Find the latest news from literary and alternative magazines including new issues, editorial openings, and much more.
The Autumn 2019 issue of The Gettysburg Review features a selection of paintings by Anne Siems; fiction by Cody Harrison, Gary Amdahl, and Kathryn Harlan; essays by Valerie Sayers, Geoff Wyss, and Floyd Collins; poetry by Gregory Fraser, Robert Gibb, Adam Tavel, G. C. Waldrep, Connor Yeck, Kathryn Nuernberger, Alison Pelegrin, Todd Davis, Alice Friman, Nancy Carol Moody, Edward Mayes, Averill Curdy, Joyce Sutphen, Sarah Kain Gutowski, and Stanley Plumly.
In the latest issue of Chinese Literature Today, find a special feature on Twenty-First Century Chinese Theater with work by Liu Hongtao, Zhang Xian, Li Jing (including an interview with Li Jing by Liu Hongtao), Zhai Yueqin, Ding Luonan, Chen Jide, and Song Baozhen. Also in this tenth anniversary issue: a tribute to Jin Yong with work by Liu Hongtao, Paul B. Foster, and Weijie Song; work by Xiao Fuxing; and featured scholar Charles A. Laughlin.
Magazine Review by Andrea Diamond
Ellen Hinsey and Jakob Ziguras were invited to assist the New England Review in compiling a collection of poems written by previously untranslated Polish authors in a special issue titled “Polish Poetry in Translation: Bridging the Frontiers of Language” (Volume 40 Number 2, 2019). No doubt, Ellen Hinsey, who had previously used love as her guide to identify works to include in her book Scattering the Dark: An Anthology of Polish Women Poets, was chosen for her care and attention.
The introduction to Hinsey’s anthology is referenced in an editor’s note in this issue and highlights difficulties that translation presents. Hinsey describes how even best efforts are often unable to fully create expressions and understandings in English that exist uniquely in Polish (and other languages) while also preserving beauty in the verses. Continue reading “New England Review – Polish Poetry in Translation”
Walloon Writers Review edition 6 is a collection of poetry, short stories and nature photography inspired by Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. This independent regionally focused literary magazine is published annually. “Edition 6” edited by Associate Editor Glen Young, is so titled as this is our first digital edition. Walloon Writers Review edition 6 is available on issuu and the link can be found on our website. No charge for the digital edition this year. Cover photography by Elizabeth J. Bates.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
Mary Birnbaum’s nonfiction piece “Owosso” caught my eye in the latest issue of Crazyhorse, not only because it’s the winner of the Crazyhorse Nonfiction Prize, but because it’s a familiar name (though a surprise to see in a national literary journal); the tiny town in Michigan is a mere hour away from where I’ve lived my whole life. It’s also where Birnbaum’s grandfather lived, she learns as she reads his obituary at the gym. This discovery leads her on an exploration of the concept of ghosts and hauntings.
Across the country, Birnbaum writes of the ghostly characters of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and personal ghost stories shared by two friends. This leads her to look at the ghosts of her own life. These are not supernatural beings haunting the darkness, but are her father and her grandfather, two strangers removed from her life.
Birnbaum’s thoughts about her father and grandfather are complex and complicated. She breaks her ideas apart into small chunks, making them easily digestible as she bounces back and forth between ghost stories, the “what-ifs” of finding and confronting her father, and her discovery at the gym. At one point she wonders, “if it’s worse to be a ghost or to be haunted. I wonder if both are possible in me,” leading me to consider the ways in which I myself am a ghost or am being haunted in my own life.
As the essay wraps up, Birnbaum decides to label Owosso a mythical location. But while the small city is something separated from herself, it did conjure up from the shadows a tiny, welcomed connection between writer and this reader.
Magazine Review by Shaun Anderson
Alyssa Quinn’s “Transcendence: A Schematic”—Meridian Editors’ Prize 2019 winner—explores her efforts to process the loss of her brother. Weaving together a pilgrimage to Walden Pond, her memories of her brother, and her own beliefs and doubts, Quinn probes the hollowed out spaces, searching for a truth she can hold in the absence of her brother.
