The Winter 2016 (38.2) issue of Indiana Review features the winners and runners up of their annual poetry and fiction contests:
Winner 2015 Fiction Prize
Judge Laura van den Berg
Simon Han, “Be Tanly”
Winner 2016 Poetry Prize
Judge Camille Rankine
Alicia Wright, “His Father’s Wake”
Finalists 2016 Poetry Prize
Anna Leigh Knowles, “The First Year We Lived Underground”
Talin Tahajian, “Hibernation”
In addition to the December 2016 Broadsided Collaboration: Burn Barrel, art by Sarah Van Sanden, poem by Todd Davis, Broadsided Press is offering the community “a powerful collaboration of defiance and hope in the face of difficulty”: NoDAPL Responses Feature.
“We want your writing and art in response to the Action at Standing Rock,” write the editors. “In the past, we’ve provided art for you to spring from. This time, we want to open our submissions to visual artists as well as writers. Guest editor Tiffany Midge will help select final pieces. We waive submission fees for those directly involved in the resistance. Please help share the word.”
Broadsided Press was founded in 2005 and publishes an original literary/artistic collaboration each month for download with the mission, quite simply, “to put literature and art on the streets.”
The 2016 Profane Nonfiction Prize winner is “The End of the World” by Kat Moore. She will receive the $1,000 honorarium and publication in the Winter 2017 Issue 3.
Judge Dinty W. Moore [no relation] comments on the winning work: “‘The End of the World’ is a powerful, intricate, and compelling memoir essay. While other writers might have sensationalized the lurid aspects of heroin use and addiction, Kat Moore uses intimate detail and a matter-of-fact narrative to show just how quotidian the day-to-day life of a junkie can be. Superb writing and voice.”
Contest Finalists: “Full Count” by Devin Kelly; “This is a Test of the Emergency System” by Jill Kolongowski; “Newmom” by Molly Pascal; “Pruritus” by JD Schraffenberger.
Profane is a winter annual print and audio journal of poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction. Every published poem and piece of prose is recorded in the author’s own voice.
Issue #9 of the monthly online journal The Woven Tale Press features the steel scupture “Facing the Elements Blindfolded” by Ruud Schrijvershof, with addtional images of his works included inside the publication. The Woven Tale Press is a fine arts and literary magazine with the mission to grow Web traffic to noteworthy writers, photographers, and artists.
“Lion” by Cesar Valtierra draws readers in to Issue 6 of The Sounder Review, an online and print jounral of art, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. Based in Upstate New York, TSR “strives to question, redefine, and challenge conventional viewpoints; to usurp the definition of reality and truth.”
The seventh season of Motion Poems has begun. If you’re a ‘series’ watcher and love getting your installment fixes – then tag onto Motion Poems. This season’s installments are being produced in partnership with Cave Canem, “a home for the many voices of African American poetry.” Motion Poems combines works from great poets with outstanding contemporary filmmakers to create free films for everyone to enjoy. This season, Motion Poems will be releasing each new film monthly via Facebook and posting announcements of the release on Twitter and Instagram, so LIKE and FOLLOW Motion Poems to stay up-to-date with the series. You can also sign up for their quaterly newsletter which includes links to the films as well as other news and updates. The first film in the series is the stunning and leave-you-speechless “How Do You Raise a Black Child?” by poet Cortney Lamar Charleston and filmmaker Seyi Peter-Thomas.
American Life in Poetry: Column 609
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
We’ve been selecting poems for this column for more than ten years and I can’t remember ever publishing a poem about a cat. But here at last is a cat, a lovely old cat. Ron Koertge lives in California, and his most recent book of poems is Vampire Planet: New & Selected Poems, from Red Hen Press.
Lily
No one would take her when Ruth passed.
As the survivors assessed some antiques,
I kept hearing, “She’s old. Somebody
should put her down.”
I picked her up instead. Every night I tell her
about the fish who died for her, the ones
in the cheerful aluminum cans.
She lies on my chest to sleep, rising
and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat
fastened to a battered dock by a string.
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2016 by Ron Koertge, “Lily,” from Vampire Planet: New & Selected Poems, (Red Hen Press, 2016). Poem reprinted by permission of Ron Koertge and the publisher.Introduction copyright ©2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
With November practically over, let’s take a timeout to look back at award-winning small press and university press books published in the past few months.
In September, Rules for Lying by Anne Corbitt was published by the Southeast Missouri State University Press. Winner of the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel, Rules for Lying follows characters through a police investigation that makes them question their memories, allegiances, and actions, all while hiding secrets of their own. Check out the publisher’s website for more information.
Earlier in November, The Ashland Poetry Press released Life As It by Daneen Wardrop. The collection was selected by David St. John as the winner of the 2015 Snyder Memorial Prize Contest. The collection of prose poems (Wardrop’s third collection) features themes of music, family life, spirituality, and more. Check out the publisher’s website for multiple ways to order copies.
