At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
The newest issue of Ecotone: Reimagining Place literary magazine is themed “The Labor Issue,” and features Retablos de Imágenes y Memorias, 2022 by Perla Segovia on the cover as well as including a portfolio of his work inside the publication.
Ian Alam Sukarso’s artwork adorns the cover of Inch, a quarterly “focused on the miracles of compression” – a micro-chapbook featuring the work of a single author. Issue #56 spotlights Jarret Moseley’s Gratitude List.
Leanne E. Smith’s photo on the Spring 2024 cover of East Carolina University’s Tar River Poetry makes me wish I could be taking a meander down that road on a cool summer’s day.
Victim, Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, tells the story of Javi, a Puerto Rican living in the Bronx. He does well in school and, through a meeting with a college counselor who’s volunteering at his school, ends up at an elite college, unlike his best friend, Gio, whose life takes a different path. Through that meeting with the counselor, Javi’s life seems to follow a traditional path toward the American success story, but Javi’s means of achieving what he seeks is complicated.
As the title conveys, Javi presents himself as a victim, whether of oppression or violence or racism, embellishing the stories he writes, first for his college newspaper, then for a national magazine. On the one hand, Boryga is satirizing the cult of victimhood, the approach that argues that one should use their stories to evoke pity as a means of accomplishing some goal. However, the ideas that Javi learns in college about systemic racism and other forms of oppression are true, as readers can see in Javi and Gio’s lives.
Javi’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t struggle with real suffering; it’s that he seeks the approval of others, especially via social media, so much that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to obtain that approval. He doesn’t care about the problems he details in his writing; he only cares about himself. His audience is also partly responsible, as the more his stories follow the expected arc of racial and class progress and success, as long as they fit the narrative his audience already believes, the more successful he becomes. Boryga reminds his audience that stories are more complicated than they seem and where the problem lies isn’t as obvious as one might think.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrites
Before The King of Terrors was the title of Jim Johnstone’s 2023 poetry book, it was the title of a 1910 Sunday sermon preached by Henry Scott Holland, a 1977 horror novel written by Robert Bloch, and a 2022 horror film directed by Ryan Callaway. Like those before him, Johnstone’s poetry book regards death and its associates, madness and fear.
The poet’s approach is a meditative lyric, “a dream, into a song.” “Fear” is an anaphora, “leading by example” and “running free” throughout the poems. The particular fears have to do with what is “unseen”: “the virus” and “the tumour,” COVID-19 and meningioma. In “parallel / time,” global and personal health crises haunt Johnstone’s poems. In response, the poet seems to be prompted to accept Chronos, assisted by Derrida (“becoming / the always-already absent present”), and to confess to the “ghosts of former lovers.”
In the poem “The Darkroom,” among my favorites for its candor and heart, the poet finds “noun and verb” between apology and prayer to admit:
But I’ve said terrible things about those whose only mistake was that they weren’t me, didn’t show up in the mirror where I stared and stared trying to make sure I was more and better, where my face would blur then realign as if hope could change the way my actions were perceived.
The intimate and “direct nature of [the poet’s] address” in this poem and throughout the book takes the reader into his confidence and illuminates the “interstitial space,” “hovering between two ways”—between “instinct” and “change,” “fragment” and “renunciation,” “a liar” and “a lyre.” In The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone offers readers poems for the uncertain time we “inhabit” “between / age and agency.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
“Addicted to Love” is the theme of Blink Ink #56, “The gold standard for microfiction” featuring stories of approximately 50 words. Not platonic, familial, or devotional, this is the rascal love where your heart sweats and you lose your mind. The world well lost for lust. Dreaming days followed by sleepless nights. A special someone, or just playing with the idea, the feeling.
In Permission to Relax, Sheila E. Murphy vibrates as “Speaker. Language. Mirror.” Murphy’s poems are equally at home at “bake sales” as they are at a “Chaplin festival.” These two locales suggest the compositionally quirky, philosophically comic, and politically potent characteristics of Murphy’s cultural critique that “upends the platitudes.” The poet points out life’s absurdities, relationship tensions, and communication difficulties: “North of probability and vortices, a warm mind / rescues love from common sense.” “Fracture” “repeat[s] … sadness” in the background and foregrounds temporal anxiety: “In a minute, / it will be / tomorrow.”
Murphy’s “span of attention” ranges formally from prose to verse and the poet is equally adept at invented as received forms. The collection includes a “Hay(na)ku Sequence,” “Eight Ghazals,” and “Winter Pantoum.” Some poems act like “a letter with a question mark [slid] under [a] door.” Other poems are a “secret way of holding thought.” Whether “replete with souvenirs” or “homemade” baked goods, the poems of Permission to Relax make an “everworld … tingling.”
Reader, Reader, Sheila E. Murphy is a poet “whose pockets are filled / with permission slips” and “sprezzatura”!