The exploration of emptiness leads Quinn to consider the places others turn to for truth. She explores science, religion, and maps, searching for a space where she can find her brother. Even in form, Quinn demonstrates absence as she creates a schematic, seeking answers from figures that do not exist. As Quinn tries to present an answer to her questions about death, transcendence, and reality she can only state with absolute uncertainty, “Perhaps the center is just as elusive as the beyond; matter as problematic as spirit.” In death, Quinn’s brother has shattered Quinn’s understanding of reality.
While the essay pulses with the agony of living in an emptied reality, Quinn recognizes that even her writing has been reformed by the loss of her brother. Quinn must confront the fact that “Syntax cannot convey true absence—say ‘I miss him’ and there he is again—there is no language for loss, for such awful missing.” Her work plunges into the loss of her brother, and emerges with the knowledge that Quinn must create a space to hold her brother within her own words.
About the reviewer: Shaun Anderson is a creative writing student at Utah State University.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
The Fall 2019 issue of the Missouri Review invites readers to wander away from the ordinary into a world that’s a little bit “off” in its feature. In “Dream Logic: The Art of Ten Contemporary Surrealists,”Kristine Somerville offers a brief history of the surrealist art movement.
While we learn the history, we also see full-color images of surreal artwork, including embroidered mixed media images by Robin McCarthy, clay sculptures by Ronit Baranga, collages by Rodriguez Calero, and more. Indeed, these all carry dreamlike qualities as they challenge our expectations. Each piece grabs the eye and forces it to take in new, creative perspectives. Baranga’s work features grotesque human features emerging from delicate teacups. Gensis Belanger’s work seems to showcase the ordinary until you blink and realize a stool is supported by four large cigarettes instead of regular legs, and the foot inside the sandal that rests on the stool is actually a hot dog. Whimsy and dream logic reign in this feature. The provided history grounds us, though, giving a clear lens through which we can examine the art.
Somerville closes with the reminder, “surrealism provides an outlet for creativity and spontaneity and an escape from the tyranny of the real.” Allow yourself to escape for a moment and wander into the dreams of the surreal artists found in the Fall 2019 issue.
Garth Greenwell interviewed by Ilya Kaminsky in The Paris Review.
I don’t know how much these distinctions exist for me. Certainly I think the conversation of art doesn’t care about them very much. I’ve always been turned off by a kind of assertive Americanism, and the American writers I love best, from Hawthorne and James and Baldwin to Alexander Chee and Yiyun Li, have all been cosmopolitan in their tastes and views. Of course, America is important to my writing—the landscape of the American South, the rhythms of American speech, the expansive, sometimes-redemptive, sometimes-toxic sense of American selfhood.
What it means to be American is one of the subjects of my books, as it is of any book about Americans abroad. Bulgaria is important to the books, too. I was speaking Bulgarian every day as I wrote What Belongs to You. Often enough, I spoke only Bulgarian. The rhythms of Bulgarian—the most beautiful, the most musical language in the world, so far as I’m concerned—are part of those sentences, as is the cityscape of Mladost, the quarter of Sofia where I lived, which I also think is very beautiful, though maybe with a difficult kind of beauty.
“The Devotions” issue features fiction by Sabirah Orah Mark, JoAnna Novak, Pablo Piñero Stillmann, Su-Yee Lin, Roger Topp, and more; nonfiction by Jenny Boully, Spencer Reece, Joan Connor, Tyler Mills, D. Gilson, and others; film by Will Stockton; art by Jochern Hendricks; Sabrina Orah Mark in conversation with Vi Khi Nao; and poetry by Peter Cooley, Endi Bogue Hartigan, Matthew Henriksen, Dujie That, Steffi Drewes, G.C. Waldrep, Antonia Pozzi, Owen McLeod, Bronwen Tate, Cary Stough, Sarah Destin, Alisha Dietzman, Christian Wessels, and more.
The Antioch Review Summer 2019 issue opens with postmodernist African-American painter and printmaker Emma Amos’ 1957 Antioch College senior paper about her education as an artist whose works are currently scheduled to go to the Smithsonian. Investigative reporter Jay Tuck’s “Mankind’s Greatest Challenge: Artificial Intelligence” is a well-founded call for caution in what has become the wild west of virtual reality. Mika Seifert’s “Old Timers” will send chills up your spine and “Coming in on Time” by Stuart Neville will have you reaching for tissues. Our poetry selection rounds out this issue that once again delivers the best words in the best order.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
The Fall 2019 issue of Weber includes two poems by Bill Snyder: “Redundancy” and “Home.”