Also out this November is The Expense of a View by Polly Buckingham, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. The stories explore the psyches of characters, most displaced and disturbed, under extreme duress. Judge Chris Offutt called the collection “a carefully rendered examination of memory, loss, and sadness.” University of North Texas Press’s website has a preview of Buckingham’s collection and ways to order.
Check out these three award-winning books and show your support to small and university presses.
This has got to be the perfect gift for at least one person on your holiday list: a 2017 calendar featuring 12 vintage images typewriters and the women who wield them. The Writing Disorder online quarterly literary journal of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, art, interviews and reviews is offering this custom-made item, and right now at a 20% discount. Proceeds support the publication – a win-win all around!
Fiction Contest Winner “The Colonel’s Boy” by Timothy Dumas is highlighted in the autumn 2016 issue of The Hudson Review, and is available for readers full-text online here. This is his first published story.
“to pursue the unattainable” (2011; mixed media on paper; 22″ x 30″) from Carol Collicut’s Marcus Aurelius Series is featured on the autumn 2016 cover of The Fiddlehead: Atlantic Canada’s International Literary Journal and looks similar to a form of asemic writing.
Published out of Dublin, Ireland, this second issue of Into the Void Arts and Literature features “In the Dream I’m Falling” by Zach Moroney on its cover.
NewPages will always favor any lit mag cover that features the Detroit Tigers “D” on its cover. Though the black and white rendition of “An Ode to Farad #1” by Jamea Richmond-Edwards doesn’t quite do it justice, readers can find the full-color image inside The Southeast Review v.34 n.2, as well as and interview with the artist by Jessica Reidy.
Yusuf Saadi is the winner of The Malahat Review 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry. Judge Steven Heighton selected “The Place Where Words Go to Die” from 519 poems entered in this year’s annual contest. Read Heighton’s comments about Saadi’s work here. Malahat poetry board member Samantha Ainsworth interviewed Saadi and explores questions like “Which comes first, the poet or the poem?” and “Do you have readers in mind when you write poetry?”
November 2016 Poetry Magazine features works from the 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows: Kaveh Akbar, Jos Charles, Angel Nafis, Alison C. Rollins, and Javier Zamora [as pictured]. The Poetry Magazine website includes the full content from the publication, in addition to recordings of several of the Fellows reading their works. The Poetry Foundation selects five poets between the ages of 21 and 31 years annually for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows, each of whom receives $25,800 to support their further pursuits in writing. Read more about each of the Fellows here.
This whimsical “Dinosaur Feeding Frenzy” by Robert C. Jackson on the cover of Vol. V of The New Guard is an oil on linen, three panels sized 48″ x 36″ or 48″ x 108″. The issue itself is a contest winners frenzy, featuring winners, finalists and semifinalists of the The New Guard Vol. V Knightville Poetry Contest and the Machigonne Fiction Contest.
I couldn’t look away from this child’s searching expression on the fall 2016 cover of Catamaran. “Via Mal Contenti” by Bo Bartlett is an oil on linen (82 x 56; 2006) is as haunting as Founder and Editor in Chief Catherine Segurson’s closing words in her editor’s letter: “. . . please remember to vote this November, because we are responsible for the world our children will inherit.”
Sink Hollow is a landmark of Logan Canyon, at the mouth of which stands Utah State University and its iconic Old Main Building bell tower. In the canyon, Sink Hollow refers to a series of depressions that trap cold air, causing the hollows to be noticeably colder than the rest of the canyon. Visitors can expect to find frost on a July afternoon in the sinks.
The November-December 2016 issue of World Literature Today is dedicated “cover to cover” to women writers.
Managing Editor Michelle Johnson [pictured] writes in the Editor’s Note: “. . . several months ago [the editors at WLT] decided to dedicate the November 2016 issue exclusively to women writers—and women reviewing women writers. The editorial team briefly considered creating such an issue without comment—as if WLT existed in a utopia of parity where all writers in a literary magazine might just happen to be women. But in 2016, giving women the whole issue is still noteworthy even for a magazine like WLT with a strong track record of publishing women writers.”
The collection opens with Alison Anderson’s “Of Gatekeepers and Bedtime Stories: The Ongoing Struggle to Make Women’s Voices Heard,” part of The Puterbaugh Essay Series. See a full list of contents here.
The Louisville Review celebrates 40 years of continuous publishing with its Fall 2016 issue. In her Editor’s Note, Sena Jeter Naslund writes, “When I first held the newborn literary magazine in my hands, with great joy and satisfaction in 1976, and placed it alone, upright and wobbly on my office shelf, I thought, Someday there will be a whole row of this journal. That vision has come true, thanks to the initial support of the University of Louisville, the diligence of Karen J. Mann and myself in fundraising and cost-cutting, and to the generous continuing support of both the magazine and our Fleur-de-Lis Press by Spalding University. I thank these institutions, and Karen, the writers who have contributed their work to these eighty issues, and the enthusiastic readers over the last forty years.” Thank you TLR and congratulations!