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
Southern Humanities Review issue 57.2 features radioactive animals in “Wild Wild Wolves” and “Radiation Bestiary”; a photo-less photo essay of the George Floyd protests in “June 1, 2020: A Photo Essay”; shiny sharp new lives in “Alternative Lives with Teeth”; and a sense of peace, finally, in “Love Song in Someone Else’s Loblolly Stand” and “I Put Life on Hold.”
This issue also features poetry by Carson Colenbaugh, Patricia Davis, Elizabeth C. Garcia, Elisa A. Garza, Hua Qing, Liang Yujing, Heather Jessen, Thomas Kneeland, James Davis May, Matthew Nienow, Susan Rich, Angela Sorby, Lindsay Stewart, Laura Van Prooyen, and Ellen June Wright. Nonfiction contributors include Debra Dean and Maggie Nye. Fiction by Taylor De La Peña, Emily Greenberg, Svetlana Satchkova, and Gabriel Welsch. The cover, Holiday on the Hudson, 1912, is from George Luks (American, 1866-1933); The Cleveland Museum of Art; Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection. Some content can be read online, and individual copies, as well as subscriptions, are available on the Southern Humanities Reviewwebsite.
The Summer 2024 issue of Cool Beans Lit is themed “Deep Dive.” It showcases the work of both new and established authors and artists delving far into their past perspectives and comparing them to new views on what the future may hold in this realm or the next. The pieces in this issue are impactful and will long resonate with readers by triggering a wide range of emotions from deep pain and despair to humor in childhood reflections to honest takes on love and anguish.
Featured authors include Ace Boggess, Sara Eddy, James Roderick Burns, Kenneth Cupp and Jason Clemmons. Stunning photography and visual art by featured artists, like Katie Hughbanks, David A. Goodrum, Robb Kunz, Edward Lee, Amalia Costaldi and Victoria Mullen, is sure to awe and inspire readers. This issue rounds out the first full annual volume for Cool Beans Lit with more unique issues and themes to come.
In the close-knit community of Hentsbury, racism and the local paper mill’s oppressive control over the town collide in a gripping tale set in the 1990s in southern Arkansas along the fictional Mud River.
Rae-Ann, owner of a convenience store and unofficial mayor of Hentsbury, finds her life intertwined with Vernon’s when a budding romance between them hits an unexpected roadblock. Their love story takes an abrupt turn when chemicals from the mill’s runoff claim the life of Rincon, a young black boy battling acute asthma. In a harrowing failed rescue attempt, Vernon, the plant’s Environmental Officer, relives the trauma of holding the dying boy in his arms.
As the community grapples with this tragedy, Vernon stumbles upon a back-door deal between state and local officials who ask him to suppress critical information about the mill’s dangerous hydrogen sulfide emissions. With the rising tensions, Rae-Ann begins to question whether Vernon will stand by his principles.
In the end, it’s Rincon’s determined grandmother, along with Rae-Ann and her older sister, who rallies the town to take action. Their efforts lead to the arrival of an EPA investigatory team, but not without consequences. When the dust settles, Vernon loses his job, but he and Rae-Ann embark on a new chapter in life together.
The July 2024 issue of The Lake is now online featuring fresh new poetry by N. S. Boone, Chris Bullard, Mike Dillon, Philip Dunkerley, Bridgette James, Ted Jean, Bridget Khursheed, Annie Kissack, Faith Paulsen, Amanda L. Rioux. The Lake also features reviews of new poetry collections, with July spotlighting Karen An-hwei Lee’s The Beautiful Immunity, Stephen Cramer’s City Full of Fireworks & Blues, and Mark Vernon Thomas’s Dancing with Shadows and Stones. Unique to The Lake is “One Poem Review,” in which an author of a recently published book of poems shares a sample work with readers. Deirdre Hines is the featured poet for July.
In James Lindsay’s Only Insistence a new father to a son is in the throes of “involuntary / reflection” on his relationship with his parents: “What is authority / but anxiety.” The authority within Lindsay’s poems is a “witness” both “apprehensive” and “evasive.” He can tell readers his “mother died, but “can’t speak / as to why.” And, he confesses he doesn’t “know how to talk / about [his] biological father.” That’s personal, “the way life is personal” “and made up / of a terrifying sharpness.”
Sometimes it is easier “to describe the lake: … / the things that float on it / and the things that drown in it that make it what it is.” What is it? It is “the tiny histories that seed memory.”
Memory is both repetition and insistence, “wringing image to solid personal fact.” Here, “as he expresses himself // brutally but beautifully / in how honestly / he carries on,” Lindsay ensures “the Reader and writer / Have [the] kind of relationship” in which “language worked / / Because it was promised.”