Snyder travels through time in these poems. In “Home,” he brings us to 1972 as he hitchhikes to his father’s house in Florida to surprise him with his arrival, and in “Redundancy,” he brings us to 1995 while he plays Scrabble with his mother.
Snyder writes with clarity, each poem rich with description that never bogs the message down. Each feels like a tiny short story, grabbing readers and pulling them into the scene. We are sitting at the table with his mother, “sunlight seeping in.” We are standing on the side of the road waiting in the humid air for a car to stop, “the sun behind a Burger King, Kentucky Fried, / all the rest.”
These poems are a pleasure to read, an intimate gaze at the familial bonds of Snyder’s speaker.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
Each issue of Ruminate opens with “Readers’ Notes,” a response from a variety of readers/writers on the issue’s theme. This is one of my favorite parts of the issue—the little snippets of connection. The Winter 2019/20 theme is “Shelter,” and thirteen readers write in with their thoughts on the subject.
It’s interesting to see the variety of approaches writers take as they cover this topic. A few speak of physical structures that offer shelter. Benjamin Malay writes of an abandoned farmhouse found while hitchhiking; Duane L. Herrmann’s shelter is a screened-in porch during childhood; and Sharon Esterly writes of a DIY Cold War bomb shelter. Moving away from man-made structures, Rebecca Martin observes a child’s own body being their shelter; Liz Degregorio’s shelter is “the kindest lie” her father could tell her as a child; and Sarah Swandell’s shelter is a womb.
Each of these pieces is short and succinct. All grab attention and hold fast as readers unfold the layers that reveal the shelter within. The Readers’ Notes section serves as a great opener for Ruminate, both as a warm-up for the rest of the issue, and as a way to jog one’s own creativity, prompting consideration on how we too might briefly write on the given topic.
december‘s Fall/Winter 2019 issue features the winners and honorable mentions of the 2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Fiction and Nonfiction.
This year’s Award in Fiction was judged by Rita Mae Brown, and the Award in Nonfiction was judged by Amy Chua. Contest Editor Lauren Lederman introduces the winners, and readers can find a full list of finalists inside the issue.
2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Fiction
First Place
“The Land Behind the Fog” by Andrea Eberly
Honorable Mention
“The Augmentation Dilemma” by TN Eyer
2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Nonfiction
First Place
“Gumdrop Electric” by Sarah Treschl
Honorable Mention
“The One Who Didn’t Stay” by Samantha Rogers
Valley Voices brings readers a special edition on ekphrastic poetry with the Fall 2019 issue. Fifty-seven poems by forty-two poets follow the theme, and John J. Han pens the essay: “A Verbal Response to Visual Art: The popularity, Types, and Composition of Ekphrastic Poetry.”
Opening the issue is a sort of call and response between husband and wife duo Leo Touchet and Elizabeth Burk in “Louisiana: A Duet of Photographs and Poems.” Touchet’s photographs serve as inspiration for Burk’s poetry. After the selection, the two speak with Editor John Zheng about their work, both as individuals and as a creative pair.
Zheng introduces the issue with, “[ . . . ] ekphrastic expressions are not simple interpretations; they are, instead, reinterpretations that experiment with imagination, language, and synesthesia in the creative process of writing poetry.” Check out the creative experimentations in the Fall 2019 issue and let it inspire you to experiment with your own ekphrastic work.
Plume has hit quite a milestone this month. Their December 2019 issue is their 100th publication. As usual, they bring readers a fine selection of poems (some with audio recordings), a smattering of book reviews, and one essay. However, they stray from their usual format with their featured selection. While readers will normally find one poet interviewed with a selection of their poetry in this section, this month the staff has chosen to feature favorites selected from the past 100 issues.
These selections include: Rasha Abdulhadi (Issue 88), Angie Estes (Issue 46), Stephen Dobyns (Plume Anthology Number 7), Amy Beeder (Issue 67), Tom Sleigh (Issue 17), Justyna Bargielska translated from Polish by Benjamin Paloff (Issue 77), and Stephen Dunn (Issue 2).