Jorge Mayet’s De Mis Vivos y Mis Muertos (2008, electrical wire, paper, acrylics, fabric) is featured on the cover of the poetry journal Field‘s fall 2016 issue. Inside, readers can find a symposium on the work of C.D. Wright, with essays by Jenny Goodman, Laura Kasischke, Pamela Alexander, Sharon Olds, Kazim Ali, and Stephen Burt.
This fall 2016 cover of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative features the photography of David FitzSimmons, “Sweet Gum and Moon, Ashland, Ohio.”
In keeping with what seems to be a ‘tree’ theme, this acrylic on panel by Eric Green, entitled “Pole,” is just sample of the kinds of stark yet lush images included in his full-color portfolio inside The Gettysburg Review, winter 2016.
At the beginning of the month, Washington Writers’ Publishing House published the winner of the 2016 Fiction Prize: Strivers and Other Stories by Robert J. Williams.
From the publisher:
Set between the 1920s and the present day, Strivers and Other Stories explores a range of African-American and Southern voices reflecting characters striving towards their versions of the American dream. In 13 stories, we meet teachers and doctors, train porters and factory workers, soldiers and musicians; mothers, fathers, children and spouses; mentors and mentees. With a mix of humor and heart, satire and sentiment, this collection captures their everyday struggles for better lives and their hopes for promising futures.
Learn more at the publisher’s website.
The fall season seems to be flying by, so let’s hit pause to look back at the award-winning books published in the past few months.
Back in September, Truman State University Press published Daughter, Daedalus by Alison D. Moncrief Bromage, winner of the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize Winner. Jennifer Clement, contest judge, calls the collection “both original and very often masterful,” with an “elevated High Church intention [ . . . ] that T. S. Eliot would have recognized.” Copies are available digitally and in print at the press’s website.
Also published in September was the winner of Southeast Missouri State University Press’s Nilsen Prize for a First Novel: Rules for Lying by Anne Corbitt. Rules for Lying is a timely novel that explores the accusations and characters involved in an alleged rape, and how the families and the town they live in react, incriminate, and take sides. More information is available at the publisher’s website.
Moving on to October, Allegra Hyde’s Of This New World, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, was released. Judge Bennet Simms calls it “an ambitious and memorable debut.” In twelve stories, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism humor, and masterful detail. Check out the University of Iowa Press website for more information.
And finally, Josh Rathkamp won the 2016 Georgetown Review Press Poetry Manuscript Contest with his collection A Storm to Close the Door. Terrance Hayes calls the collection stunning with poems that “are often quick-witted and charming, but they never shy away from their meditations and quotidian American blues.” SPD has A Storm to Close the Door available for purchase.
This past October, Noemi Press released the winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Poetry Award: Bone Confetti by Muriel Leung. Leung’s first poetry collection, Bone Confetti reveals “there are two types of survivors at the end of the world.” Ash confetti “floats between funeral and parade, wedding and hell. When all that is left is the terrible residue of memory, lovers and ghosts try their best to make do [ . . . ] in an attempt to fashion a new sense of humanity.” Check out the Noemi Press website for more information and copies.
Looking ahead to December, the 2015 Winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Award will be released. Uncountry: a mythology by Yanara Friedland. The novel is “a collection of narratives that aim to expand creative pathways into historical space, particularly histories of migration and displacement.” Divided into four sections, each section explores “The gaps bweteen ‘remembered’ official history and the more unreliable spaces of private memory and unspoken unofficial history.” Copies of Uncountry are available for pre-order at the Noemi Press website.
[Quotes from SPD website]
Pint-Size Publications, publisher of literary magazine Sport Literate, introduces their very first nonfiction, single-author book: A Proficiency in Billiards: Reflections from a Well-Traveled Life by Lance Mason. Mason first came to the editors’ attention with his essay “In the Lair of the Red Dragon,” published in an issue of Sport Literate earlier in the year.
A Proficiency in Billiards, Mason’s first essay collection, takes readers from his home base in South California where he stood “eyewitness to pool hustlers and drag racers in the 1960s” to travels throughout the world, including New Zealand, Ireland, Greece, and Yugoslavia, just to name a few. Readers are invited along Mason’s travels, all from the comfort of their homes.
Keep an eye on Pint-Size Publications to see what they’ll have on tap next, and head to their website to order copies of A Proficiency in Billiards.
