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.” Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: 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. Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Curieux Academic Journal”
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.”
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)
The Spring 2017 issue of The Georgia Review, in addition to celebrating 70 continuous years of publication, also features the 2016 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner: “Still Lifes and Landscapes” by Emily Wolahan. In addition to publication, the winner receives $1000. The 2017 poetry contest is still open, with Naomi Shihab Nye as the final judge.
Michigan Quarterly Review has announced its annual prizes awarded to authors whose works were published in the magazine during the previous year.
Lawrence Foundation Prize
Ruchama King Feuerman [pictured] has won the $1,000 Lawrence Foundation Prize for 2016. The prize is awarded annually by the Editorial Board of MQR to the author of the best short story published that year in the journal. Feuerman’s “Kill Fonzie” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue.
Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize
John Rybicki has won the 2016 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, which is awarded annually to the author of the best poem or group of poems appearing that year in the Michigan Quarterly Review. His poem “A River Is Not a Watery Rope,” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue.
Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets
Eric Rivera has won the 2016 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, which is awarded annually to the best poet appearing in MQR who has not yet published a book. The award, which is determined by the MQR editors, is in the amount of $500.
For more information about each of the winners, visit the MQR website here.
Erin McIntosh is the featured artist in this 70th anniversary issue of The Georgia Review, with one of her works from Geometric Series on the cover and several more inside along with an introduction about the artist and her work.
“Forgetten” by Jane Zwinger on the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of Glimmer Train is a welcome symbol of spring that reflects the blossoming trees lining our city streets this April.
The cover of Ruminate Spring 2017 features an untitled piece from the 2017 Kalos Visual Art Prize Winner Lucas Moneypenny. More of his work as well as that from Second Place winner Chakila L. Hoskins and Honorable Mention Carolyn Mount is included in the issue.
The Drowning Gull online biannual of art, nonfiction, poetry and fiction hails an eclectic editorial staff: Tiegan Dakin, a poet and artist living in New South Wales, Australia; Rebecca Valley, poet and writer living in Washington state; Shonavee Simpson, Australian freelancer from Newcastle; and Katelyn Dunne, a Chicago native currently living in Kentucky to attend university. “Living in different parts of the world,” says Dakin, “makes communication difficult at times. But we all have a common love of publishing, so we try tirelessly to make it work.” Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: The Drowning Gull”
The April 2017 broadside collaboration from Broadsided Press is “Overheard at the Zoo” with poetry by Jessica Johnson and art by Se Thut Quon. Poetry lovers/activists are encouraged to print the free PDF broadside and become a vector by posting the work around your town, campus, workplace – wherever the world could use just a bit more poetry.
The Florida Review has launched a new online component Aquifer, with free weekly literary features (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and graphic narrative), as well as interviews, book reviews, and digital stories. Later this year, Aquifer will open up submissions for this online content. Editors also hope that Aquifer: The Florida Review Online will open up the possibility for even more features, becoming a fully multi-media arts and letter site. We look forward to this great new innovation for TFR!
The winner of the 2016 FIELD Poetry Prize, Chance Divine by Jeffrey Skinner, was published at the end of last month. The editors, David Young and David Walker, selected the collection from a group of submissions they say was one of the strongest in the prize’s 20-year history. However, Chance Divine made an impression, the editors “coming back to it with increasing admiration. It’s a notably ambitious book, unafraid to ask large questions about contemporary physics, poetry, and faith, and the relationships between them—but with a wit and inventiveness that lead to unpredictable, exhilarating results.”
On the Oberlin College Press website, readers can find three excerpted poems, more information about the collection, and a way to order a copy.
Photograph “Paula/Window #1” by Roger Mullins on the cover of v16 i2 of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley inspired this week’s theme of lit mag covers.
A detail of “The History of Nature” by Brad Kunkle on the Spring 2017 issue of Arroyo is from his Light & Leaf series, paintings “embellished with genuine gold and silver leaf, which reflects light in a room differently than paint.Therefore, they can appear contrastive and unique when the point of view or source of light has changed.”