If readers are feeling especially ambitious, they can find their own favorite poem among the full archive of all these past issues.
Stepping back in time to 1960s-Manhattan, author and former supernumerary actor with the New York City Opera Company (NYCO), Edward Hower reminisces of sharing the stage with the magnificent, world-renowned coloratura soprano, Beverly Sills in “Echoes.”
Readers, performers, and devout season ticket holders alike are presented with backstage passes to one of the most opulent, velvet-covered theaters in the world. Hower’s recollections are so detailed that we can smell the sweat seeping through the make-up, pantaloons, and Roman breastplates.
Through a tender, adoring lens, Hower observes how Sills’s pianissimos float through the air forever, with descents so dazzling that guests are left liquified. Questions of purpose and place are contemplated in between the echoes of scales and vibratos: whom to love and how to love them, refusing to give up by giving in, and to what ends one must sacrifice for the sake of maintaining their integrity. As audience members we too may feel, as Hower expresses, “the tremor of applause rising through us” as we seek triumphant courage amid the tyranny of doubt on the stages of our own lives.
Review by Camille Sleight-Price
After twenty-seven years, Jennifer Barber has left her position as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander. In the Summer 2019 issue, readers can find a portfolio, edited by Fred Marchant, dedicated to Barber’s work with Salamander over the years.
Location is a strong theme among these poems. Martha Collins writes of Santa Fe in “Passing,” flashes of scene and memory flitting by as she walks us through the streets; Valerie Duff sits at the titular “Fry’s Spring Filling Station” in Charlottesville, VA and thinks of the passage of time; Danielle Legros Georges lands in Cap-Haitien, Haiti in “Green Offering”; Yusef Komunyakaa quietly reflects on the train stop at Liberty Airport in Newark, NJ; and Gail Mazur considers hiking Ice Glen trails in Massachusetts, thoughts of romanticism and friendship drawing her there. If you’re unable to get out and travel this summer, take a mini literary vacation through this selection of Salamander.
Between those stops on the map are other great poems including “Selected Haiku for Jenny” by Maxine Hong Kingston, a set of three-lined stanzas that seem almost like a writing exercise to urge her to write, as it begins “There are days of no poems. / Not even 17 sounds will come.” And then later “Haiku master: ‘No need / for 17 syllables. [ . . . ] / Be free.” In “Recovery,” Jeffrey Harrison writes of a familiar feeling for me: the fear of breaking a favorite coffee cup. In one moment, he thinks he’s lost it, and in the next it’s still there, “its yellow somehow brighter,” better now that he’s felt its loss.
There are plenty more poems to check out in this portfolio, a fitting good-bye for Jennifer Barber and her dedicated work throughout the years.
Review by Katy Haas
The Chattahoochee Review Spring 2019 issue features the winners of the 2019 Lamar York Prize:
Winner for Fiction
Judge Kevin Wilson
“A Box of Photographs” by Peter Newall [pictured]
Winner for Nonfiction
Judge Adriana Páramo
“The Black Place” by Whitney Lawson
To read the judge’s commentary and see a full list of finalists, click here.
Entries for the Lamar York Prize are accepted from November 1 – January 31 of each year. In addition to publication, winners receive a prize of $1000.
Big Muddy has proven to be one of my most favorite journals to read. The topics of its many stories and poems speak to that downhome, simpler type of life, even if sometimes it may not be a positive image or experience for those involved.
Within its pages, you’ll find fiction, poetry, and essays that really make you think about life and the situations we find ourselves in. Most of the work and topics are directly related to the ten states bordering the Mississippi River, all the way from the U.S./Canada border to the Gulf Coast through Louisiana.
I always look forward to seeing what Plume Poetry is going to bring to the table with their Featured Selection each monthly issue. This month, they bring readers five poets under the age of thirty-five: Caroline Chavatel, E.G. Cunningham, Emma DePanise, Ella Flores, and Kimberly Grey. John A. Nieves briefly interviews the five as introduction to their respective two poems.
The latest issue of Southern Humanities Review features a set of four flash fictions by Judith Ortiz Cofer, a good sampling of the rest of the writing inside the issue: “My Mother Comes Back from the Dead,” “Eleven,” “Thirteen,” and “Sen-Sen.” Themes of family, self, and gender appear repeatedly in these four, posthumously published pieces, bound together by a common voice. I imagined the same narrator speaking throughout the pieces.