Only Insistence by James Lindsay. Goose Lane Editions, September 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
The Shore Issue 22 sparks with sizzling poetry shimmering just in time for summer. Find new hot poetry by: John Gallaher, Ben Cooper, Susan Muth, Julia Kooi Talen, Kate Welsh, Brett Griffiths, Sarah Burke, Peter Herring, Ahana Chakraborty, Colleen Salisbury, CC Russell, Mary Morris, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Olivia Jacobson, Zeke Shomler, Alyssa Jewell, Liz Robbins, Emilee Kinney, Meghan Sterling, Lauren Mallett, Mark Majcher, Kelly Erin Gray, Naomi Madlock, Rachael Lyon, Elya Braden, Julia Lisella, Christopher Faunce, Amy Thatcher, Jeremy Rock, Meredith MacLeod Davidson, Ana Prundaru, Nathan Erwin, Jacob Schepers, Kathryn Merwin, Calista Malone, Carson Colenbaugh, Bryan D Price, Amanda Russell, Jo Snow, Rachel White, Rebekah M Rykiel and JB Kalf. This issue also features unforgettable art by Madeline Hernstrom-Hill.
Readers don’t have to have read the first book of Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters to understand what happens in book two, as she has enough exposition to bring the reader up to speed. However, reading the first installment (or re-reading it, if it’s been a while) will certainly enable the reader to avoid having to wonder about Karen’s relationship with her brother and her deceased neighbor, Anka, who appears through audiotapes she recorded.
Ferris presents the book as Karen’s sketches on notebook paper, and Karen portrays herself as a werewolf, mainly because she feels like a monster due to her romantic interest in other girls. She draws the world like a horror comic from the 1950s, as she sees the world as a treacherous place. Her brother Deeze seems to be an enforcer for a local mob boss, of sorts, and he may have even worse secrets in his past. Anka tried to rescue girls from the Holocaust, a real horror that Karen sketches based on the tapes.
Karen’s lack of knowledge forces the reader to draw conclusions from the limited information she has, embedding the reader in this world of terror. The artwork is amazing and immensely detailed and colored, which explains why it has taken seven years to get the second volume. While Karen lives in a monstrous world, it’s one that readers will want to live in, hoping that Karen can realize the humanity she exudes.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrites
Lisa Ko’s second novel follows three Asian-American women—Giselle, Ellen, and Jackie—who meet as teenagers, then remain close for the rest of their lives, though they see each other infrequently. Giselle becomes a performance artist, Ellen transforms a house she and others squatted into a type of communal living space, and Jackie revolutionizes the tech industry, careers and passions that seem far removed from one another.
However, they are all creators of some sort, even artists, though the world seems bent on preventing them from becoming so. They encounter sexism and misogyny, racism, and capitalist expectations, working together and separately to overcome (or simply thwart) those barriers and demands, to find success in their own ways. Ko moves the novel from the 1980s of their teenage years all the way to a future beyond their deaths to explore the ways in which they impact their world and how they become the women they need to be to survive and thrive in that world.
Underneath their different pursuits, they are all trying to answer the same questions that all artists are trying to answer, the questions Giselle knows an interviewer is really asking her: “HOW DO YOU LIVE (HOW DARE YOU LIVE) WHAT DO YOU DO (WHAT SHOULD WE DO) HOW DO WE LIVE HOW DO WE DIE WHAT DO WE NEED TO HEAR.”
Ko’s novel provides three different answers to those questions, but, more importantly, it asks the readers to find the answers in their lives.
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko. Riverhead Books, March 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
34 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
We hope you had a wonderful Fourth. Hopefully you have a few extra days to rest and relax before diving back into work. Read a good book, get some writing done, and maybe some submitting. NewPages has your back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
In word association, if I say “bus,” I’m sure “Greyhound” would be among the top responses, and it would be spot-on for introducing this new, history-oriented journal of text and audiovisual poetry and prose. Publishing biannually online with a regularly updated “Featured” column, The Greyhound Journal was originally created to open more spaces for literary dialogue revolving around history and to increase the accessibility of history through narrative. “Our founding mission,” the editors assert, “is to promote the exploration of history through creative work and literature.”
With eight bonus pages, the July 2024 issue of World Literature Today presents International Horror Fiction in Translation, guest-edited by Rachel Cordasco. The cover feature gathers stories by Junko Mase (Japan), C. E. Feiling (Argentina), Mahmoud Fikry (Egypt), and John Ajvide Lindqvist (Sweden), plus a reading list by Jess Nevins and online interview with Megan McDowell. Additional highlights include a conversation with 2024 Dublin Literary Award winner Mircea Cărtărescu; an essay on storytelling, sacrifice, and acts of love by Anna Badkhen; Gloria Blizzard’s “History of Canada” booklist; and Kim Stafford’s “Proclamation for Peace” poem in eight languages. The book review section rounds up the best new books from around the world, and additional interviews, poetry, and essays offer indispensable summer reading.
