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Regional Writing in New Mag Issues

Want to check out some work by writers from specific regions? Three recent literary magazine issues have you covered.

The Common‘s 21st issue includes a feature on Arabic Stories from Morocco. In this section is translated writing and art from the Hindiyeh Museum of Art by Latifa Labsir, Fatima Zohra Rghioui, Mohamed Zafzaf, and more.

Volume 42 Number 1 of New England Review‘s translation feature is “From Granma to Boston and Havana and Back: Cuban Literature Today.” Here, find work by Víctor Fowler Calzada, Jorge Enrique Lage, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, and others.

And from within the United States, Rattle‘s Summer 2021 issue features twenty-two Appalachian poets. Among these are Ace Boggess, Mitzi Doton, Kari Gunter-Seymour, Raymond Hammond, Elaine Fowler Palencia, and more.

Unclassifiable Content in Arts & Letters

In the table of contents of Arts & Letters latest issue, the heading “Unclassifiable” caught my eye, promising a walk off the beaten path. This section features the winner of the journal’s annual Unclassifiable Contest.

When I paged to this winning piece—”Voidopolis” by Kat Mustatea—I was greeted with a series of photos with accompanying text. This excerpt is from a project Mustatea began on an Instagram page, loosely retelling Dante’s Inferno. Throughout this 46-part series, Mustatea never uses words with the letter “E.” This combined with the format of the photo-sharing app gave me a burst of inspiration to try new things and to challenge myself while doing it.

There is just enough included in the issue to hook the reader along and lead them to check out the rest of the story on Mustatea’s Instagram. The project has ended, so there’s no wait for new readers to reach the conclusion. Step away from the usual, the classifiable, and check out this piece in the Spring 2021 issue of Arts & Letters.

EVENT’s 2020 Non-Fiction Contest Winners

Find the winners of EVENT‘s 2020 Non-Fiction Contest in their latest issue.

First Place
“Our Lives” by Alexis Pooley

Second Place
“Differences” by Madeline Sonik

Third Place
“Sea Monsters Revealed” by Adrienne Gruber

Judge Madhur Anand introduces the winners with an essay on judging nonfiction. Print and digital copies of this issue are available at EVENT‘s website.

Sou’wester – Spring 2021

In this issue of Sou’wester, find fiction by Karin Aurino, Joe Baumann, Matthew Bruce, Bryana Fern, Rachel Furey, Justin Herrmann, Siew David Hii, Mehdi M. Kashani, Kate LaDew, Nathan Alling Long, Lope López de Miguel, Fejiro Okifo, R.S. Powers, Katie Jean Shinkle, Noel Sloboda, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, Samantah Steiner, Matthew Sullivan, and Tina Tocco; and nonfiction by Martha Phelan Hayes, Louise Krug, and Cynthia Singerman.

Rattle – Summer 2021

The Summer 2021 issue of Rattle features a tribute to Appalachian Poets. The 22 poets in this special section write about family, history, and modern life. The tribute section was so good, we had to stretch the issue to 124 pages to fit it all in. In the open section, the poems are as strong as ever, featuring reader favorites Francesca Bell and Ted Kooser, along with several excellent poets new to Rattle’s pages, writing about everything from sexual desire to cancer, big foot to peeing in the pool, including a long poem from Clemonce Heard on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.

EVENT – Spring Summer 2021

EVENT’s latest Non-Fiction Contest Issue is here, featuring the three 2020 winning essays, and an exciting assortment of poetry, fiction and reviews to keep you entertained. Work by Alexis Pooley, Madeline Sonik, Adrienne Gruber, David Zieroth, Malgosia Halliop, David Ishaya Osu, James Pollock, Jade Riordan, and more. Read more at the EVENT website.

Boulevard’s 2020 Winning Emerging Writers

The Spring 2021 issue of Boulevard features the winner of the 2020 Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers and the winner of the 2020 Poetry Contest for Emerging Writers.

