NewPages Blog
The American Poetry Review May/June 2017 issue includes a special supplement interview by Lance Rutkin with Paul Muldoon. Included in their discussion: Muldoon's thoughts on "commissioned" work; how to approach art when writing poetry about it; playing with linguistics in poetry; structuring a volume of poetry; the place of poetics in contemporary Irish politics; his poetic relationship with Seamus Heaney; and the sonnet form in the current day. Read the full interview here. 
The May - August 2017 issue of World Literature Today features New Native Writing: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock, guest edited by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish. The section includes "twenty-eight writers with tribal affiliations from throughout the continental US as well as Guåhån (Guam) and American Samoa." In her introduction, Mish writes about the 1992 WLT feature "From this World: Contemporary American Indian Literature" in an issue "released just before Returning the Gift, a historic Native writers’ conference held on the University of Oklahoma’s campus, the home of World Literature Today." Mish used that 1992 date as the start point for the works she collected for this feature, "to avoid creating categories and to reaffirm the impact of Returning the Gift, I solicited submissions from United States Native writers whose first book was published after the 1992 festival. Despite the simple, temporal structure of this approach, I believe the aesthetics and thematics Native scholars and writers have identified are clearly present in the work." A full list of contributors can be found here.
Twenty-five years later, Returning the Gift Literary Festival returns to Oklahoma University campus (October 8-11, 2017). For more information about the festival, visit here.
Issue 40:1 of the Missouri Review features winners of the 26th Jeffrey E. Smith Editor's Prize. Winning entries in each genre receive $500 and publication.
Fiction Winner
“Instructions to the Living from the Condition of the Dead” by Jason Brown of Eugene, OR
Poetry Winner
Karen Skolfield [pictured] of Amherst, MA
Nonfiction Winner
“Swarf” by Tyler Keevil of Abergavenny, UK
A full list of finalists and runners-up can be found here.
In his Spring 2017 Welcome Readers! section, Main Street Rag Publisher M. Scott Douglass offers readers a historical assessment of the publication's genre content. Having originally started as a poetry journal, Douglass says it was from the advice of Dana Gioia and others that he started publishing fiction and then later book reviews. Now, he says, with the Spring 2017 issue, "for the first time ever - the balance has been tipped in the favor of prose." He considers possible reasons for this, but the bottom line: "Main Street Rag needs poetry submissions. We need a lot of them. And we need them as soon as possible or the Summer issue may end up being a totally prose edition."Whatever you can do to help, readers. The publication DOES accept simultaneous submissions, Douglass assures - though the website may not yet reflect this change in policy. Writers can expect a reasonable report time, and, according to Douglass, a review by "a tougher poetry editor than we've ever had before. . . but that only makes the magazine better." MSR takes submissions via Submittable; there is a reading fee which is waived for subscribers.
Field Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Issue 96/Spring 2017 from Oberlin College Press features the unique "Self Portrait in Single-breasted Suit with Hare" by Sam Taylor-Wood (2001).
This work by Jody Hewgill on the cover of Kenyon Review draws readers in to the featured poetry theme for this May/June 2017 issue, "Nature's Nature."
The dramatic "Suffering" by Virginia Vilchis is the cover art for the Summer 2017 of Into the Void Arts and Literature from Dublin, Ireland - available in print and digital copy. 
Jelly Bucket, the literary magazine produced by students of the Eastern Kentucky University Bluegrass Writers Studio, has announced their 2017 contest winners:
Grand Prize Winner:
Marianne Peel, “Huckleberries and Homebrewed Boilo”
Fiction Winner
Emma Choi, “What Happened?”
Nonfiction Winner
JC Lee, “Abbatoir Blues”
Poetry Winner
Marianne Peel, “Huckleberries and Homebrewed Boilo”
Fiction Runner-Up
Elizabeth Burton, “Blood Moon”
Nonfiction Runner-Up
Lynn Casteel Harper, “The Meaning of Sovereignty”
Poetry Runner-Up
Amanda Chiado, “Plummet”
Learn more about the winners and judges at the Jelly Bucket website.
Pick up a copy of the 2017 issue of The Briar Cliff Review to check out the winners of their annual contest (which—mark your calendars—opens for submissions every August): Fiction
Daniel Paul, “The Last Sun of Kansas”
Nonfiction
Lisa Lanser Rose, “Christmas in the Bitch’s Dollhouse”
Poetry
Jude Nutter, “Ianua: 19 September, 2016”
[Cover art: Michael Crowley, “The Stacks in Long Hall, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland”]
The Spring 2017 issue of The Malahat Review, published in memory of Richard Wagamese, features the Open Season Award winners: Nonfiction
Matthew Hollett, “Kiki, Out of Focus”
Fiction
Rebecca Morris, “Foreign Bodies”
Poetry
Genevieve Lehr, “two tarantulas appear in the doorway during a thunderstorm”
Click the writers’ names above to check out interviews with each on The Malahat Review’s website.