New England Review issue 45.2 includes the special feature “Where On Earth Did You Come From?’ — Seven South Korean Poets & Their Translators,” guest edited by Soje. Readers will also enjoy stirring prose by Lauren Acampora, Ben Miller, Iheoma Nwachukwu, and Cynthia R. Wallace; piercing poetry by David Joez Villaverde, Fay Dillof, Emily Pittinos, and Ayokunle Falomo; cover art by Fi Jae Lee, and so much more!
Sheila-Na-Gig Volume 8.4, Summer 2024 offers readers breadth and depth in well-crafted free verse poetry (and some forms!) with a spotlight on Editor’s Choice Award winner Shannon K. Winston. The volume includes lots of Sheila-Na-Gig’s frequent contributors in addition to a host of newcomers, including, Stefan Balan, Roderick Bates, Thomas Bolo, Sarah Browning, Rachel Aviva Burns, Zelda Cahill-Patten, Jim Daniels, DeWitt Henry, Linda Laderman, Isabel Cristina Legarda, Grace Massey, Richard Matta, Eric Nelson, JC Reilly, Claire Scott, Richard Allen Taylor, Gail Thomas, William Welch, and Kenton K. Yee.
Michael Harriot makes the point of Black AF History about as clear as he can in the title. The subtitle—The Un-Whitewashed Story of America—removes any remaining doubt. Some of the history will be familiar to most readers, though the angle Harriot takes won’t be. For example, when he refers to at least one elected official as a serial killer, what he means is that they were an active member in the KKK. He wants readers to see what they think they already know for the reality that it actually is: leaders in the KKK killed numerous Black people, so they’re serial killers. He also presents history that isn’t taught in any high school (or most college) classes, and he does an excellent job of focusing on Black women who aren’t named Rosa or Harriet.
Given that Harriot isn’t an historian by training, his presentation (though not his research) is far from scholarly. At times, his Uncle Rob will supposedly interrupt a chapter and provide a slightly more colorful presentation; there are footnotes that are more side-eyes than clarifications; and there are at least two interviews with Racist Baby, a character that first showed up on Reddit.
He does structure the book like a typical history textbook, though, complete with supplemental materials and end-of-chapter quizzes, though those structural devices are more of a wink-and-nudge than anything else. Overall, Harriot doesn’t want his readers just to be informed; he wants them to be angry AF.
Black AF History by Michael Harriot. Dey Street Books, September 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
Nimrod International Journal Spring/Summer 2024 issue is themed “Refuge.” What is refuge? How do we pursue or find it? The concept is rather abstract and wildly different for many people, and the authors within represent that very conundrum. Readers can explore fiction by Emily Giangiulio, Divya Maniar, Zen Ren, Catalina Infante Beovic, G.W. Currier, Mackenzie Majewski, Sarah Gerkensmeyer, and Conor Flannery, and poetry by Kelly Rowe, Bex Hainsworth, Rana Tahir, Lauren Tess, Nancy Eimers, Jody Winer, Hannah Baker Saltmarsh, Hannah Dierdorff, Kyo Lee, Sandra Crouch, Elizabeth Galoozis, M.K. Foster, Halee Kirkwood, Amara Tiebout, Geoffrey Babbitt, Eben Bein, Chelsea Dingman, Tiffany Mi, Zen Ren, Connie Braun, Eleanor Goodman, Maria Provenzano, Phillip Watts Brown, Mary Francesca Fontana, Jake Phillips, Caits Meissner, Angela Kirby, and many more.
Hailing from Eastern Washington University, Willow Springs 2024 Spring print journal features Surrealist Prize Winner Meg Kelleher, whose poem is available to read online along with an audio recording. Readers can enjoy more poetry by Mark Anderson, B. J. Buckley, Todd Davis, Richard Gallagher, Mark Halliday, John Hodgen, Carol Potter, Georgia San Li, Liana Roux, John Schneider, John Spaulding, and Josh Tvdry; fiction by Matthew Baker, Andrew Furman; nonfiction by Jenny Catlin, Courtney Kersten; and an interview with Nance Van Winckel.
37 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
June is officially over with Sunday and July kicks off on Monday. Don’t miss out on all the submission opportunities with June 30 or July 1 deadlines! NewPages has you covered with our weekly Where to Submit Roundup, so you don’t miss a thing. Also, with a new month gearing up, don’t forget to check out our monthly calendar of writing contests!
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
Looking for a bookstore stocked with dozens of the most recent titles of contemporary lit mags to browse? Look no further! Check out the New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!
Each month, we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content information for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
In One, Haley Lasché’s debut poetry collection, the poet “claims a bite of language” and invites readers to consider the primacy and implications of “one,” the number and word. Welcome to “imperative’s den”!
Regardless of the part of speech—noun, pronoun, or adjective—the word “one” and its various definitions offer “syntax” and “possibility”; throughout the collection “one” references and “names itself / an unbroken.” But, we are not all in one piece. The meaning of words and their semantic relations lead to inquiry: What are the implications of being “at one with” or “for one”? And, where do harmony and example lead?
