registration - closing July 18.

For you newbies, the August PoPo Fest goes like this: You sign up. You get a list of 31 names/addresses of other people who signed up. Starting late July, you write a poem a day on a postcard and mail it off to the next person on the list, so by the end of the month, you will have (hopefully) written and sent 31 poems and (hopefully) received 31 poems.

The poems are not supposed to be pre-written or something you've been working on for months. This is an exercise is the spontaneous, the demanding, the gut-driven, the postcard inspired - whatever it is that gets you to write once a day, each day, and send it off into the world.

Last year, poems from contributors were selected for publication in the 1st Poetry Postcard Fest Anthology, 56 Days of August, Poetry Postcards, to be published October 2017.

I've done this event since it began! I don't always keep to a poem a day; sometimes I get ahead one day, or catch up another, with several poems in one day. But I try my best. The event gets me thinking of poetry in my every day, when I rarely have time for it, and writing it down - something I have time for even more rarely.

I've received poems from across the state, the country and around the globe. I've gotten postcards made from cereal boxes, some with gorgeous original artwork, and lots of the lovely tacky tourist cards from travel destinations. I have cards from "famous" poets, and some who have since become more famous, and some never signed, so I'll never know, and it hardly matters. I've gotten poetry. Sent to me directly. From strangers. Lovely, strange, absurd, and funny. Poetry.

It's an amazing event, and I hope you will take the challenge and join in this year. There is a nominal fee for the event ($10). I can only imagine the amount of work it is to run this (with 300+ people participating), and keeping up virtual space to promote it. I'm not dissuaded by the fee, knowing the extraordinary event that it is, and knowing I've spent 100 times that on conferences from which I've gotten a great deal less inspiration...anyone else?

So, please writers, wanna-bes and needs-a-kick-in-the-arsers, poetry lovers, postcard lovers - this event is for you. Join us! Registration ends July 18!

Issue 43 of New Orleans Review is themed "The African Literary Hustle" and opens with the editorial by Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Laura T. Murphy, "This Hustle is Not Your Grandpa's African Lit." The two issue editors examine the historical 'presentation' of African literature published in Western culture as "all too often realist, in English, and in the spirit of Chinua Achebe. But romance, science fiction, fantasy, epic, experimental poetry, satire, and political allegory all find expression in Africa, though not necessarily publication." The editors confront this disparity, "Those who are called to write often have to hustle to get recognition by writing a coming-of-age colonial encounter tale or hustle even harder to have their unique voices heard. So the post-Achebe generation writer faces all sorts of firewalls."

Thus, the call went out for this issue, and writers responded with the editors hoping "to provoke some interesting and unpredictable writing and thinking that would reflect and respond to the spirit of the hustle." Oddly enough, the editors note, "eighty percent of the submissions were from white non-African-identifying writers who thought they could hustle their way into a volume of African literature and had no qualms about it." Seriously.

The editors close on the comment, "But what is African literature? Is there, can there be, was there ever and African literature? In asking you have answered your question. African literature is a question. It is an open question that invites, and has to keep on inviting, different geographies, languages and forms."

Thus, this issue of New Orleans Review: The African Literary Hustle.

The Summer/Fall 2017 issue of The Southampton Review includes winners of the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize:

"Delivering" by Suzy Vitello [pictured]
Vitello's piece can be read on TSR's website here.

"Sounds Kept in the Valley of the Tongue" by Sarah Cadorette

The most recent issue (17.1) of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley features winners of two of the publication's annual contests:

2016 Mighty River Short Story Contest
$1000 Award and Publication
"In the Jungle" by Jeremy Griffin [pictured]

2016 Wilda Hearne Flash Fiction Contest
$500 Award and Publication
"Frayed Cords and Pink Underwear" by Shannon Sweetnam

From the Smithsonian article "Horse-Riding Librarians Were the Great Depression’s Bookmobiles" by Eliza McGraw:

During the Great Depression, a New Deal program brought books to Kentuckians living in remote areas.

In 1936, packhorse librarians served 50,000 families, and, by 1937, 155 public schools. Children loved the program; many mountain schools didn't have libraries, and since they were so far from public libraries, most students had never checked out a book. "'Bring me a book to read,' is the cry of every child as he runs to meet the librarian with whom he has become acquainted," wrote one Pack Horse Library supervisor. "Not a certain book, but any kind of book. The child has read none of them."

Read the full article and see more photos here.

The Summer 2017 issue of The Cincinnati Review features the winning entries of their annual Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in poetry in prose:

Prose Winner
"Stylites Anonymous" by Maureen McGranaghan

Poetry Winner
"Very Many Hands" by Aaron Coleman [pictured]

Each winner receives $1000 in addition to publication.