And for a dose of humor, Issue #49 of Pembroke Magazine features a photograph taken by Editor Jessica Pitchford at the annual John Blue Cotton Festival in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Love it.
In 2015, on the anniversary of his wife’s death as a result ovarian cancer, Hyong Yi wrote 100 love notes and, along with his two children, handed them out to random passers by on the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina. The three-line poems were written as conversational love notes between Hyong and his wife, reading “Beloved, follow me to the top of the mountain. Hold my hand; I’m afraid of falling. Don’t let me go.” and “I don’t need a test to tell me who to love. I believe in you and me. I do until death do us part.”
Friends encouraged Hyong to create a website to commemorate his commitment to his wife, and now The #100 Love Notes Project: A Love Story book has been published by Lorimer Press. This beautifully crafted collection features the work of 17 artists commissioned by Hyong Li to illustrate his 100 three-line poems.
This historical tome edited by Anselm Berrigan has just been released from Wave Publishing: “The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York.These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century’s most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years.” Poets/artists interviewed include: Akilah Oliver, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Barbara Henning, Bruce Andrews, Charles North, David Henderson, Eileen Myles, erica kaufman, Harryette Mullen, Judith Goldman, Larry Fagin, Magdalena Zurawski, Peter Bushyeager, Red Grooms, Sheila Alson, Tina Darragh, Victor Hernández Cruz, Will Alexander, and many more. The book can be ordered directly from the publisher for the discounted price of $17/shipping included.
Editor Chris Agee included a handwritten note with v9 n2 of Irish Pages, “This issue is already highly controversial. . . ” Why? The focus: “Israel, Islam & the West” with feature content: Gerard McCarthy on the refugee crisis in Greece; An unpublished survivor’s account of Bergen Belsen; “A Trial” by Hubert Butler; Writings on Iran, Bosnia and Islam; Avi Shlaim on “Israel and the Arrogance of Power”; Dervla Murphy’s “Hasbara in Action”; John McHugo on Syria; Chris Agee on “Troubled Belfast”; Ghazels of Hafez; Lara Marlowe on Mahmoud Darwish; New poems on the Middle East by Seán Lysaght, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ciarán O’Rourke & Cathal Ó Searcaigh; and “I am Belfast”, a photographic portfolio by Mark Cousins.
The cover photograph for the Spring 2017 issue of Thema by VHoward fits this issue’s theme perfectly: “Take the zucchini and run.” And also gave me a jolt of hope for summer’s soon arrival!
The Spring 2017 cover photo of Willow Springs is by Polish-born photographer Marta Berens from her ongoing series Suiti – documenting the culture of the people of Alsunga, Latvia.
While the ship in the bottle is the focal point of Justin Burks’s image on the Winter 2017 issue of Carve, it was actually the Kit-Cat Clock that drew me in. Burks is a graduate of the Art Institute of Dallas and founder of Birdhouse Branding, a creative agency that helps develop and design brands, websites and illustrations for individuals and organizations.
September 30, 2017 marks the seventh annual global event of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a grassroots organization that brings poets, artists, musicians, and photographers together to call for environmental, social, and political change, within the framework of peace and sustainability. The local focus is key to this global event as communities around the world raise their voices through concerts, readings, workshops, flash mobs, community picnics, parades and demonstrations that speak to the heart of their specific area of concerns, such as homelessness, ecocide, racism and censorship.
The 100 Thousand Poets for Change website now features a Global Action Calendar open to everyone for posting creative actions planned to take place around the world, as well as the Resistance Poetry Wall, an open call for posting poetry about the recent USA elections. Poets from around the world are invited to post.
100 Thousand Poets for Change wants everyone planning now for their local September events and asks that organizers register their events on the 100 TPC website so your actions can be recognized.
“The Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center in Portland, Maine, dedicated to the idea that children and young adults are natural storytellers.” Focusing on writers ages 6 to 18, The Telling Room offers programs at their downtown writing center, engaging local writers, artists, teachers, and community groups in afterschool workshops, writing assistance, fieldtrips, the “Super Famous Writers Series,” and publishing.