[Cover art: Walter Scott, “Private Eyes”]
Three Percent Podcast is now expanding from their weekly(ish) episodes to include weekly Two Month Review mini-episodes. Each season of the new mini-episode series will highlight a different Open Letter book, reading it over the course of eight to nine episodes. Rotating guests will join host Chad W. Post, using the reading selection as a springboard for further discussion on literature, pop culture, reading approaches, and more.
Two Month Review gives the feeling of a book club—weekly readings and discussions—but with an accessibility that doesn’t require listeners to read along. For listeners that do want to read along, Open Letter has set up a Goodreads group and is currently offering 20% off two titles (with code 2MONTH at checkout) that will be discussed: The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán and Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson.
All episodes of Two Month Review will be available from the same iTunes playlist Three Percent uses, and listeners can also check out the introduction episode here.
Les Figues Press held their NOS Book Contest every year from 2011-2015, awarding $1,000 and publication to a writer of a poetry or prose manuscript, which includes lyric essays, hybrids, translations, and more.
The 2015 contest was judged by author and performance artist lê thi diem thúy, who chose Irradiated Cities by Mariko Nagai. She says of her selection:
This book, a sifting and circling, a calm and masterful layering of voices and vantage points, a slowly emerging portrait of four different Japanese cities and their inhabitants, resists any effort at arrivals or conclusions. By doing so, it shows us that while we may have an accumulation of facts for what happened on a particular day in a particular place, perhaps even the names and words and pictures of the people to whom catastrophe struck, and would not let go, it is within the dark sedimentation and the feather-light drift of history that we might glean what yet remains, and gives off light, to summon and trouble us still.Nagai explores the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. With lyrical fragments and black-and-white photographs, Nagai guides us through loss, silence, echo, devestation, and memory, creating a haunting piece of work.
Read through advance praise of the collection and order a copy for yourself at the Les Figues Press website.
At the end of April, Arte Publico Press released a two-volume collection from Rolando Hinojosa. From Klail City to Korea with Love contains Rites and Witnesses and Korean Love Songs from the Klail City Death Trip Series.
In Rites and Witnesses, the author “captures the complex relationships and unsettling power struggles in both civilian and military life.”
Korean Love Songs has long been out of print, first published in 1978. In this section, Hinojosa presents his only poetry book, capturing the horror of war through Klail City native Corporal Rafe Buenrostro’s recollections.
Rolando Hinojosa is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Casa de las Américas prize in 1976, the most prestigious prize in Latin America. Now readers can bring home two of his books in one collection, continuing the examination of life along the border.
Learn more about From Klail City to Korea with Love at the publisher’s website.
Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine is "an online lit mag where artists of word and image explore the ephemeral boundary between human and animal." Each month, Animal publishes one story, one poem, and one essay, and for each, there is an accompanying "cover art" image. The Cover Art page on Animal is a collection of truly amazing and stunning artwork that will have viewers on a slow scroll to contemplate and enjoy each piece. 
Art is at the center of Reverberations, a digital publication of writing that “investigates the way that art echoes beyond itself and interacts with ourselves,” says Editor Linne Halpren. Editor Sage Marshall adds, “Art is often created in response to something else, and our thoughts on art are further reverberations.” 
Southern Humanities Review has been published fiction, poetry, and essays quarterly from the Department of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama since 1967. The newest double issue (Vol 50.3&4) marks their 50th Anniversary, and features the essay winner of The Hoepfner Literary Award “Time, Sight, Orbs, Memory” by Megan Kerns. Fiction winner “Landfall: A Novella” by Michael Knight and poetry winner “Epithalamium” by Brandon Amico appeared in Vol 50.1&2. Full text and excepts from the winning works can be read here. 
The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes 12 emerging fiction writers for their debut story published online or in a literary magazine during the calendar year. The twelve winners each receive $2000 and are to be compilated in the inaugural anthology published by Catapult in August 2017.
This year’s winners were chosen by judges Kelly Link, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Nina McConigley, and together “they act as a compass for contemporary literature; they tell us where we’re going.” Each piece is introduced by the editor who originally published the story, providing editorial insight to aspiring writers and curious readers.
The 2017 winning writers include: Angela Ajayi, Amber Caron, Emily Chammah, Jim Cole, Crystal Hana Kim, Samuel Clare Knights, Katherine Magyarody, Grace Oluseyi, Laura Chow Reeve, Amy Sauber, Ruth Serven, and Ben Shattuck.
Learn more about the prize, the judges, the honorees, and the journals at the PEN America website, and pre-order your copy from the Catapult website.
Saturday is the day! April 29 is the 4th Annual Independent Bookstore Day. Indie bookstores across the United States are gearing up to celebrate with exclusive items, literary activities, readings, author signings, giveaways, and more this upcoming Saturday.
Find a great indie bookstore in your area on the NewPages Guide to Independent Bookstores and show your support.