2020 Poetry Contest for Emerging Writers
Winner
“Black Zombi” by Bryan Byrdlong

Honorable Mentions
Esther Ra
Calvin Walds
Christine Robbins

2020 Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers
Winner
“The King’s Game” by Jonathan Wei

Runner-up
“Six Articles for Survival” by Laura Joyce-Hubbard

Grab a copy of the issue or check out these pieces on the journal’s website.

The Lake

The June issue of The Lake is now online featuring Estaban Allard-Valdivieso, Georgi Bailey, Daisy Bassen, Sylvia Freeman, Neil Fulwood, Margaret Galvin, Maren O. Mitchell, Fiona Sinclair, J. R. Solonche, Richard Allen Taylor, Damaris West, Sarah White, Rodney Wood.

Boulevard – Spring 2021

The Spring 2021 edition of Boulevard is now available with winning poems from the 2020 Poetry Contest by Bryan Byrdlong, the winning essay from the 2020 Nonfiction Contest by Jonathan Wei, and a craft interview with Emily St. John Mandel. New poetry by Adrian Matejka, Adedayo Agarau, JD Amick, Clare Banks, Lory Bedikian, Ava C. Cipri, Laura Davenport, Kwame Dawes, Rosalind Guy, Rachael Hershon, Lisa Low, Jane Morton, and more.

Camille T. Dungy Interviewed in The Missouri Review

The Missouri Review always has plenty to offer readers. Aside from the usual poetry and prose, there are art features, a “curio cabinet” feature, and an interview. In the Spring 2021 issue, Jacob Griffin Hall interviews poet, essayist, professor, and editor Camille T. Dungy. The two discuss everything from types of research to environmental writing to poetic beginnings. There is plenty to take away from this interview, but what I enjoyed most was the portion on “experiential research,” excerpted here:

HALL: In an interview with Arkana, you talk about “experiential research”—”Listening to the world, paying attention, watching and looking” is just as important as, say, digging into archives. What habits or practices do you have that help you be attentive to the world around you?

DUNGY: Ha. It’s not a habit or practice. It’s a way of life. I suppose it could be taught. I suppose we all have to learn to slow down and pay better and different attention from time to time. But I also think that an artist, a writer, must look at the world more attentively, more closely, more patiently and carefully than people who are not artists tend to look. It’s just how I move through the world. I can stop and hear myself thinking if I want to, but I am always thinking in this way. “How would I describe the color of that grass?” “Oh, look, that rabbit has a bit of russet on its scruff.” “I wonder when they first release Subarus in the US?” “Do you think that woman’s eyes are naturally gray? Those are all questions I asked out loud or in my head today.

Touch-Starved Poetry

Magazine Review by Katy Haas.

In Volume 33 of The Briar Cliff Review, readers can find a poem that I think most people can relate to after the past year. “Gargoyles” by Sara Wallace describes the empty of feeling of craving someone else’s touch. While the poem does lean toward the romantic side of touch (“No one’s biting your lips, / no one’s tasting you.), it comes at a time when I’m seeing my friends celebrate the ability to hug their loved ones again after, and ends up feeling more general. After being separated from friends and family during the pandemic, who hasn’t missed the intimacy of touch?

Wallace carries the idea of gargoyles through the poem, first as a smoker standing in a doorway of a bodega, and finally as the game “statues, / how when you were tagged // you had to pretend you were stone,” and could only move again when “someone touched you.” I love this thread she carries through from present to past, keeping with that yearning for physical touch.

“Gargoyles” by Sara Wallace. The Briar Cliff Review, 2021.

Plume – May 2021

This month’s Plume featured selection is “Five Contemporary Love Songs edited by Leeya Mehta,” with work by five contemporary Indian poets: Tishani Doshi, Rajiv Mohabir, Jerry Pinto, Arundhathi Subramaniam, and Jeet Thayil. Chelsea Wagenaar reviews Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort. In nonfiction: “The Mind’s Meander: Indirection, Ambiguity, and Association in Poetry” by Rachel Hadas.