In her editor’s note to Runestone Journal Volume 4, Gretchen Marquette writes about the value of literature and its role in helping us better understand ourselves. Recent research has shown how fiction improves our understanding of the world around us as well as make sense of our own predicaments. Marquette goes on to express this as the power of all literature, and thus the responsibility of writers old and new to “show us the way forward in our private moments of despair.”
Works that ask: What is this? is what Leaping Clear values in its submissions. Artists and writers whose works are influenced by their involvement in meditative and contemplative practices will find a home here, as will readers who appreciate having a more interactive experience with what they read. Past issues included essay, fiction, music, video and photography, but this “Solstice” issue is focused solely on poetry and visual poetry.
The cover of SLICE Issue 23 is a confluence of great design choices, from the gorgeous, slightly menacing artwork of Teagan White to the title itself, which sits, top-trimmed, like a visual onomatopoeia. The cover is glossy, the text is bright and easy to read, and the issue is slim but still substantial. The magazine exudes a contagious confidence, a sense that this, here, is everything a lit mag should be.
The Fiddlehead is published four times a year, devoting its Summer 2018 issue to poetry and reviews of poetry collections. The out-going co-editor, Ross Leckie, in his editorial opener, lets readers know that the special summer issues are “larger than the regular issues,” and “have the feel of something like an annual anthology.” Divided into three thematic sections each presented with a line from one of the poems within as a title and a black and white copy of the cover art—Waning Summer Light, 2017 by Sonya Mahnic—the issue contains poems by thirty-four poets and is packed with memorable work to keep company with even in the coldest of winters.
Room, published out of Canada, continues to live by their tagline “literature, art and feminism since 1975.” Room has come a long way from the white, middleclass, lesbian pieces of the 1970s. Editor Leah Golob is proud to say in her Editor’s Letter how “the magazine has taken greater care to feature a more nuanced, inclusive, and intersectional approach to gender and sexuality.” This issue is dedicated to queer writers who are either women or genderqueer. Through fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and art, this issue of Room proclaims queerness that is presented in bodies and in history, a queerness that is today and yesterday and always.
You don’t have to be an expert in Chinese literature to enjoy Chinese Literature Today (CLT). And though this issue is dedicated to Chinese science fiction, featuring science fiction writer Han Song, you don’t have to be an expert in science fiction either. CLT features fiction, poetry, and interviews, in addition to literary and film criticism all by Chinese or (for the first time) Chinese-American and Tibetan authors. Framed by introductory and contextual pieces such as “A Very Brief History of Chinese Science Fiction” by Wu Yan and Yao Jianbin, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, CLT provides readers with necessary background. All the same, be aware that a good portion of the journal is dedicated toward academic articles and scholarship rather then wholly fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction.
Continue reading “Chinese Literature Today – 2018”
The Winter 2019 issue of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices online is dedicated to reviews and interviews, from authors of a wide range of genres. Included in the issue are interviews with Ana Jelnikar, Genia Blum, Serina Gousby, Tenzin Dickie, Jennifer Martelli, and Adriana Páramo, and reviews of Then Again by Ben Berman, Bad Harvest by Dzvinia Orlowsky, Rewilding by January Gill O’Neil, The Raincoat Colors by Helena Minton.
Cover photography, in addition to a portfolio inside this issue, by Keith Flynn, which documents “the effects of the Great Recession on the individual lives of people living in Appalachia, within a 75 mile radius of Asheville, North Carolina.”
After twenty-six years as editor-in-chief of Salamander, Suffolk University’s literary journal, Jennifer Barber has announced she is “stepping down to pursue other projects.”
“The magazine will continue to be housed in and nourished by the Suffolk University English Department,” she assures readers. The spring/summer 2019 issue will be guest edited, and any further information about future issues will be announced in the fall issue.
Our best wishes to Jennifer as she embarks on her new live adventures!
Light and Dark Magazine’s name is also part of their mission: to publish work that displays both the light and the dark side of humanity. The online issues are bite-sized and easy to digest, providing just a few pieces to take in throughout the month until the next issue is published. The November 2018 issue features two new pieces of fiction—“You Do What You Have To” by James MacDonald and “Santa Madusa” by Siolo Thompson—and cover art by Abigail Bonnanzio.