One response might be found in the chosen poetic form of the monostich. The one-line stanzas constitute a single moment, observation, or experience within a human body moving within the natural world where it is often nighttime, often cold; human senses awake just as those of the nocturnal possum and owl as the moon comes to light.
Lasché’s synesthetic poetry “is a story told from one eye to the next” from within the “earthen current” where many nights become one night and one within the night becomes one with the night. Where a “spark of voice” joins a “prism of sound,” Haley Lasché’s One is a “song ravenous for light”!
One by Haley Lasché. Beauty School Editions, October 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
In the Spring 2024 (226) issue of The Malahat Review, readers can enjoy Open Season Awards winning works by Jocy Chan (poetry), Aldyn Chwelow (creative nonfiction), and Dominique Bernier-Cormier (fiction) as well as poetry by Nicole Boyce, Weyman Chan, Laurie D. Graham, Iqra Khan, S. A. Leger, Shane Neilson, Teresa Ott, Meredith Quartermain, Meghan Reyda-Molnar, Tazi Rodrigues, Anya Smith, and Misha Solomon, fiction by Corinna Chong, Dylan Clark, and Bill Gaston, and creative nonfiction by Daniel Allen Cox, as well as several book reviews. Cover art, Head Space, by Ibrahim Abusitta.
Summer + Reading = Happy Place. To help you achieve that goal, check out the July 2024 New Books Received. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
Many MFA candidates choose a program based on proximity. But it’s risky to make convenience the deciding factor in your education. Here are seven top elements to look for in a low-residency MFA program:
A program that will stretch you as a writer. How many credit hours comprise the degree? how many packets? how many pages per packet? These numbers help reveal what a program will ask of you—and give you in return. Spalding MFA alum Whitney Collins said, “The sheer volume of work we were asked to generate was remarkable, and, yes, a bit intimidating, but you will AMAZE yourself by being able to do it. I graduated with a newfound confidence surrounding my generative abilities.” Since graduating in 2018, Whitney has won a Pushcart Prize and published two short-story collections with Sarabande Books.
A student-centered program. How flexible is the program? Can you spend a core semester studying a second genre? Are there scheduling options to fit your life? Can you take a leave of absence without penalty? At Spalding, the answers are very, yes, yes, and yes.
A great track record and a promising future. For your MFA degree to retain its value over the years, it should come from a proven, thriving, continuously innovating program with a bright future. The Spalding program is one of the oldest and best-regarded low-residency MFAs and enjoys generous support from its university.
Active faculty. You’ll grow most by working with faculty members who are publishing, producing, and plugged into the industry now. Spalding’s faculty includes best-selling poet and memoirist Maggie Smith; Salon.com chief content officer Erin Keane; best-selling novelist and Kentucky Poet Laureate Silas House; children’s lit phenoms Leah Henderson, Lamar Giles, and Lesléa Newman; TV writer and producer Bruce Marshall Romans (Hell on Wheels, Messiah, Spider-Man Noir); Gabriel Jason Dean, whose play Rift or White Lies runs off-Broadway this fall; and many others actively creating while providing dedicated, relevant instruction to students.
Alumni successes. An established program should have recent alumni successes. Spalding congratulates MFA alums Ashley Cook on her 2024 Daytime Emmy for writing, Nathan Gower on the Washington Post write-up of his new novel, Andie Redwine and Larry Brenner on the book deal that grew out of their Once Upon a Disney podcast, Jennine “Doc” Krueger and Ann Eskridge on their inclusion in Theatre NOW New York’s musical theatre lab, Holly Gleason for being named LA Press Club’s Entertainment Journalist of the Year, Parneshia Jones for serving as director of Northwestern University Press, and Crystal Wilkinson for being profiled seemingly everywhere, including The New York Times, for Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts.
Ongoing support from faculty and administration. Writing is a lifetime undertaking, and you want your MFA program’s support for the long haul. Alum Lauren Budrow wrote, “Out of my four degrees, it’s my MFA from Spalding that I feel the most connected to, where I could actually reach out to fellow alums as resources, and feel comfortable enough to reach back to faculty for advice or assistance. Those friendships and connections exist because the core bond with the program is so solid.”
Nwabineli’s second novel, Allow Me to Introduce Myself, follows Aṅụrị Chinasa, a twenty-five year-old woman born in Nigeria and raised in England. Her mother died in childbirth, so her stepmother, Ophelia, became the primary caregiver, as her father struggled with grief. Aṅụrị spends much of the novel involved in a lawsuit with Ophelia, as Ophelia was one of the earliest momfluencers, making millions through advertising and sponsorship, with all of the content focused on Aṅụrị. The effects of that childhood have prevented Aṅụrị from moving on, as she turned to alcohol as one of her main means of rebellion against Ophelia and her expectations.