In her feature article for the Glimmer Train Bulletin #122, fiction writer Kimberly Bunker opens “The Fear of Not Saying Interesting Things” with: “For some reason, this doesn’t stop me from talking, but it often stops me from writing.” She continues, commenting on both the necessity of work as well as inspiration for writers. “I think it’s possible to cultivate a mindset that’s receptive to but not obsessive about ideas, and to be methodical about pursuing the ideas that seem worth pursuing—i.e., finding a balance between waiting for lightning to strike, and getting behind the mule.” Read the full article here.
Published by NYU Langone Medical Center as part of the Department of Medicine’s Division of Medical Humanities, the Spring 2017 issue of Bellevue Literary Review features the winners and runners-up of their 2017 Bellevue Literary Review Prize:
Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
Selected by Ha Jin
Winner: “Do I Look Sick to You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” by C.J. Hribal
Honorable Mention: “And It Is No Joke” by Conor Kelley
Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
Selected by Ariel Levy
Winner: “Of Mothers and Monkeys: A Case Study” by Caitlin Kuehn
Honorable Mention: “Jacket” by Jennifer Hildebrandt
Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry
Selected by Kazim Ali
Winner: “Poem For A Friend Growing Lighter and Lighter” by Abe Louise Young [pictured]
Honorable Mention: “In the absence of birdsong” by Michaela Coplen
Odd Bloom Seen from Space by Timothy Daniel Welch will be published in April 2017. Winner of the 2016 University of Iowa Press’s Iowa Poetry Prize, Odd Bloom Seen from Space, according to the publisher, “looks at the self amid the ashes of fleeting exultation and uncertainty.” The poems in this debut collection offer wisdom and surprising humor, making for a collection that is “gorgeous, original, and baffling.”
Readers can find out more about Odd Bloom Seen from Space on the University of Iowa Press website. While there, they can find an excerpted poem, “On the Isle of Erytheia,” and preorder copies.
Bauhan Publishing LLC hosts the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize each year, awarding their sixth annual prize to Zeina Hashem Beck for her collection Louder than Hearts. The collection was chosen by Betsy Sholl, former poet laureate of Maine, who says Louder than Hearts “has it all—compelling language and a sense of moral gravitas, personal urgency and the ability to address a larger world with passion and artfulness.” She continues, calling the collection “timely in the way it provides a lens through which to see life in the Middle East, and hear the musical mix of English and Arabic.”
The collection will be released in April, but in the meantime, readers can read more about Zeina Hashem Beck, or they can try their hand at the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize themselves: submissions are open until the end of June.
Each year, the Cleveland State University Press holds the Open Book Poetry Competition, the Essay Collection Competition, and the First Book Poetry Competition (all three open until March 31, 2017). The three 2016 winners are set to be published at the beginning of April 2017.
In One Form to Find Another by Jane Lewty was chosen as the 2016 Open Book Poetry Competition winner, selected by Emily Kendal Frey, Siwar Masannat, and Jon Woodward. Advance praise refers to the collection as “an heroically unsettling and compelling textual reenactment of feminine embodiments’ lament, contemplation, and recalibration of disturbed histories . . . ”
daughterrarium by Sheila McMullin, selected by Daniel Borzutzky, won the 2016 First Book Poetry Competition. Borzutzky says of his selection, “I admire daughterrarium for pushing too far, for making me cringe with its representations of what one human can do to another, of what a body can do to itself.”
James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well won the 2016 Essay Collection Competition, chosen by Chris Kraus. From Kraus: “In these essays, Hall lives alongside, and empathically lives through, his family’s meth addiction, and mental illnesses . . . and considers his own penchants for less than happy, equal sex with an agility, depth, and lightness that is blissfully inconclusive.”
Check out the individual links to learn more about each prize-winning collection, and pre-order copies of all three.
In mid-April, Gallic Books will be publishing Hell’s Gate by Laurent Gaudé. Gaudé’s The Scortas’ Sun is the winner of the Prix Gouncourt, the French literary award given to an author of the best imaginative work of prose each year. Hell’s Gate is a thrilling story following a father as he chases redemption for his murdered son. It explores “the effects of bereavement and grief on a family, and the relationship between the living and dead.”
