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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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“On Writing” is a series of guest posts written by writers for the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter, curated by Rob McLennan. On Writing #107 features former NewPager and poet Gina Myers. Entitled “Is there room in the room that you room in?,” borrowed from the opening sonnet in Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, Myers explores the concepts of community and inclusivity as place in poetry. Read the full post here.