Cimarron Review – Fall 2020

In this issue of Cimarron Review: poetry by Ken Autrey, Martha Silano, Sandra McPherson, Daniel Bourne, Erin McIntosh, George Bilgere, Annie Christian, Rebecca Cross, Chloe Hanson, Austen Leah Rose, Millie Tullis, Avra Wing, Amy Bagan, and more; fiction by Jason K. Friedman, Laura Dzubay, David Philip Mullins, and Ashley Clarke; and nonfiction by Brenna Womer, Andrew Johnson, and Lindsay Shen.

Anomaly – No 32

Our new issue, ANMLY #32, features a special folio Neighbor Species and Shared Futures curated by Kristine Ong Muslim. Featuring work in various genres from Tilde Acuña, Richard Calayeg Cornelio, Reil Benedict Obinque, Regine Cabato, Pedantic Pedestrians, Melvin Clemente Magsanoc, and more. See what else you can expect to find in this issue at the Anomaly website.

New Site for Creative Nonfiction

Have you heard the news? The Creative Nonfiction Foundation, home of literary magazine Creative Nonfiction, has a newly designed website! This is the first redesign in ten years. Now on the site, almost everything from the journal’s 27-year archive is now available to subscribers. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up now to ensure you’ll receive the 76th issue which will explain how the genre of creative nonfiction was established, how it’s changed over the years, and where it may go next.

Take some time this weekend to familiarize yourself with the new website!

The Main Street Rag – Spring 2021

The Spring 2021 issue features Postscript to a Postscript: an interview with Bill Glose, Winner of the 2020 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, interviewed by M. Scott Douglass. Fiction by Abe Aamidor, Allison Daniel, Tony Hozeny, Michele Lovell, Bob Moskowitz, Robert Stone and poetry by Bill Glose, Joan Bauer, Frederick W. Bassett, Joan Bernard, Burt Beckmann, Ace Boggess, Marion Starling Boyer, and more.

Carve Magazine – Spring 2021

The Spring 2021 issue features short stories by and interviews with Sydney Rende, Sam White, Kimm Brockett Stammen, and Caroline Kim. New poetry by Michael Quinn, Ruth Baumann, Will Thomas, and Mureall Hebert and nonfiction by Jory Pomeranz and Christie Tate. Prose & Poetry Contest winners: Mona’a Malik, Ryan Little, and Alisha Acquaye. Read more at the Carve website.

New Lit Mags added to the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines in April 2021

Back from hiatus, Agave Magazine is a print publication showcasing contemporary art, literature, and photography for a modern readership. Ideal submissions develop subjects thoroughly giving us all the essentials—no more, no less. From editorial pieces to mixed genre, their contributors share insights on their creative processes alongside published pieces.

Founded in 2020, Coastal Shelf is a quarterly online literary magazine. Contemporary and eclectic, they crave close attention paid to language and a ‘larger takeaway’/analysis given to the events/themes. They love pieces with wittiness (but not light verse), quirkiness and layers. They also dig interesting uses of history and science.

The Lascaux Review, pronounced Las-coe, features fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction of literary quality. Lascaux has published work by Philip Appleman, Hélène Cardona, Joseph Fasano, Tony Hoagland, Lee Martin, Maggie Smith, Robley Wilson, and many other poets and writers. Annual contests are conducted in poetry, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and short fiction.

Founded in 2017, MoonPark Review is a quarterly online journal publishing compelling, imaginative short prose, including flash (fiction/nonfiction) and prose poetry. Thirteen prose pieces (or thirteen writers) are featured each quarter, accompanied with original illustrations.

Nixes Mate is unafraid of punctuation; semicolons don’t frighten them. Not even a little bit. Since 2016, they have been featuring small-batch artisanal literature, created by writers who use all 26 letters of the alphabet, and then some. There are many paths to poetry. Walk with them one line at a time.

Okay Donkey likes the odd, the off-kilter, and the just plain weird. They also like the surreal, experimental, and the genre-bending. They strive to uplift and amplify underrepresented voices and always strongly encourage BIPOC and LGBT+ folks to submit their work.