Check out the Gallic Books website for more information about Hell’s Gate. Read advance praise, check out a downloadable PDF extract, and give yourself a chance to read work by one of France’s most highly respected playwrights and novelists.
Dear America,
A cento of Adrienne Rich
You’re beginning to float free
Toward a new kind of love
Burning itself, burning down
The blueprint of a life.
I wanted to choose words that even you
Intend to refuse shelter
With a lie. And each
A beautiful tumor
Feeding on everything.
. . .
[Read the rest and listen to the poet read his own work on Terrain.org]
The winner of the 2016 Orison Poetry Prize, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom by Rebecca Aronson, will be published next month on April 4, 2017. Hadara Bar-Nadav, who selected the winner, calls the collection, “[e]xplosive, turbulent, haunting magnetic,” saying that “[m]ortality and death undergrid Aronson’s fantastical visions, where a child becomes a seagull, a woman turns tarantula, and a house threatens to fill with blood.”
Find sample poem “Wish” at the Orison Books website, where you can also find out more about Aronson and pre-order copies, which are currently on sale, a couple saved bucks you can set aside for even more poetry.
Parlor Press’s annual New Measure Poetry Prize (now open for 2017 submissions until the end of June) awards a poet a cash award of $1,000 and publication of an original manuscript.
The 2015 winner, This History That Just Happened, by Hannah Craig, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, was published at the beginning of the year. Komunyakaa says of his selection, “This History That Just Happened places the reader at the nexus where rural and city life converge, bridging a world personal and political, natural and artful, in a voice always uniquely hers.”
Craig has also won the 2016 Mississippi Review Prize and her manuscript was a finalist for the Akron Poetry Prize, the Fineline Competition, and the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Stop by the Parlor Press website to learn more about Craig and purchase her debut poetry collection digitally or in print.
Begun in 1989, Reach Out and Read is a program wherein medical professionals “prescribe” books and reading aloud to children “as a means of fostering the language-rich interactions between parents and their young children that stimulate early brain development.” Now, the Reach Out and Read model exists in all 50 states, with almost 1,500 sites distributing 1.6 million books per year. The program serves 4.7 million young children and their families each year, “including one in four children living in poverty in this country.” The organizers hope to grow each year, envisioning that support for books and reading will become a regular part of every child’s checkup. For more information about programs near you and information about how to get involved, visit Reach Out and Read online.
Winners and honorable mentions of The Master’s Review Short Story Award for New Writers have been announced. The winning story is awarded $2000, publication (online this spring), and agency review from Amy Williams of The Williams Agency, Victoria Marini from Irene Goodman, and Laura Biagi from Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc. The second and third place stories win $200 and $100 respectively, publication, and agency review as well. Previous winning works can be read online here.
Winner
“Operation” by Scott Gloden
Second Place
“White Out” by Caitlin O’Neil
Third Place
“Malheur Refuge” by Rick Attig
Honorable Mentions
“Little Sister” by Yin Ren
“Million and a Half” by Kevin Klinskidorn
“The Weight of Gravity” by Denise Schiavone
“The Caveman” by Rachel Engelman
“Good Listener” by Ally Glass-Katz
The Master’s Review is currently accepting submissions for its annual Anthology Prize. This year’s judge is Roxanne Gay.
Diode celebrates ten years of publishing “electropositive poetry”: poetry that “excites and energizes”; poetry that uses language that “crackles and sparks.” Issue 10.1 features works from over 40 poets as well as two full-length collections, Starlight & Error by Remica Bingam-Risher and quitter by Paula Cisewski, several chapbooks, interviews and reviews. All of Diode‘s is available for readers to enjoy online.
This month’s featured collaboration from Broadsided Press , “Final Descent into Phoenix” with poem by Julie Swarstad Johnson and art by Kara Page, has been months in the making. “We chose Julie Swarstad Johnson’s poem for publication from our open submissions over a year ago,” notes the Broadsided Editorial Team. “We sent it out to artists to see who would ‘dibs’ it in November, in January artist Kara Page sent us what she’d created, then our designer found a way to bring both together into a single letter-sized pdf, and finally we asked poet and artist what they thought of the results,” with the conversation between artist and poet published on the Broadsided website.