Author Cass R. Sunstein introduces his 2016 book, The World According to Star Wars (HarperCollins) humbly enough:
I’m going to be covering some diverse topics here, including the nature of human attachment, whether timing is everything, how to rank the seven Star Wars movies, why Martin Luther King Jr. was a conservative, how boys need their mothers, the workings of the creative imagination, the fall of Communism, the Arab Spring, changing understandings of human rights, whether The Force Awakens was a triumph or a disappointment, the limits of human attention, and whether Star Wars really is better than Star Trek.
With the exception of that last point, which I still find open to debate, one of the joys of this book is that Mr. Sunstein accomplishes the tasks he sets out in a quick reading, well-documented short book that combines playful romps of unabashed Star Wars fandom with high level reviews of politics, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, and film critique. The book is engaging for nerfherders and Jedi Knights, alike.
[Guest post by Chris Curtis. Chris teaches psychology at Delta College: www.delta.edu/clcurtis.]
Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their July/August Fiction Open competition. This competition is held twice a year and is open to all writers. Stories generally range from 3000-6000 words, though up to 20,000 is fine. The next Fiction Open will take place in March. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.
First place: Mark Fishman [pictured], of Paris, France, wins $3000 for “Songwad Road.” His story will be published in Issue 100 of Glimmer Train Stories.
Second place: Jessica Johannesson Gaitán, of Bath, England, wins $1000 for “Bad Language.”
Third place: Jill Rosenberg, of Montclair, NJ, wins $600 for “16 Days of Glory.”
A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.
Deadline soon approaching for the Short Story Award for New Writers: November 10
This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5000. No theme restrictions. Most submissions to this category run 1000-5000 words, but can go up to 12,000. First place prize wins $2500 and publication in Glimmer Train Stories. Second/third: $500/$300 and consideration for publication. Click here for complete guidelines.
American Life in Poetry: Column 606
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Emilie Buchwald was the co-publisher and founding editor of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis going on forty years ago, and that press grew up to become one of the finest literary publishers in our country. Today she edits children’s books at Gryphon Press, which she also founded. Here’s a lovely remembrance from her new book, The Moment’s Only Moment, from Nodin Press.
My Mother’s Music
In the evenings of my childhood,
when I went to bed,
music washed into the cove of my room,
my door open to a slice of light.
I felt a melancholy I couldn’t have named,
a longing for what I couldn’t yet have said
or understood but still
knew was longing,
knew was sadness
untouched by time.
Sometimes
the music was a rippling stream
of clear water rushing
over a bed of river stones
caught in sunlight.
And many nights
I crept from bed
to watch her
swaying where she sat
overtaken by the tide,
her arms rowing the music
out of the piano.
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2016 by Emilie Buchwald, “My Mother’s Music,” from The Moment’s Only Moment, (Nodin Press, 2016). Poem reprinted by permission of Emilie Buchwald and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their July/August Very Short Fiction Award. This competition is held twice a year and is open to all writers for stories with a word count under 3000. The next Very Short Fiction competition will take place in March. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.
1st place goes to Zehra Nabi of Baltimore, MD [Photo credit: Summer Greer], who wins $2000 for “Cow Killer.” Her story will be published in Issue 101 of Glimmer Train Stories. This will be the first print publication of her fiction.
2nd place goes to Mark Watkins of Lawrenceville, GA, who wins $500 for “What I Know About Where I’m From.”
3rd place goes to Hank Snelgrove of Nordland, WA, who wins $300 for “Fire in the Foam Bin.”
A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.
Deadline soon approaching for the Short Story Award for New Writers: November 10
This competition is held three times a year and is open to all writers whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5000. No theme restrictions. Most submissions to this category run 1000-5000 words, but can go up to 12,000. First place prize wins $2500 and publication in Glimmer Train Stories. Second/third: $500/$300 and consideration for publication. Click here for complete guidelines.
The newest issue of The Bitter Oleander: A magazine of contemporary international poetry and short fiction, features an interview with and a selection of poetry from Katherine Sánchez Espano.
Espano received her MFA from the University of Florida and has taught English and creative writing classes at several colleges. Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Green Mountains Review, The Bitter Oleander, Sycamore Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others. Her work has also been included in the American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America anthologies. In 2015, she published her first book of poetry, The Sky’s Dustbin, the winner of the 2014 Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award.
She is also a poet with the We Are You Project, an international organization “created to inform, enlighten, stimulate, and educate the public on the many facets and realities of Latino identity as it emerged over the past four centuries and continues to evolve in this, the 21st Century” through art exhibits, documentaries, poetry, lectures, and seminars.
Read an excerpt from the interview and one of her poems here.
“Heather is your friend. Heather is your girlfriend. Heather is your girlfriend’s girlfriend. Heather is leaning against the wall at your neighbor’s house party. Heather is next to you in bed, naked.”