The Wallace Stevens Journal Editors Steven Gould Axelrod and Natalie Gerber introduce readers to the Spring 2017 special issue feature Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost: A Reconsideration with these words: "One of the well-worn ironies of epoch-fashioning in literature is its tendency to position literary oeuvres in ways that serve the need for distinction and contrast without attesting to the surprising overlaps and conjunctions that exist in the lives and careers of the era’s foremost practitioners. This, in a sentence, is the story of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, two modernist American poets who have emerged—more so than most of their peers—at opposite ends of the modernist spectrum."For a full list of contents, click here. Those with access to the journal through Project Muse can read full text; others can read the beginning portions of each entry.
When he sought to name his newly envisioned academic journal for high school writers, Theodore Bass said the word ‘curious’ embodied what he wanted to do with the publication. In French, the word is ‘curieux,’ which Bass thought had a nicer ring to it. Thus, Curieux Academic Journal was christened. 
Nightboat Books publishes the winners of the annual Nightboat Poetry Prize, the 2015 winner to be released next month: No Dictionary of a Living Tongue by Duriel E. Harris. Judge Kazim Ali says of the poetry collection:
No Dictionary of a Living Tongue is formidable in its explorations of art, citizenship, and life as a body amid the social, political, and electronic networks that define us, hold us together, bind us. [ . . . ] An elegant use of sound couples with a keen and roving intelligence and a fierce commitment to social justice to create a unique and powerful collection of poems.
Paging through the poetry collection, I was struck by the variety in forms, visually arresting before even reading the content. I was especially drawn to the fold-out poem “Danger, Live Feed” on pages 69-70, which warrants tearing out and framing (if the idea of tearing apart a book doesn’t make you cringe, that is).
Check out the Nighboat Books website for more insight into Harris’s No Dictionary of a Living Tongue, where you will also find a PDF preview and a link to order from SPD.
In Poet Lore's Spring/Summer 2017 feature World Poets in Translation, Hodna Nuernberg translates Togolese poet Anas Atakora. Nuernberg introduces the poet, "Atakora writes in a French that is simultaneously limpid and roiled by the undercurrents of Kotokoli, his mother tongue. . . Atakora's genius lies in his ability to draw inspiration from this duality, creating a poetic voice that plays with oppositions as he develops a personal lyricism rich with polyphony and intertextuality."Nuernberg goes on to explain, "Atakora considers himself to be among the third generation of Francophone Togolese poets, tracing his lineage back to the neo-Négritude writers of the 1960s and 70s. The content-driven and politically engaged writing that characterized the work of the neo-Négritude writers is tempered in Atakora's work by his interest in stylistic invention and by his commitment to liberating poetic language from formal constraints, a sensibility he shares with writers of the second generation, who came of age during the cultural renewal of the 1990s."
Poet Lore Spring/Summer 2017 is available for single issue purchase in the NewPages Webstore.
Winner
Kate Keleher, “Sweater“
Runners-up
Addison Namnoum, “Bozeman, Montana”
Genevieve Plunkett, “The Buried Man”
Debbie Vance, “Girl Doll”
[Cover art: Gary Petersen, "Slip Stream 2"]
Recently chosen as a NewPages Editor’s Pick, Inside My Pencil by Peter Markus (Dzanc Books, March 2017) recounts poetry lessons taught to children in Detroit public schools. Markus, an award-winning writer and a writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit, sees the magic children hold inside their pencils and shares it with readers in this nonfiction book.
We start with Markus on his first day in the schools and then continue on to read his lessons on similes, metaphor, on the verb to be, the power of imagination. In prose that is poetic in itself, he brings us into the classroom and feeds us lines his students came up with in response. The creativity and imagination of the kids is a joy to read. In one chapter they define what beauty is, and in another, they turn love into metaphors, each line a beautiful display of the magic inside their pencils.
Inside my Pencil is available from the Dzanc Books website where readers can learn more.
The Santa Fe Writers Project hosts their Literary Awards Program each year since 2000. At the beginning of April, they published the 2015 grand prize winner: Magic for Unlucky Girls by A.A. Balaskovits. Selected by Emily St. John Mandel, the winning short story collection retells traditional fairy tales, taking familiar tropes and weaving them into modern stories of horror and hope.
From the publisher’s website:
From carnivorous husbands to a bath of lemons to whirling basements that drive people mad, these stories are about the demons that lurk in the corners and the women who refuse to submit to them, instead fighting back . . .
Find out more about Magic for Unlucky Girls at the SFWP website, where readers can order copies, check out the author’s website, and stop by the Awards Program page, submissions currently open until the tail end of July.
The Spring 2017 issue of Boulevard (vol. 32 nos. 2 & 3) features the winner of their 2016 Boulevard Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets. Contest Judge Edward Nobles selected the works of Stacey Walker, who received $1000 and publication of her three poems, "Reading the Signals," "Pockets," and "Grace in War." Honorable mentions went to Hannah Leisman and Craig Van Rooyen. (Cover art: Fafal Olbinski, The Eye of the Medusa, 2017) 