Home » Newpages Blog » Cutthroat

March 2023 eLitPak :: CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS

Screenshot of Cutthroat's Climate Crisis Anthology flyer for the NewPages eLitPak newsletter
click image to open flyer

CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS announces a 357-page anthology of poetry and prose devoted to the climate crisis featuring work by Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, J. Drew Lanham, Linda Hogan, Luis Alberto Urrea, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Patricia Spears Jones, Lidia Yuknavich, Cynthia Hogue, Jesse Tsinijinnie Maloney, Alice Zheng, Richard Jackson and more. Purchase at our website. Profits donated to Endangered Species Preservation.

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.

Interested in advertising in the eLitPak? Learn more here.

Sponsor Spotlight: Cutthroat

Have you visited Cutthroat lately? They publish an online edition and an annual print anthology with high-quality poetry and prose with an edge.

They offer three awards every years: the Joy Harjo Poetry Award, the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award, and the Barry Lopez Nonfiction Award which open for submissions in August.

Readers can look forward to Issue 25 which will drop sometime this month. You can learn more about Cutthroat and their past contributors at their listing on our website.

Cutthroat Mentoring

Cutthroat Literary Magazine offers month-long and six-week-long one-on-one mentorships in a number of genres. “This is much cheaper than a writers conference or a writing program,” the magazine touts, with a refundable fee if the mentor fails to fulfill his/her contract. The mentorships include submitting work, getting close read feedback (“extensive written critical comments and suggestions”), and being able to interact via e-mail within each week of the mentorship to ask questions and submit new works or resubmit revised works. Visit the Cutthroat website to read more specifics, inlcluding fees. The writing mentors include:

POETRY: Patricia Smith, Richard Jackson, Joy Harjo, Pam Uschuk, Doug Anderson, Marilyn Kallet, Annie Finch, William Pitt Root

 

SHORT STORY: Donley Watt, Lorian Hemingway, Darlin’ Neal, William Luvaas, Melissa Pritchard, Beth Alvarado

MEMOIR: Joy Harjo, Doug Anderson, Beth Alvarado

MIXED GENRE: Sean Thomas Dougherty

ESSAYS: Linda Hogan

NOVEL: Donley Watt

SCREENPLAY: Steve Barancik

CUTTHROAT’s Online Only Issue

What’s the issue with CUTTHROAT‘s online only issue? I posed a few questions to Pamela Uschuk, editor-in-chief, about why, the decision-making behind this, and what it might indicate for the future of CUTTHROAT (does going online mean no more print?). Her resonse gives some great insight into how a magazine is run and all the behind-the-scenes people and work required to maintain a quality publication. Here’s her response:

“I can tell you why we made the decision to publish one online edition and one print edition per year. The reason is mainly monetary, but there are side issues worth discussing.

CUTTHROAT is largely unfunded, so Bill Root and I pay to publish this magazine. We receive so many worthy submissions in poetry and short fiction, we felt that printing one issue a year didn’t allow us to publish enough of these wonderful submissions.

CUTTHROAT is truly a labor of love.

None of our editors/staff is paid – except for the judges we hire to judge our national literary prizes. All work is volunteer, and our editors work hard, reading through a mountain of material for each issue.

For the present, we decided that the best option for us is to publish one print edition (this past year’s issue ran to 180 pages!), and to publish one online edition per year. Because we don’t have to pay for reproduction of art work inside the magazine, this online edition allows us to feature visual artists as well as writers.

We choose one guest fiction editor each year to edit the online fiction submissions. This year’s guest editor was William Luvaas. Our poetry editor, William Pitt Root, edits for both online and print editions each year.

The future of CUTTHROAT is bright. We are all committed to publishing this magazine for the long term. We are old-fashioned and love the feel of the print edition in our hands, so we have no plans to to to an entirely online format. We are lucky, each year, to have interns to help us out with logging in submissions, creating data bases, mailings, etc. We also have two terrific web designers, Laura Prendergast and Kevin Watson, who help me maintain our website and set up the magazines.”

Volumes 3 and 5 of CUTTHROAT are available online in PDF format.

Cutthroat – Spring 2006

Cutthroat logo

A cutthroat is a kind of trout — and this must surely be what the journal’s name refers to, given the beautiful painting by Albert Kogel, “Rush Hour Fish,” on the cover—although it’s hard not to think first of its better known connotations (a murderer or someone who is a ruthless competitor). So, it seems fitting that the poetry and fiction in this journal tend to tackle what I’d call “big, serious themes”: the war in Iraq, the incidents of 9/11, the aftermath of major illness, literacy, Vietnamese war orphans, the effects of the one-child law in China, the violence at Columbine high school, child abuse. “Cutthroat Discovery Poet” Elizabeth Gordon’s work is characteristic of the journal’s predilections in terms of subject matter, though her style is more conversational than much of the work presented here. My favorite of her six poems is “Game Over, President Tells Iraq”:

I remember my life like it never happened
the beautiful city of my birth
river city           colonial city      city of self-immolation
my parents’ lovemaking they slow groans of continents
the dog tags pressed between them
the copter hovered above them
slicing
the ghosts of my ancestors
smell of chemicals and refuse
diesel and perfume
fine candies melting on the tongue

There are plenty of stars in this issue, as well as worthy newcomers, including Joy Harjo and Rick DeMarinis (whose own work appears alongside the work of the poetry and fiction winners of awards in their names), Marvin Bell, Judith Barrington, Dorianne Laux, Kelly Cherry, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among others. Donley Watt’s fiction choices, stories by Tehila Lieberman and Pamela Hawthorne, are especially appealing. [www.cutthroatmag.com/]

Cutthroat Volume 1 Number 1, Spring 2006 reviewed by Sima Rabinowitz