American Life in Poetry: Column 639
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

One of my favorite poems is Louise Bogan's "The Crossed Apple" which mentions two species, Meadow Milk and Sweet Burning, and since reading it many years ago I have made notes of the names of apples, a poet's delight. In this touching poem by Cathryn Essinger, who lives in Ohio, I've come upon yet another for my collection. Her most recent book is What I Know About Innocence from Main Street Rag press.

Summer Apples

I planted an apple tree in memory
of my mother, who is not gone,

but whose memory has become
so transparent that she remembers

slicing apples with her grandmother
(yellow apples; blue bowl) better than

the fruit that I hand her today. Still,
she polishes the surface with her thumb,

holds it to the light and says with no
hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .

they're so fragile, you can almost see
to the core. She no longer remembers how

to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but
her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants.

And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core—
to that little cathedral to memory—where

the seeds remember everything they need
to know to become yellow and transparent.

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2016 by Cathryn Essinger, “Summer Apples,” from Alaska Quarterly Review, (Vol 33, No. 1 & 2, 2016). Poem reprinted by permission of Cathryn Essinger and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2017 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

The Southampton Review Editor Lou Ann Walker recounts the day, ten years ago, when Robert Reeves, who would be rebuilding the MFA Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, opined that a "distinguished MFA program" should likewise have a "distinguished literary journal as its intellectual and creative center." Then he asked Lou Ann: "Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested in founding and editing a literary review?" She writes that it had been her "secret dream" to do just that. Ten years later, Walker has created exactly the publication worthy of the university's writing program - and vice versa! Publishing two issues per year, readers can also find selections available to read on the TSR website.

Hanging Loose, published by Hanging Loose Press since 1966, includes the section "Writers of High School Age" in each issue. Featured in issue 108 are two young poets who contribute several works each.

Elizabeth Girdharry writes of math and sciences with "Filling Empty Spaces," including the lines "Mathematical formulas, / on how to stay tangent to the line, / somehow slipped my mind," and "There Was Geometry" begins: "There is geometry in my junk drawer." And comes back around to, "More importantly, / there is geometry in my junk drawer. / Angles and tangents twist out of circles / the same way you smooth back flyaway wisps of baby hair / when you're pondering a hard science theory."

Elise Wing crafts strong imagery to draw her readers in. "The Microscope" begins "Dead diatom / Crisp as a leaf skeleton," and "The Living That Terrifies" begins with the amusing but poignant, "Your ears are the trees for egrets to nest in," and "Tomorrow, the Seagulls" starts, "The future is as frightening as a three-headed hyena."

NewPages includes Hanging Loose in our Young Writers Guide where we list publications written by and for young writers and readers as well as a vetted, ad-free list of contests for young writers.

In celebration of TLR's 40 years of publication and "looking toward the future," Sena Jeter Naslund writes in the Editor's Note, four guest editors all under the age of forty were invited to select works for this first issue year 41. "Each of them is a graduate, in various areas of concentration, of the Spalding University low-residency MFA in Writing Program," notes Naslund. Making the selections: Eva Sage Gordon, nonfiction editor; Ellyn Lichvar, poetry and Children's Corner editor; Amina S. McIntyre, drama editor; Flora K. Schildknecht, fiction editor.

The Summer 2017 issue of The Gettysburg Review features paintings by Tina Newberry. In addition to this untitled cover piece, there are eight works in a full-color portfolio inside. It's also worth a visit to her website to view her Barbies series.
You have to take a close look at this detail from "Iron Horse" by Kent Monkman on the cover of Brick #99 to get the full effect of the kind of cultural/historical mishmash that makes up this image and a great many of his works.
"Myth" by Eiko Ojala is a papercut illustration for the cover of the May 2017 issue of Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, an online bi-monthly publishing poetry and prose.

Glimmer Train has chosen the winning stories for their March/April Very Short Fiction Award. This competition is held twice a year and is open to all writers for stories with a word count under 3000. The next Very Short Fiction competition will open on July 1. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.

1st place goes to George Makana Clark [pictured] of Milwaukee, WI, who wins $2000 for “Pluto.” His story will be published in Issue 102 of Glimmer Train Stories.

2nd place goes to Madiha Sattar of Karachi, Pakistan, for “Mulberry Street.” Her story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train, increasing her prize from $500 to $700.

3rd place goes to Oguz Dinc of Istanbul, Turkey, for “The Hurricane.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train, increasing his prize from $300 to $700.

A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.

Deadline soon approaching! Short Story Award for New Writers: June 30
This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5000. No theme restrictions. Most submissions to this category run 1500-5000 words, but can go up to 12,000. First place prize wins $2500 and publication in Glimmer Train Stories. Second/third: $500/$300 and consideration for publication. Click here for complete guidelines.