Also added are print literary magazine Bacopa Literary Review, Blue Collar Review, Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry, Walloon Writers Review, and Workers Write! and online journals Decolonial Passage, Flare Journal, and WhimsicalPoet/WhimsicalArt.

Don’t forget to stop by our Guide to Literary Magazines to see the newly updated listings and remember we also have our Big List with even more journals!

Creative Nonfiction – No. 75

This milestone issue features some of our favorite prizewinning essays. These curious, beautiful, nuanced stories about everything from surviving lightning strikes to the relief of solving medical mysteries consider the many perils, as well as the tremendous power, of living in a body. See what else the issue has in store for you at the Creative Nonfiction website.

About Place Journal – May 2021

“Geographies of Justice,” edited by Alexis Lathem with Richard Cambridge and Charles Coe. An extraordinary testament to extraordinary times: includes poetry from Susan Deer Cloud, Tammy Melody Gomez, Richard Hoffmann, Jacqueline Johnson, Petra Kuppers, and Danielle Wolffe; nonfiction from Teow Lim Goh, Andréana Elise Lefton, David Mura, Nicole Walker, and Catherine Young. Find more contributors at the About Place Journal website.

The Necessity of Human Myth

Guest Post by Adrian Thomson.

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s “The Boy Who Drew Cats” speaks both to our current time and to the necessity of human myth. Confined to a house in Uruguay as her children face quarantine in Japan, Kercheval connects to the hero of a Japanese fable, the titular drawer of cats, in an attempt to find solace within herself through her own artistic ventures.

This connection to cultural myth—and Kercheval does cement her own tale very concretely to the modern as well as the mythical—inspires the author in its assertions of safety, balance, and a sense of stability. The myth helps her recapture her own love of art and facilitates a return to  the page where flowers transform into felines. Kercheval does not uphold the myth as a perfect guideline, either—she comments upon it, accepting the good she sees there while acknowledging elements she appears to dislike.

But her inclusion of the fable also speaks to the wider purpose of human myth—as a necessity of the imagination to allow us to “visit” faraway places and to inspire. Kercheval places both within the story to generate trust that the world will get better, as well as trust in her own abilities.

“The Boy Who Drew Cats” by Jesse Lee Kercheval. Brevity, January 2021.

Reviewer bio: Adrian Thomson is a graduate student at Utah State University, currently working toward his MS by way of a thesis in poetry.

New Letters Volume 87 Numbers 1 & 2

woman looking at a poster for a ballet performanceLiterary magazine New Letters publishes two double issues a year in print. Their Winter/Spring 2021 issue is now available for purchase and features fiction by Blair Hurley, Robert P. Kaye, Kirstin Scott, Anthony Varallo, and Leslie Blanco; essays by Carolina Avarado Molk, Emily Howorth, and Michaela Django Walsh; and poetry by Rebecca Foust, Jennifer Perrine, D.S. Waldman, Ted Kooser, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Liane Strauss.

Also in this issue find the winners of their annual literary awards!

  • “Indigent” by Elizabeth Robinson, winner of the Editor’s Choice Award
  • Two poems by Mark Wagenaar, winner of the Patricia Clearly Miller Award for Poetry
  • “Lobu Hoteru” by Jacob R. Weber, winner of the Robert Day Award for Fiction
  • “Joan” by Rebecca Young, winner of the Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction

Their current awards in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction are open to entries through midnight CST on May 18! Check out the 2020 winners and don’t forget to pick up this issue and support the journal by subscribing!

Magazine Stand :: Wordrunner eChapbooks – 2021

Our theme for this issue is LOVE in all its painful, confusing, passionate, and joyous diversity. Featuring fiction by Louise Blalock, Margaret Emma Brandl, Ed Davis, Stefan Kiesbye, and Nick Sweeney; memoir by Jane Boch, Ruth Askew Brelsford, Laura Foxworthy, and Carmela Delia Lanza; and poetry and prose poems by Leonore Hildebrandt, Robert Murray, and Jacalyn Shelley.