Further complicating the situation is that Ophelia is now carrying out the same parenting approach with Noelle, Aṅụrị’s half-sister, with similar effects. Aṅụrị not only wants Ophelia to remove all of the content concerning her childhood; she wants Ophelia to stop posting about Noelle. In fact, Aṅụrị wants to take Noelle out of the house and raise her on her own.
Aṅụrị has several people helping her work to move past the scars of her childhood: her two best friends—Simi and Loki—her therapist Ammah, her lawyer Gloria, and a possible boyfriend, Christian. However, the years of damage make it difficult for Aṅụrị to trust anybody.
Nwabineli’s novel is an excellent exploration of the effects of the internet’s lack of privacy on children, calling into question parents (and children) who willingly give up their lives to total strangers for financial gain. This timely exploration should have every reader asking whether what they view online has effects they might not have considered.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
The Summer 2024 issue of The Kenyon Review includes a folio centered on the theme of Extinction, with poetry by Jessica Abughattas, Saddiq Dzukogi, Martín Espada, and Farah Kader, fiction by Lee Conell, Vida James, and Jimin Kang, and nonfiction by Taneum Bambrick and noam keim. The tenth-anniversary edition of “Nature’s Nature,” guest edited by David Baker, also appears in this issue. “Nature’s Nature” has been an annual feature, and the past nine years brought together 158 contributors, mostly poets but also prose writers and visual artists. This year’s edition spotlights established poets Philip Metres, Evie Shockley, and Mary Szybist introducing emerging poets including Ariana Benson, Jasmine Reid, and Paige Webb. Complimenting these two folios both on the cover and in a special color feature is landscape photography by Camille Seaman.
Boulevard Winter 2024 – a double issue – spotlights 2022 Fiction Contest winner Trent Lewin, and 2022 Nonfiction Contest winner Gabriel Rogers. It also features a Boulevard Craft Interview with Gus Moreno, a novel excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates, new fiction from Roy Parvin, Nick Otte, Mathew Goldberg, and Joshua Allen Griffith, new poetry from Nandini Dhar, Ellara Chumashkaeva, Tai Wei Guo, James Allen Hall, Otter Jung-Allen, Bryan D. Price, Michael Romary, Ellen Doré Watson, Caroline White, and translations of Saadi Youssef by Khaled Mattawa, as well as essays by John Dalton, Michael Bishop, Demetrius Buckley, Madeline Jones and Susan Sugai. Cover art is Current Mood, oil on canvas by Song Watkins Park.
The June 2024 issue of About Place explores the concept of “west.” West has always been more than mere direction, a setting sun, evening. The term invokes a fraught mythology of wilderness and conquest, of destiny and riches, of jackrabbit homesteads and romantic distances, of cowboys and bears. These symbols have long dominated our histories of these lands, centering whiteness and masculinity in rugged, difficult terrain. But the West has always been strange, full of contradictions, queer. “Strange Wests” conceives of the West beyond its conventional, colonialized framework. What happens when the dam breaks, when waters flow along their pre-colonial course and stewardship is returned to the original caretakers of the land?
[Cover artwork Dreams Collage by Irina Tall Novikova.]
The poems in Rennie Ament’s Mechanical Bull toggle between extremes, where it is “[l]earned anything has a punishing / angle. Tensions range between husbandry/slaughter, “wonder”/horror, humility/“hubris,” superluminal/“supraliminal,” human body/poetic form, “association”/“dissociation,” and a “new book”/old story of a girl on the roadside and a murderer under the trees. “Pick / your version,” reader, but understand you and the poet may be in “business together” but she has “all the capital.”
Ament’s “[p]oems are a bed of nails” and you prick “awake on their numerous tips.” The hypothesis: pleasure and pain are an “eerie glistening” on a continuum. Her poems, in turn, edulcorate and confront everyday “savagery / fallen short of its potential.” The potential for danger looms everywhere, “murder coming in” through fists or rape. “Who will do something. Like ring a bell. A good old-fashioned bell.”
Rennie Ament does something with Mechanical Bull; her poems ring bells.
Mechanical Bull by Rennie Ament. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, October 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
Bear Review online journal May 2024 issue (10.2) welcome a side variety of poetry, reading submissions year-round to publish in two issues: spring and fall. Their only criteria for submissions, “your writing is alive on the page, has urgency and has something at stake.” Making the cut for their newest issue are contributors Wael Almahdi, Lynne Potts, Kerry Kurdziel, Tess Liegeois, BJ Soloy, Greg Jensen, Erin Hoover, C. Wade Bentley, Heidi Seaborn, H.R. Webster, Louise Mathias, Sascha Cohen, Sarah Giragosian, Eben E. B. Bein, Michael Robins , Jose Hernandez Diaz , Sophia McCurdy, Fay Dillof, Natalie Louise Tombasco, Rodrigo Toscano, Alyssa Sinclair, Chris Bullard, Julie Rouse , Grant Chemidlin, Carolyn Hembree, and Anthony Borruso with artwork by Babe Siegl. Also featured are the winner, Bevin O’Connor, and finalists, Stephanie Niu and Brian Woerner, of the 2023 Michelle Boisseau Prize as well as interviews with Bevin O’Connor and Carolyn Hembree.