Glossy, heavy, and floppy, with a wingspan of seventeen inches and a page count of 310, Hotel Amerika, from a physical standpoint, is a struggle to read. The cover image, a sullen self-portrait by Canadian photographer Kourtney Roy, taken from her Autoportraits series, reimagines Snow White as a 1950s school dance wallflower, setting the mood for the eclectic mix of poetry and prose that follows. Roy’s wider body of work, available through her website, is an intriguing retro tour of America’s (and the wider world’s) physical and psychic landscape.
Fiction carries the day in Saw Palm 12, and the editors begin the issue with the genre via John Brandon’s smooth and seemingly unassuming “Hillsborough County Crime Report.” This was my first encounter with Brandon’s work—a fiction writer out of Florida who’s published almost exclusively through McSweeney’s. His story invites the reader into a side of Florida life captured often in film: the apparent world of organized crime. In this tale we meet The Driver and a chatty New Guy who was recently released from prison and is assigned to work with The Driver to tail a Subject.
The Summer 2018 issue of Kestrel is particularly focused on the theme “Love, Labor, and Loss.” In the Editor’s Note, Elizabeth Savage introduces work that “indicate[s] the unwitting effects and lessons of labor. . . . what counts as labor [ . . . ] —work valued for what it created or for the wages it earned.”
Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College invites writers to submit their best poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary shade.
This month, I had the joy of reading Ruminate’s Summer 2018 issue “Hauntings,” and I know some of these stories will “haunt” me for a long time to come. Ruminate is a reader-supported contemplative literary arts magazine that explores the creativity, beauty, and irony in the human experience. They publish works from the viewpoint of all world religions and spiritualties, although many of the published stories, artwork, and poems do not have an overt connection to faith or spirituality. Continue reading “Ruminate – Summer 2018”
I generally don’t like to play favorites, but chapbooks are hands down my favorite books to read. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry—it doesn’t matter. If it’s a chapbook, I want to get my hands on it. Wordrunner eChapbooks offers a twist on the usual chapbook by bringing them online. Dedicating each of their issues to one writer, they create a digital chapbook, a great little showcase of one author’s work.
Anyone searching for a traditional approach and literary collection will be comfortable and entertained by the Summer 2018 edition of Able Muse. This edition of artwork, poetry, essays, fiction, and interviews provides both entertainment and insight in what can best be complimented by its traditional approach and content. The literary works and the featured art theme encourage the reader to look further into the associated online poetry workshop Eratosphere.
Little Star 7 is understated, well-designed, bulky at nearly 400 pages, and packed with quality. The cover features “Blueblack Cold XIII” by Alison Hall, a work of subtle beauty best described by its title. The issue’s poetry is strong but mainly safe, invoking familiar gods and wonder at the workings of the world.
The Antioch Review is a literary magazine produced in Ohio since 1941 and is one of the oldest literary magazines still published in America. It contains essays, fiction, and poetry from a variety of authors and has played a role in literary history, having included pieces produced by some of the most well-known writers, like Ralph Ellison and Sylvia Plath. The Spring 2018 issue of The Antioch Review sticks to the theme of “Love & Kisses, Lust & Wishes.” It’s an issue about love, about lust, about what we could want, and about what we never got to keep.
While it’s not new to group “the arts” under a single umbrella of creativity, Nimrod expands this umbrella even further to consider the arts merged with diversity. Editor Eilis O’Neal breaks the poetry and fiction down into two categories: work about the arts (broadly speaking), and work by diverse artists (broadly speaking). There’s no division between these two categories within the table of contents or anywhere in the magazine, creating a seamless flow from piece to piece. Nimrod is expansively inclusive in what defines art and what defines diversity. This inclusivity aids in how welcoming the magazine is. Nimrod creates a place to gather and share stories.