Enticed? I certainly was, which is why I contacted Kelsey Mars, founder and sole editor of Heather, a new online indie literary publication, to learn more about this nakedness next to me in bed.
First – the name. “Heather,” Kelsey tells me, “is a unique feminine name, as well as being a shade of purple and a color generally associated with alternative sexuality. I wanted Heather as a publication to embody all aspects of this, to draw up images of bad girls in pleated skirts and the back row of the movie theater.”
Publishing fiction, non-fiction and poetry as well as digital art, photography and film, readers can determine whether or not the content stands up to its namesake. The free, online PDF features poems “about subjects that might make you uncomfortable,” Kelsey warns, as well as “erotica, film to chew on, stories about robots, flash fiction to make you cry a single diamond tear.”
While new to this venture, Kelsey is a seasoned literary professional. “I’ve been published in Huffington Post: Queer Voices, Thought Catalog, Miscellany, Meat For Tea and am upcoming in Painted Bride. You can read my original screenplay, Gotham Summer, as I tweet it out: @gothamsummer. I studied Media Theory and Communications at the College of Charleston, where I was first introduced to flash fiction writing. Since then, I’ve written two novels and more poems and flash fiction than is healthy for one person. In the light of day, I work on the Customer Experience team at Casper Sleep and preach the good word of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Never ask your art to pay for you.”
While involved in so much of her own writing,I asked Kelsey the motivation for adding this responsibility. “So many of us get rejection after rejection, often without knowing why. So many voices go unheard in this industry and it’s a damn shame. I started Heather to publish the weird stuff, the stuff that other publications might not see as ‘premium’ or literary enough. I wanted experimental stuff, the weirdest thing someone has ever written. I wanted a home for that stuff.”
Writers looking to home their works should know that Kelsey manages submissions on a rolling basis, accepting works as they fit the arc of each issue, offering the work more than one shot, but releasing it if it hasn’t found its fit after two issue cycles. Heather accepts simultaneous submissions, which keeps the editorial process timely.
Already, Heather has been made home by authors such as Maggie Cooper, whose first published pieces of fiction appeared in Heather and, as Kelsey notes: “totally blew my mind”; Monique Quintana, a fiction editor herself “whose shit haunts my dreams” Kelsey says; and Kirsten Bledsoe, a filmmaker whom Kelsesy knew prior to Heather, who has made both a feature length series about queer women of color and a prodigious ode to Marilyn Monroe’s poetry (which Heather published).
The future for Heather is boundless: “I want to go to Mars, dude,” Kelsey tells me with an edge of seriousness. “I want to see what’s outside of our solar system. Send me poems, fiction, art about that stuff. The stuff that we don’t even know yet. Let’s go to uncharted territory and live to brag about it.” Back down on earth, Kelsey hopes to publish Heather three times this year and keep the publication going well beyond that.
In addition to the regular publishing cycle, Kelsey is planning a special holday issue. The publication is not holiday themed, “but rather what you actually want to be reading when you’re avoiding your family over the holidays,” Kelsey says. “I’d like to publish more creative nonfiction in this issue, poetry about our fears, things like that.” Submissions accepted via Submittable; deadline November 27 to be published December 11.
As a final word, Kelsey encourages writers: “The most important thing I want people to take away from Heather is that you can do it to. You can publish the stuff YOU love. And if more of us do that, more of us will realize we’re someone’s favorite thing.”
Crossing Through the Present: German Poetry in Translation is a special section in the current issue of Middlebury College’s New England Review (v37 n3). “The selection of writing from Germany assembled here,” writes Carolyn Kuebler, “came about as the result of both intention and accident—NER ’s ongoing intention to offer an inspiring, provocative range of literary voices, and the happy accident of our own Ellen Hinsey’s living for a time in Berlin. While there, Ellen read a particularly intriguing essay about poetry, notebook-keeping, and Hannah Arendt, and she suggested it would be worth translating for NER. . . She also met the essay’s author, the writer Marie Luise Knott, who offered to share her familiarity with the scene to help us choose a selection of new German poetry. Add to that a call for submissions, a series of meetings in Berlin cafés, and several time-zone-jumping phone calls, and the result is that this issue contains not only a multitude of voices from the English-speaking world, as always, but also a multitude of voices from the German-speaking world. They meet here in our pages.”
Two works, “Zakid’s Delicatessen, Bremen” by Peter Waterhouse (trans. Iain Galbraith) and “on classification in language, a feeble reader” by Uljana Wolf (trans. Sophie Seita), are available to read on the NER website along with Kuebler’s Editor’s Note for this issue.
“I wanted to remember the absences that online life had replaced with constant content, constant connection. I’ve remembered what it is to be free in the world, free from the obliterating demands of five hundred ‘contacts.’”