38 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Hopefully you have been surviving in this super-hot week. A great time to stay indoors or haunt your local library for writing, submitting, or editing. NewPages has you covered with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities to help in your submission goals. With June ending soon and July starting up, don’t miss out on the opportunities below.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
The forty-seven essays in Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence – all published between the 1970s and the 1990s – provide readers with a penetrating glimpse into the linkages between war, militarism, interpersonal violence, and women’s oppression. It’s a valuable collection, but because it is disconnected from the contemporary realities of 21st-century politics and social movements, its usefulness is likely limited to scholars, researchers, and academics.
Nonetheless, the essays remind readers of the extent of psychological and physical violence, noting that conflict exists far beyond the battlefield and can be seen in our home and work lives, as well as in interactions with a host of government agencies that belittle and condescend. What’s more, several of the essays offer an expansive view of violence and touch on pollution, racism, and economic inequity as potent forms of attack.
While many Second Wave feminists agitated for female parity in the armed forces and in law enforcement, the anti-violence segment of the movement is often sidelined. This book changes that. And while debates that raged during the 1970s and 80s – whether self-defense was a betrayal of nonviolent precepts or was a legitimate response to rape – seem dated, Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence reminds us that 20th-century pacifist-feminists were bold, creative, and radical.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Publishing the best in fiction since 1985, Beloit Fiction Journal Spring 2024 welcomes readers to enjoy works by Madeleine Gallo, Banzelman Guret, Andrew J. Hodges, Vikram Kapur, Mark Doyle, Melissa Beneche, Gary Fincke, Lauren Marie Miller, Hannah Barnhart, Alyssa Quinn, Ellen Burns, Clare Needham, Jess Weixler-Landis, Krista Diamond, and Alyssa Pelish. The cover artist for this issue is Romain Mayambi.
Stephen C. Pollock’s poetry collection Exits explores the beauty and frailty of life, the cycles of nature, and the potential for renewal. It also responds to contemporary anxieties surrounding death and the universal search for meaning.
Musical and multilayered, Exits features a potpourri of styles, ranging from traditional forms to free verse to hybrid works. Many of the images are drawn from nature. In addition, each poem is paired with a piece of artwork intended to resonate with the writing and enhance the reader’s experience.
Exits has been honored with the Gold Medal for poetry in the 2023 Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards and the Silver Medal for poetry in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Echoing these accolades, Midwest Book Review declares: “Exits is a book that has profoundly impacted the literary world.”
“Pollock’s poetry is brilliant” —Kristiana Reed, editor-in-chief, Free Verse Revolution
“Exits exemplifies the musicality of language” —Foreword-Clarion Reviews
“Full of wit, insight and provocative imagery, Exits is a masterful collection” —IndieReader, 5.0 stars
Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson Apogee Press, April 2024
In Rendered Paradise, poets Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson invite the reader into the worlds of three major women artists: Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin and Kiki Smith. Dyckman and Robinson bring a radical collaborative approach to this gathering: through their shared vision, contemplation, and creation, each artist’s works are encountered as unique presences coming alive in fresh and unexpected ways. “We have seen so many instance of men writing about men,” says Editor Edward Smallfield, “and have had many fewer opportunities to read women writing about women. The writing changes as the poets move from one artists to another, so that the focus of the language is the work of art, not the preferred vocabulary of the poets.” This remarkable book isn’t “about” the artworks it engages with, but is its own work of art, new and wondrous.
The 2024 annual issue of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry features Dana Gioia’s libretto, Fiat Lux, dedicating Christ Cathedral of the Catholic Diocese of Orange County, California; Martha Collins’s elegy “After Words” in memory of Lee Sharkey as well as a posthumously published new poem by Sharkey, “For the Ghosts”; new translations of two Afghan women poets of the diaspora by Bänoo Zan; 2 interviews with Sarah Law and Malcolm Guite; 23 book reviews of individual collections of poems; 3 essays on the life’s works of Antonio Machado, Vassar Miller, and Micheal O’Siadhail; and over 80 pages of new poems and translations in a wide variety of styles.
Application Deadline: June 30, 2024 Apply to receive feedback on the first 50 pages of your novel or query letter from a literary agent. Limited spots available. Deadline to apply is June 30, 2024! View flyer for more details and a link to our website.
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Deadline: August 1, 2024 The election is looming, and all those thoughts and emotions are getting sharper and at time produce fear and depression. Now is the time to have art be your voice and presence. Visit our website for full information and to submit your work.