Raleigh Review – Spring 2021

This issue features the winners of the Flash Fiction & Geri Digiorno Contests. New flash fiction from Frank X. Christmas, Andrea Eberly, Amina Gautier, Katherine Hubbard, Alana Reynolds, and Nicholas A. White. New poetry by Julia C. Alter, Melissa Boston, Jessica Dionne, Chelsea Harlan, and more. Find more contributors at the Raleigh Review website.

At the Intersection of Religion & Generational Conflict

Guest Post by Madeline Thomas.

When a combination of a Catholic upbringing and the unforgettable viewing of a commercial for The Exorcist sends a young girl’s mind to the inevitability of a personal demon possession, the first steps are taken on a path to parental disappointment. Jessica Power Braun’s “Black Alpaca” places readers at the intersection of religion, generational conflict, and closet-Jesus nightmares with sharp humor and unflinching honesty.

The essay, published in Hippocampus Magazine, works through the realities of fear and guilt in the Catholic Church, the slow movement away from your family’s religious identity, and the discovery of a poignant black alpaca painting in the context of Braun’s identities as a mother, wife, and daughter. Humor forms the heart of the piece, but the essay makes no attempt to pull away from what is both painful and real—forming a balance that cultivates both emotional impact and investment for readers.

In a time where I feel the need for constant breaks from the mire of news and the world in general, the humor and tone present in “Black Alpaca” provides needed relief. Braun utilizes her power in storytelling to craft something worth connecting with.

“Black Alpaca” by Jessica Power Braun. Hippocampus Magazine, January 2021.

Reviewer bio: Madeline Thomas is a graduate student and writer at Utah State University.

Join Poor Yorick for Their Monthly Reading Series

skull on black and pink backgroundPoor Yorick is continuing their monthly reading series with a virtual open mic and fireside chat! This event features a sneak preview of upcoming special issue in honor of National Poetry Month, “The Poet’s Mask.” Several contributors will present their work on the theme of masks and masking on April 29.

Contact Brianna Paris ([email protected]) for a Microsoft Teams invitation.

“The Poet’s Mask” will be published on Friday, April 30 on Poor Yorick‘s website.

This event is brought to you by the editorial team at Poor Yorick: A Journal of Rediscovery, which is the online literary publication of Western Connecticut State University’s M.F.A. Program. The journal publishes poems, stories, essays, photo essays, and other innovative works about rediscovery, the lost and the found—what we bury, and what we dig up. The editor will be on hand at the open mic to talk submissions, too; if this sounds like your kind of publication, contact us!

Sponsor Spotlight :: Neon: A Literary Magazine

black and white photograph looking up at a wind turbineNeon: A Literary Magazine is a tiny biannual journal and chapbook press. It is one of the longest-running independent literary magazines in the UK which focuses on slipstream fiction, poetry, and artwork. They publish work that is fantastical, surreal, and which crosses the boundaries between science fiction, horror, and literary fiction.

Neon publishes in print and a range of digital formats. They allow you to set your own price for a digital copy. When you purchase a print subscription (they ship to anywhere in the world!), you can addon on of their chapbooks, too. Subscribe today!

Plus, if you’re a writer, Neon is currently open to submissions. The theme of the next issue will be “Cities.” They are a paying market.

Drop by their listing on NewPages to learn more.

West Trade Review Volume 12 Available for Preorder

West Trade Review Volume 12 cover

West Trade Review, formerly Encore Literary Arts Magazine, is accepting preorders for its 12th print issue due out in May of this year.

This issue features fiction by Sophie Nau, Reshmi Hebbar, Lex Chilson; poetry by Mercury-Marvin Sunderland, Tesa Flores, Hunter Boone, Stephanie Dickinson; plus art, interviews, and reviews. Check out their preview and don’t forget to order a copy today.

Plus, don’t forget to swing by their listing on NewPages to learn more about them.