Author Michael Harris shares this journal entry near the end of an “Analog August” (a self-enforced month without a smartphone and other internet devices) in his 2014 book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection (The Penguin Group). Mr. Harris examines the loss of absence from the perspective of the digital immigrant generation—those of an age to recall life both before and after the ubiquitous online world. Do you remember what it was like to cast an empty gaze out the window of the car on a long family trip? To vaguely wonder what the couple down the street was discussing as you waited for your bus? Do you remember being alone with your thoughts and just . . . being? Mr. Harris takes a digital immigrant journey of exploration through our technology-infused society and technology-induced angst, culminating in his own attempt to recapture absence.
CutBank Literary Journal #85 features the winners of the 2016 genre contests:
Montana Prize in Fiction
Selected by Claire Vaye Watkins
“Crick” by Terrance Manning, Jr.
Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction
Selected by Amanda Fortini
“Meme” by Tracy Fuad
Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry
Selected by Oliver De La Paz
Three Poems by J.R. Toriseva
I think Black Warrior Review covers make the pick every issue, with Luanne Redeye’s (Self)Image on the Fall/Winter 2016 cover just another example of why. More from her “Genre Paintings 2011 – ” series can be found inside the publication, as well as here on her website.
The cover of The Massachusetts Review (v57 n3) features Nina Chanel Abney’s What, 2015 (unique ultrachrome pigmented print, acrylic, spray paint on canvas). More of her work is also featured in the publication and can be viewed in her online portfolio here.
The cover of the seventh issue of Subprimal Poetry Art features Three Shadows by Kate Viola, who says the painting was “inspired by the haunting arias often found in operas.” Subprimal Poetry Art is a open access online publication of words with music, words alone, and artwork.
Father Fragments
by Erica Goss
Once a week I wipe the dust from the lid,
tilt the little jar of ashes
and watch them settle. Where
is his giant bark of a laugh,
his hand smacking the table
so hard my plate jumped?
Night after night he voiced
all the parts in Huckleberry Finn. . .
[read the rest and more on gravel]
“Nobody wants to feel everything, just as nobody wants to read work by a writer who is emotionally incontinent. In real life, I may be strung out on anxiety, or aching from bad news, or jubilant, or missing someone I love. However, I know that my job is not to directly transmit those emotions to the reader. My job is to live my life, feel my feelings, and then learn to translate what I’m feeling without making it about me.”
From “Emotion is Not Plot: Using Detachment to Create Powerful Fiction” a craft essay by Claire Rudy Foster in the online journal Cleaver Magazine.
Published online quarterly the last day of January, March, June, and September, Brilliant Flash Fiction holds several writing contests per year, often with a prompt, none with a fee, and each with a cash prize. The most recent was “Special Delivery” judged Paul Beckman [pictured]. Of the 287 international writers who entered, the top three prize winners and shortlist can all be read online here.
Winners
First: “It Came in the Mail” by Damhnait Monaghan
Second: “Princess Party” by Jennifer Stuart
Third: “The Secret of the Snoring Time” by Elizabeth Fisher
Issue 53 Fall 2016 of Brevity is a special issue on Race, Racism, and Racialization and includes such essays and authors as “Black in Middle America” by Roxanne Gay, “A Pop Quiz for White Women Who Think Black Women Should Be Nicer to Them in Conversations about Race” by Deesha Philyaw, “How to Discuss Race as a White Person” by Samuel Stokley, “Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps” by Sejal Shah, “How to Erase an Arab” by Julie Hakim Azzam, and “Mexican Americans and American Mexicans: An Etymology” by Sarah A. Chavez.
The online journal also includes guest editors for this issue Joy Castro and Ira Sukrungruang in conversation with one another about “what they hoped for and what they learned” in putting this issue together, as well as the accompanying craft essay “Three Commandments for Writing About Race” by Xu Xi [pictured].
3Elements Review is an online quarterly literary journal publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography. Unique to this publication, submissions for each issue must include the three elements the publishers post in advance. Past issue elements include: labyrinth, trace, reflex; measure, cleaver, silver; mania, tower, exposure.
The most recent issue (Fall 2016 #12) features the elements passageway, relic, kiss. “When we first chose the elements for this issue . . .” write the editors, “we worried that this specific trio of words would be a bit too leading. Would we get dozens of submissions about alluring, illicit affairs, kisses stolen along the shadowy hallways of castles and cathedrals? As it turned out – the answer was no. This issue is filled with writers and artists who surprised us, who made us see and consider the elements in ways we never had before, and we are honored to be able to share their work with you all.”
The elements for Issue 13 are THREAD, GLAZE, MURMUR with a submission deadline of October 31.
“Drone Confessional” a collaborative broadside with a poem by Kim Garcia and art by Helen Beckman Kaplan is the Broadsided poster for October 2016. Broadsided Press provides the opportunity for writers and artists to come together to create a work to share with Vectors – people who then download the free PDF and post it around their neighborhood, workplace, or travel destination. Each month’s writer and artist also provide commentary on their pieces and the collaborative process.