Poet Clare Paniccia surprises readers by following up this title with the imagery of boys dissecting frogs in biology class, then skillfully guides this action to align with that of a girl's realization about the nature of [those] boys who would treat girls similarly. Never in my life would I have put these two together, but Paniccia's ability to do so seamlessly engages the reader in a strange tangle of reminicent emotion. Take the opportunity to hear her, and others on TriQuarterly's online journal, read the work herself. 

Self-Portrait as Girl Being Led On
By Clare Paniccia

I watched them do it,
their small, fat fingers taking
          to the swell of chest a blunt scalpel
and peeling, no, sawing into stomach
                 their fitful curiosity, the frog’s
                         glass eye staring outward and empty,
                 staring toward the very mouths of schoolboys
          who entered so brutally the crevice, the abdomen’s
                                    silenced bell. . . . 

Read the rest and hear the poem read by the author on TriQuarterly.

The summer 2017 issue of Rattle features a tribute to poets living with mental illness. "An estimated 26% of Americans experience mental illness in a given year," write the editors, "and we wanted to acknowledge and explore that reality, while also helping to diminish the associated cultural stigma of these illnesses. [. . . ] While the topics of the poems themselves vary greatly, each of the poets live with some form of depressive, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, bi-polar, post-traumatic stress, or eating disorder—all of discussed openly and bravely in their contributor notes. In the conversation section, we talk about mental illness and a wide range of other topics with Francesca Bell." [Cover Art by Jasmine C. Bell.]

In his introduction to Issue 97 of Translation Review, Boris Dralyuk, literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, writes: "Today’s Russian-to-English translation community is far broader and more diverse; the body of work of any given translator might be smaller than that of Garnett, but there are so many more gifted translators that the shared corpus is a monumental achievement. In this, our era of translation does indeed resemble the Silver Age of Russian poetry..." Dralyuk goes on to discuss many contemporary writers, some of whose works fill the pages of this issue, "The Silver Age of Russian-to-English Transaltion," while also recognizes the shoulders of the Golden Age writers upon which we now stand.

Translation Review is a forum for the discussion of the art, practice and theory of literary translation published by UT Dallas Center for Translation Studies and available online via Routledge Taylor & Francis Online. The full issue can be accessed here for individuals/institutions with logins. Without a login, the full preface can be accessed as well as beginning excerpts from each work published.

New online literary magazine Breathe Free Press specializes in the lyric essay. Having recently published their first issue, Editor Deborah Di Bari seeks an editorial assistant.

From Di Bari:

"We are seeking a freelance assistant for outreach to the literary community, strategize, manage and curate media content for social media and blog."

Artists say things with objects, images, symbols, and metaphors that are difficult, if not impossible, to express any other way.
Artists have tremendous courage, a necessary quality when it comes to expressing personal dreams and emotions so all can see them.
Artists break down barriers of thought, time, custom, and expectation.
Artists make the intangible tangible.
Artists see the trees and the forest.
Artists challenge us to see and understand our world differently than we do now.
Artists are born with open hands and open hearts, courageously willing to accept whatever is given.
Imagine our world without artists, without their ability to see, dream, express, break down barriers, and challenge the rest of us to imagine our world differently.

Excerpted from Christine Brooks Cote, "Imagine Our World Without Artists," from Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2017.

The Fiddlehead No. 271 (Spring 2017) includes winners and honorable mentions from their 26th Annual Literary Contest:

The Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem
Dominique Bernier-Cormier's "Fabric"
[author pictured]
Read an interview Bernier-Cormier here.

Poetry Honorable Mentions
Tammy Armstrong's "Blessing the Boats"
Kim Trainor's "Bluegrass"

Short Fiction Prize
Kate Finegan's "Blues Too Bright"
Read an interview with Finegan here.

Fiction Honorable Mentions
Steven Benstead's "Will There Be Clowns?"
Ann Cavlovic's "The Foundation"

Winning entries can be read on The Fiddlehead's website.

MAYDAY Magazine offers their spring 2017 issue (#11) in tribute to magazine cofounder, editor, writer, and teacher Okla Elliott, who passed away unexpectedly in his sleep March 19, 2017. Editors David Bowen and Raul Clement write in "A History of Friendships," the Editors' Introduction, "After the grief and shock—which of course still haven’t gone away and never will—and after all the immediate practical concerns, one thing became clear: Okla’s publishing ventures, including MAYDAY Magazine, should forge on. At MAYDAY, we were finalizing our spring issue. Okla Elliott was born on May 1st—Mayday, in fact—and the month of May was fast approaching. What better way to celebrate his life than a tribute issue in the birth month of his 40th year?"