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Caesura Poetry Workshop aims to support, inspire, and energize poets through a wide variety of affordable Zoom workshops hosted by award-winning poet, editor, and teacher John Sibley Williams. Most workshops include poem analysis, active group discussion, and writing prompts. Some are even self-paced! We also offer critiques of poems and manuscripts, as well as ongoing mentoring. Visit us at our website and view our flyer for more information.
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Deadline: August 1, 2024 The Greensboro Review invites submissions for our annual Robert Watson Literary Prizes in Poetry and Fiction. Winners in each genre receive a $1,000 award and publication in the spring issue of the journal. Send us your previously unpublished poems and short stories, now through August 1! To learn more, read past prizewinners, and submit your work, visit our website and view our flyer.
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.
43 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
And just like that, June will be half over with tomorrow. That means there’s a lot of deadlines coming up, so don’t miss out! NewPages has you covered with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
Deadline: July 15, 2024 The Tenth Gate Prize honors mid-career poets writing in English. Entry is open to authors of at least two previously published full-length poetry collections. A prize of $1000 and publication of the collection is awarded annually. See our flyer for more information and a link to submit.
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.
Winning Writers will award a grand prize of $10,000 in its tenth annual North Street competition, and $20,400 in all. The top nine winners will enjoy additional benefits from co-sponsors BookBaby, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Book Award Pro, Self-Publishing Made Simple, and Laura Duffy Design. New this year: Everyone who enters online will receive a brief commentary from one of the judges. Submit books published in any year and on any self-publishing or hybrid-publishing platform. $79 entry fee. Enter online or by mail by July 1. Learn more at our website and share our flyer.
The 2River View Summer 2024 issue is online and open access for readers to enjoy new poems by Sally Van Doren, Kami Enzie, Susanna Lang, Melanie H. Manuel, Christine Marshall, Robert McDonald, Derek N. Otsuji, Pablo Piñero Stillmann, Diane Thiel, and Ellen June Wright as well as artwork from Christie Taylor’s Driftwood Series. The 2River View offers “Make the Mag” and “Chap the Book” features which allow readers to download a press-ready file of any issue of 2RV or any chapbook to make print publications.
At the age of seven, Jennifer Coleman is severely burned in a house fire that kills her sister. Despite the barriers of her scarred face and her tragic childhood, she reaches the pinnacle of achievement as a classical concert pianist, but at a deep psychological cost.
During Jennifer’s meteoric rise as a virtuoso pianist, her disfigurement takes on mythic proportions. She is internationally loved and admired, but unable to love herself. At a pivotal point in her career, she meets an extraordinarily creative, suicidal musician named Felix, who challenges Jennifer’s beliefs and falls deeply in love with her. Will Jennifer be able to learn from Felix’s example before she self-destructs?
Cadenza is symphonic. It succeeds not only as an absorbing, psychologically nuanced novel, but also as a tragic fable of ambition and virtuosity. Its extraordinary heroine offers profound truths about purpose, memory, trauma, and the transcendent powers of art and love.
— Lauren Acampora, author of The Hundred Waters
“An engrossing epic of artistic triumphs and personal disasters, unflinching in its depiction of scars both physical and emotional, Cadenza reads like a piano concerto playing in a house on fire.”
The Baltimore ReviewSpring 2024 issue features poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction by Kaique Antonio, Bobby Bangert, Amy Boyes, Sara R. Burnett, Stephen Cicirelli, Michael Don, Katherine Gekker, Linden Hibbert, Max Kruger-Dull, Susan Leslie Moore, Elisabeth Murawski, Rukman Ragas, Melody Sun, Norie Suzuki, and Ryan White.
Many contributors also provide notes about their work, as well as audio recordings. All issues of The Baltimore Review back to Winter 2012 can be read online at no cost, and content from the online issues is also published in annual print compilations. Founded in 1996, The Baltimore Review showcases writers from Baltimore, across the U.S., and beyond.
When Phoenix, Arizona Poet Laureate Rosemarie Dombrowski was asked by the Office of Veteran and Military Academic Engagement (OVMAE) at Arizona State University to produce a military-themed issue of another literary journal that she was running, she was ready for a new challenge. “I asked if I could create a new journal instead,” Dombrowski explains, “one that exclusively featured the stories of veterans – either written by veterans or their family members.”
This formed into the annual publication of ISSUED: stories of service which features poetry, flash prose (under 1500 words), and profiles (interviews), both online and in print.
“I’m also the granddaughter, daughter, and half-sister of veterans,” Dombrowski shares, “and I’ve had close relationships with several veterans over the course of my life, but I’ve never inquired about their service or done much research on it, so this felt like a project that would encourage other family members to reflect, research, and resurrect that familial history.
“We also know that veterans are oftentimes medically and socially marginalized (and historically and culturally conditioned to not speak about their service-related trauma), so I wanted to make a creative, encouraging, inclusive platform for them.”