If you’d like to be a Vector, all you need to do is print and post the broadside. Broadsided Press would also like to encourage colleges and universities to start their own broadside collaborations! Visit their website here for more information.
Hotel Amerika promotes itself as a publication for “writing in all its forms. . . traditional work alongside the experimental. We strive to house in our pages the most unique and provocative poetry, fiction and nonfiction available. Work with a quirky, unconventional edge—either in form or content—is often favored by our editors. Hotel Amerika is an eclectic journal that attracts an equally eclectic audience.” To that end, last year they held a Transgenre Writing Contest, the winners featured in their Spring 2016 issue.
1st Place
Sarah Minor, “Nest”
2nd Place
Dana Curtis, ” Two Films”
Honorable Mention
adrian nichols, “lexicon of anarchy, no. xxii”
Sophie Monatte, “Fragments”
Other writers who works are included in the Transgenre section: Jessica Hollander, Julia Brennan, Katherine Riegel, Elizabeth Bryer, Lisa Samuels, Amy Newman, and Sara Biggs Chaney.
Since 2013, Noemi Press and Letras Latinas (the literary imitative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame) have been co-publishing under the Akrilica Series to showcase innovative Latino writing.
You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior by Carolina Ebeid joins the ranks of the Akrilica Series, published in September 2016. Ebeid’s first book, You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior has been called “a book of listening and responding and listening again” (Shane McCrae) that uses “[t]he voice of a mother, of lover, of friend” (Julie Carr).
More information about the book and the series can be found at the Noemi Press website.
The Fall 2016 issue of Ruminate features winners and select honorable mentions and finalists from their 2016 contests:
2016 Janet B McCabe Poetry Prize
Judge Alice Fulton
FIRST PLACE: “Yellow” by Melissa Reeser Poulin
SECOND PLACE: “Small Implosions” by Barbara Ellen Sorensen
HONORABLE MENTION: “The Lord, Walking in the Evening” by Michael Schmidtke and “Deer Apples” by Sally Thomas
With October here, it’s time to announce a couple of the award-winning books slated for publication this month.
Winner of the 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, Of This New World by Allegra Hyde, hit the shelves earlier this month. The collection starts at the Garden of Eden and ends on a Mars colony, each story wrestling with “conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink,” and asking the fundamental human question: “Is paradise really so impossible?” Of This New World is Hyde’s first collection, and it’s now available at the University of Iowa Press website (now currently on sale for the frugal reader!).
Love Give Us One Death: Bonnie and Clyde in the Last Days by Jeff P. Jones is the winner of the 2015 George Garrett Fiction Prize. Final Judge Tracy Daugherty says the book of the two famous outlaws shows “larger dimensions: the spiritual shadows and compulsive needs from which our nation springs and through which it has found its many forms of speech.” This is Jones’s first book, and copies are available from the Texas A&M University Press website.
Able Muse has announced that Nicole Caruso Garcia has joined their staff as Assistant Poetry Editor, replacing the departing Richard Meyer. Nicole Caruso Garcia was born grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, earned her B.A. in English from Fairfield University, and an M.S. in Education from University of Bridgeport. She was a 2006 Summer Institute Fellow of the Connecticut Writing Project and currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Trumbull High School in Connecticut. Her poetry has appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Willow Review, The Raintown Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Soundings East, The Ledge, Poetry Midwest, and Small Pond Magazine of Literature, and she received the Spring 2010 Willow Review Award. But, to show her ability to flex poetic styles, while she tends toward formalist poetry, “her rapping alter ego, Capital G, often visits to bust a rhyme for her students.” We at NewPages can dig it.
Continuing an annual tradition started three years ago, Creative Nonfiction presented a list of topics to its newsletter subscribers and social media followers and had them vote for the ones they liked best. “Mistakes” was the first issue (#53), followed the next year by “Waiting” (#56), and now, for 2016, “Childhood” (#60), with the subtitle: “It’s not all fun and games.” Each Readers’ Choice issue also includes a Best Essay contest. Readers can access on the CNF website the winning essay, “The Walk Home” by Judith Barrington, and an interview with Barrington; “Before We’re Writers, We’re Readers” by Randon Billings Noble – 15 nonfiction authors on the true (or mostly true) stories they read as kids; Lee Gutkind’s introduction; and two additional pieces: “I Survived the Blizzard of ’79” by Beth Ann Fennelly and “Writing Motherhood” by Marcelle Soviero.
The Fall/Winter 2016 issue of Nimrod Magazine includes the winners, runners-up, and numerous finalists from thier annual literary awards.