Continue reading “Nimrod International Journal – Spring/Summer 2018”
Primarily an online publication of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and photography, Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices also provides the community with unique essays on its SolLit Blog. Recent features include:
“A Writer-Photographer’s Poignant Essay about Smelter Town” by William Crawford
“Women Writers’ Roundtable: Judy Juanita, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, and Dr. Raina J. León on Life-Changing Art” by Rochelle Spencer
“Misogyny and the Acceptance of Violence Against Women” by Patricia Carrillo [pictured]
“The Immigrant Experience Then and Now — and Hope for the Future” by Diane O’Neill
“Neurodiverse Students Need Creative Arts” by Donnie Welch
“Protesting Police Brutality: From Taking a Knee in the U.S to Striking in Catalan” by Chetan Tiwari and Sandell Morse
“Writing, Meditation, and the Art of Looking” by Marilyn McCabe
Guest bloggers are invited to contribute: “We seek inspirational and informative content from diverse voices on writing craft, writing process, diversity (or lack thereof?) in the lit world, recent trends in writing and/or literature, brief author interviews, and more.” See full submission guidelines here.
For over thirty years, New Delta Review has been publishing quality poetry, prose, interviews, and art, produced by students of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. They host annual contests, produce chapbooks, and publish online issues twice a year. The latest issue offers a strong selection of writing, with particularly strong prose.
Available open access online with the ability to order quality print copy, reading Star 82 Review is like walking through an old home and discovering all kinds of cool nooks and crannies. It is filled with imagination and smart and searing perspectives succinctly conveyed in poetry and prose, including Word + Image, art, and erasure text. Each issue is identified by an erasure poem featured on the front cover. This issue: “applying for worlds of compromises and empathy.”
Brilliant Flash Fiction promises to be even more brilliant than usual as they present the winners and shortlist of the “Wow Us” Writing Contest. Out of the 350 writers that entered, Eileen Malone, Suzanne Freeman, and Laton Carter stand out as the three placing winners.
Each poem in this issue of RHINO seems to be in the throes of observing disaster or its aftermath and attempting to make sense out of senseless tragedy and sorrow. The result is powerful poetry from beginning to end, some poems so intense that time must pass to allow the turmoil to settle before reading on. Yeats’s haunting phrase “A terrible beauty is born” is apt to apply to these poems. They are beautiful in their lyric distillation of fear, sorrow, and grief, and are fitting in the current social and political climate.
EVENT, a Canadian magazine published out of Douglas College, celebrates its thirtieth year printing a Notes on Writing issue. Established Canadian authors open the issue with essays reflecting on their lives as writers and writing as a piece of their lives. But more than simply reaching out to writers, EVENT grapples with questions writing can help answer, questions about discomfort and, at times, violence. Benjamin Hertwig’s Notes on Writing essay leaves us with the phrase, “uncomfortable in a most necessary way.” I couldn’t help but read the issue through that lens.
Sheila-Na-Gig and I share a couple things in common, I recently discovered. We both came into the world in 1990, and neither of us can get enough poetry. The journal has grown and adapted in the past twenty-eight years, now an online magazine with quarterly contests for poets. The latest issue of Sheila-Na-Gig online features two poems by the latest winner, Rebecca Dettorre, as well as work by eighteen additional poets.
Continue reading “Sheila-Na-Gig online – Fall 2018”This month, I had the enjoyment of reading the 2018 issue of The Meadow, a literary and arts journal published by the Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada. This annual publication pulls together poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork to make a collection that really encompasses great stories and representations of life, both in Nevada and throughout America’s heartlands.
The spring issue of Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR) is an assemblage of numerous pieces to inspire and stimulate. Form and function bestow imagery and metaphor in new and distinctive ways. The issue contains sixty-eight poems plus seven from featured poet, Gerald Stern, in addition to essays, reviews, and an interview, so there is much to savor and revisit at every reading.
There is something unusual about Sugar House Review. With its glossy paper and curious formatting, this magazine not only stands out among others but also delivers aesthetic pleasure to its readers. The Fall/Winter 2017 issue features simple yet bold design which, I am sure, will charm anyone holding it in their hands. In addition to its appealing design, Sugar House Review offers a great number of pieces that will excite attentive readers. This issue features poetry, “sugar astrology,” and an interview with Kevin McLellan whose poems appear on the earlier pages of the issue. Always curious to know about a poet’s process, I was delighted to see the inclusion of an interview that asks all of the indispensable questions giving a sneak peak into Kevin McLellan’s creative process.