Broadsided posters are available for free download and postering all about town. Become a Broadsided Vector today!
Each June, Rescue Press accepts submissions for the Black Box Poetry Contest for full-length poetry collections open to poets at any stage in their writing careers. The latest Black Box Poetry winner will be released later this month (March 15): What Was It For by Adrienne Raphel. Judge Cathy Park Hong calls the debut full-length collection “feral and full of feverish delight.” She continues, “Raphel takes Victorian nonsense verse into the twenty-first century and transforms it to her own strange and genius song.”
Readers can learn more about What Was It For at the publisher’s website, where they can also find Raphel’s bio with more information about the writer and pre-order copies.
Things Impossible to Swallow poems by Pamela Garvey is the newest in the 2River Chapbooks Series. 2River chapbooks can be read online, or to make your own print copy, click “Chap the Book” to download a PDF, which you can then print double-sided, fold, and staple to have a personal copy of Garvey’s chapbook. There are currently 24 chapbooks available for free download for readers to enjoy.
Diode Editions recently held their very first full-length book contest and have announced two co-winners: Remica Bingham-Risher’s Starlight & Error, and Paula Cisewski’s quitter.
Starlight & Error retells through the lens of imagined memory the legacies of love between aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, children and their children’s children. The poems ask how we transcend the mistakes of those who made us, and who will save us.
quitter is a “thoughtful protest in form, line, and ideology.” The collection invites readers to ask ourselves what we’ve tried, and if we’ve tried hard enough, challenging us to continue looking for solutions.
Learn more about the prize-winning collections at the Diode Editions website where readers can read advance praise and order copies.
In February, Black Lawrence Press released Retribution Binary by Ruth Baumann, which advance praise calls “a study in wreckage and palpable absence” that is “Part dreamscape, part gutter-bucket realism” (Marcus Wicker). Retribution Binary is the winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Baumann is no stranger to winning chapbook prizes, winning the Salt Hill Dead Lake Chapbook Contest in 2014 and the Slash Pines Chapbook Contest in 2015. Copies of Retribution Binary can be found on the Black Lawrence Press website, where readers can learn more about Baumann, and read an excerpt.
Also released last month was the winner of the 2016 Georgia Poetry Prize, Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno, chosen by Thomas Lux. Lux calls the collection “madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book,” imploring readers to read it three times. Salerno’s fourth poetry collection, Sun & Urn is now available from the University of Georgia Press website, a book made from “the wild stuff of grief and loss.” Check out the press’s website for more information.
“Calmly on Fire,” a found photograph and collage on paper by Lorna Simpson, makes it difficult for readers to look away from Hotel Amerika Winter 2017.
Published in Ireland, this spring 2017 issue of Into the Void cover features “Two Boys in the Woods” by Refael Salem.
Unusual beauty seems to be my theme this week, finishing off with “Red Heart Boat” by Andy Levine on the cover of the online Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.
The University of Iowa Press brings readers a real treat: the lost novel of Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. While we’re familiar with Leaves of Grass, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle was serialized in a newspaper under a pseudonym, read with little fanfare, and then disappeared.
It wasn’t until 2016 that it was found by Zachary Turpan, a literary scholar. While following a deep paper trail into the Library of Congress, he stumbled upon the only surviving copy of Witman’s lost novel.
Now, after lying in wait for over 160 years, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle is available for modern readers both digitally and in print at the University of Iowa Press website.
Issue #55 (Spring 2017) of Rattle includes a selection of poems on the theme “Civil Servants.” “The collection features seventeen civil servants — poets who have worked for various government agencies, including the EPA, the FDA, the CIA, the Census Bureau, and many more,” write the editors. “Apparently working for the public produces a dry sense of humor, because many of the poems lean sardonic. These poets are also smart and down-to-earth, and just may restore your faith in bureaucracy.” Some of the writers included: Lisa Badner, Dane Cervine, A.M. Juster, Bruce Neidt, Pepper Trail, Jane Wheeler, John Yohe. See a full list of contributors here.