Nimrod Literary Awards: The Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry
FIRST PRIZE: Markham Johnson, OK, “Greenwood Burning, 1921”
SECOND PRIZE: Bryce Emley, NC, “Thesis/Antithesis” and other poems
Nimrod Literary Awards: The Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction
FIRST PRIZE: Chad B. Anderson, D.C., “Maidencane”
SECOND PRIZE: Ruth Knafo Setton, PA, “Swamp Girl”
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Susan Finch, TN, “My Friends, My Sisters, My Doppelgangers”
Daniel Hamilton, KY, “Dragonslayers”
Photographer John Chavers’ kaleidoscope image is featured on the October 2016 online issue of Crab Fat Magazine, a journal “founded on the principles of inclusive & diverse writing/publishing.” And they mean it.
The Georgia Review has been turning heads for 70 years and will be celebrating through the year with a variety of special events that they will update on their website. The Fall 2016 cover art (“#1637”) is by Masao Yamamoto, whose work is also featured with an introduction and full-color, twelve-page portfolio within.
Copper Nickel, the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver, features several Translation Folios in each issue, spotlighting the works of several writers in translation. The Fall 2016 (#23) issue includes five poems by Jerzy Ficowski introduced and translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, three prose poems by Shoba introduced and translated by Paula Gordon, and four poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski introduced and translated by Piotr Gwiazda.
Southern Humanities Review 49.4 includes a special poetry section of the winners, runners-up, and finalists of their 2015 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize honoring Jake Adam York. In addition to publication, the winner, Mark Wagenaar [pictured] received $1,000 and travel to Auburn, Alabama in October 2015 to read his award-winning poems at the Julie Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art alongside Richard Tillinghast, the final judge of the 2015 prize. This event kicked off the 2015 Auburn Writers Conference. The contest is held annually in honor of Jake Adam York, poet, fifth-generation Alabamian, and an undergraduate alum of Auburn University, whose works “examined race relations in the South, celebrating the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement and questioning, as a native son of the South, his own complicity in its tragedies.”
Winner
Mark Wagenaar
First Runner-up
Susan O’Dell Underwood
Second Runner-up
Doug Rutledge
Finalists
Mehul Bhagat
Ryan Black
Cortney Lamar Charleston
Meghan Dunn
Jennifer Givhan
Pamela Hart
Susanna Lang
Ansley Moon
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
The Antioch Review, “one of the oldest, continuously publishing literary magazines in America,” celebrates 75 year of publishing fiction, essays, and poetry from both emerging as well as established authors. The celebration begins with the Summer 2016 issue, Part I, with a selection of “firsts” and a few “favorites” from the 40s – 60s. Editor Robert S. Fogarty includes the first poem and first story published in the journal, as well as the “most downloaded” essay which was first published in 1943.
Also shared within this historical collection is the “Preamble and Statement of Principles” collectively written by The Association of Literary Magazines of America when those 19 magazine organizers first met in 1961. It begins: “Resolved, that we form an association, the purpose of which is to increase the usefulness and the prestige of the literary magazines in the United States and Canada,” and later makes the following statement that still rings true today: “A nation’s body of literature does not depend wholly on a the great, and since the magazines have served as a seedbed for each generation of creative writers they have also helped to preserve the very impulse to literary creation. The literary magazines of the present generation are continuing this indispensable tradition.”
The American Poetry Review provides readers a glimpse inside their bi-monthly publication by providing featured works of poetry on their website. From the September/October 2016 issue, readers can enjoy works by Marie Howe, Afaa Michael Weaver, Nicole Steinberg, Jane Wong, Carlos Pintado, and Beth Ann Fennelly. Available in the print edition is the full content, which includes Michael Dowdy’s commentary “Reading Latina/o Poetry in the Summer of Trump” and Edward Hirsch’s “What is the Task?” – a version of an essay which appears as the introduction to The Best American Poetry 2016.
The Raleigh Review Fall 2016 issue features “Red Madonna” by Geri Digiorno on its cover, an appropriate welcome to its contents, which Editor Rob Greene comments: “Many of us enter the arts as a way to heal . . [the arts] is about real people trying to make a better world. We hope the work in this volume guides you a better understanding of humankind.”
“Jenna’s First” by William Paul Thomas adorns the cover of The Carolina Quarterly Fall 2016, with a full-color portfolio of his work within. “I paint representations of disembodied heads of people in my social circle and sometimes scrawl text directly over their likenesses,” Thomas writes in his Artist’s Statement. “As it relates to my portraits, whatever the viewer derives from looking is the correct interpretation. I embrace symbolic ambiguity while clinging to observational specificity.”
“My work explores narratives that recognize the urgency and conflict in our continuing attempts to connect to the world around us,” writes Hanna Dansie in her Artist’s Statement. Her work is featured both on the cover of the Spring/Summer 2016 Hayden’s Ferry Review and with several internal pages as well.