The editors reached out to friends and colleagues of Elliot for their remembrances. Twenty-two poets, fiction writers, and academics in various fields responded and their works are collected in this issue. Also featured are several interviews both with (previously published elsewhere) and by Elliott.

MAYDAY Magazine is published by New American Press and its full contents can be read online here.

The June 2017 issue of Poetry features photographs and artifacts from the Poetry Foundation’s forthcoming exhibit, Matter in the Margins: Gwendolyn Brooks at 100, curated by Anna Chen, June 16–August 25, 2017.

Chen writes: "Gwendolyn Brooks’s literary archives, now in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reveal that she clustered and bundled papers as well as life experiences: she tucked notes inside pieces of paper folded into makeshift pockets, slid photographs behind other photographs in albums, and pasted clippings on top of each other in scrapbooks. She added further layers of meaning with her copious annotations, like the detailed notes she wrote on the backs of many of her photographs (given in quotation marks in the accompanying images) in order to preserve the knowledge of the people and events they captured."

Read Chen's full introduction to this feature as well as view a slideshow of the photographs and artifacts here.

Fusion is Prarie Schooner's online series, which Editor Kwame Dawes says, "is an opportunity to create dialog across geographical spaces and cultures through the sharing of art and writing. It represents an effort to create bridges between the many silos that separate us, and to do so by asking writers to think about the very things that connect us and distinguish us in different parts of the world." Issue #11 is a collaboration with Ugandan poetry and art on the theme "Shoes."

In her essay, "Ngato! Ngato! Shoes!" Ugandan Poet Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva [pictured] writes, "It's often the most silent shoes that are the strongest. It's the shoes that allow thieves to stalk upon unsuspecting people and the shoes that enable a cheetah to pounce on its prey. The silent shoes do not desire unnecessary attention to detract them from their mission."

Read the full issue here.

Winners of the 2017 Lamar York Prize for nonfiction and fiction appear in the Spring 2017 issue of The Chattahoochee Review:

Winner in Fiction
Selected by Patrick Ryan
"Papijack" by Carol LaHines [pictured]

Winner in Nonfiction
Selected by Jill Talbot
"First Visit" by Vince Granata

A full list of the finalists can be read here.

In his introduction to Issue 63 (Spring 2017) of Creative Nonfiction, themed "How We Teach," Lee Gutkind writes about attending a yoga and creative writing retreat where he is teaching creative nonfiction to an "ecclectic" group of attendees. Just as varied is the group's experience with yoga, which the yoga instructor misjudged by giving too rigorous of a few first sessions. Gutkind writes that the instructor backed down after that, teaching technique and form basics, regardless of the participant's experience level. "We hard-core students thought we knew all of this stuff—some of us have been practicing for decades—so we were somewhat apprehensive at first. But as the lesson progressed, we began to realize that going back to the basics and relearning what we thought we knew was quite helpful."

Gutkind likens this to our need to review our own practice, weed out bad habits we may have developed over the years, and get back in tune with the basics: "In yoga or writing—or in practicing any art or skill—it does not hurt to start over once in a while just to make sure you know what you think you know. In fact, it occurs to me this is also why teaching can be reinvigorating—I know many writers who make their primary living by teaching and who often find their inspiration in writing prompts given to their students. But maybe there’s also something about focusing on the basics that can inspire innovation and transformation."

Read the full editorial here.

The Spring 2017 issue of The Fiddlehead: Atlantic Canada's International Literary Journal includes a special feature on 2016 Griffin Prize international winner Norman Dubie. Editor Ross Leckie introduces the section of twenty-three poems, including five new ones, with "Norman Dubie: The Details of Winter That Upset Us."

Leckie writes, "No poet I can think of writes as much about dreams as Dubie, and no poet ought to be able to, as dreams are so often adduced as the moment of epiphany, as the encoded truth that underlies all the banality that consumes our daily lives. In Dubie’s work, however, dreams seem as one room in the mind’s library, in which there is also an astonishing array of books and the lives of their authors, and details of plot and character that are not there, but could be. There are landscapes both from memory and from imagination, scenes of history in the grotesquerie of its filth and muck, and assorted friends and family who demand attention, or simply stop by for a chat."

Love this summery landscape photo by David FitzSimmons on the Spring 2017 cover of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.
A look back to fall, this macro focus on the cover of Cimarron Review #198 is "Ornamental" by Kathleen Galvin. This beautiful image decieves the trecherous nature of these "Sweet Gum Balls" that blanket the ground beneath their trees in the fall.
"Leaving Home Finding Home" is the Spring/Summer 2017 theme of Nimrod International Journal published out of The University of Tulsa. The photograph is "After Loss, The Photographer Collects Small Homes in the Hope of Finding Love" by Ashley Inguanta.