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At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!

2015 Rhino Editors’ Prizes

rhino-2015Every year RHINO Poetry selects works that have had the greatest impact on their editors. Cash awards are given in poetry for First, Second, and Honorable Mention, and the First Place winner is nominated for a Pushcart Prize (with other place winners occasionally nominated as well). There is also a Translation Prize which receives a cash award as well. There is no application process; the winners are selected from the general submissions to be published in the annual and are also published on the magazine’s website.

2015 Editors’ Prize in Poetry
First Prize: Jose Angel Araguz for “Joe”
Second Prize: Paul Tran for “[He picked me up]”
Honorable Mention: Nate Marshall for “buying new shoes”

2015 Translation Prize
“Cause” by Farouk Goweda, translated from the Arabic by Walid Abdallah and Andy Fogle
“Devil & Freedom” by Olja Savičević Ivančević, translated from the Croatian by Andrea Jurjević

Gaza: The Land Behind the Fence

eman-mohammedThe photography and writing of TED Fellow Eman Mohammed is featured in the spring/summer 2015 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. Eman Mohammed is a Palestinian refugee born in Saudi Arabia and educated in Gaza City. She is the first female photojournalist in Gaza, having started at the age of 19. The mother of two daughters, Eman “continues to shed light on hidden stories by documenting not only the war, but its aftermath and its effect on the people of the region.”

Eman Mohammed introduces her portfolio with several sections of writing: I. The Path / “You have to be a man”; II. The Blast Zone / Locked Doors; III. Mothers and daughters / “Many women died in the kitchen”; IV. Defining Moment / Broken Things; V. The Hole Inside My Heart.

2015 BrainStorm Poetry Contest Winners

The Spring 2015 issue of Open Minds: The Poetry and Literature of Mental Health Recovery features winners of the 2015 BrainStorm Poetry Contest:

open-minds-quarterlyFirst Place
“J’Arrive” by Cindy St. Onge
Portland, Oregon, USA

Second Place
“Curb Collection” by Tamara Simpson
Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Third Place
“What Has and Hasn’t” by Tyler Gabrysh
Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Honorable Mentions to be published fall 2015:

“Ophelia” by Ruthie-Marie Beckwith
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA

“Observational” and “The 4th Floor” by Katy Richey
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA

“The Rain King” by Thomas Leduc
Sudbury, Ontario, Canada

Atlanta Review Feature: Russian Poetry

cigaleThe Spring/Summer 2015 of Atlanta Review International Section, edited by Alex Cigale [pictured], features 52 Russian poets in translation. In his opening remarks, Editor and Publisher Dan Veach writes about the great Russian poets: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Yevtushenko, and Brodsky – who was exiled as a ‘social parasite.’

Veach comments, “On their worst days, poets sometimes wonder if what they do is useless . . . what these poets do is far from useless, and it was out of fear, not scorn, that Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union. As Oslip Mandelstam, who died in Stalin’s prison camps, once said: ‘Only in Russia is poetry respected; it gets people killed. Is there another place where poetry is so common a motive for murder?’ Independent thinking, a broad and human perspective, imagination, fearless criticism, creativity itself – these are the things that repressive regimes fear most, and for which we turn to poetry and poets.”

Books :: Cider Press Review Book Award

open-mouth-of-the-vase-amy-ashThe Open Mouth of the Vase by Amy Ash, the winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award, was published in January.

“Pain, love, regret, joy, longing, loss, humor, and an earthy sexuality all find memorable expression in these poems. Ash has a gift for reversing reader expectations in illuminating ways, as well as for coining metaphors that startle with their aptness and their ability to refresh the world,” says judge Charles Harper Webb of his selection.

The Open Mouth of the Vase is Amy Ash’s first full-length collection. Pick up a copy or learn more at the Cider Press Review website.

Shakespeare First Folio Tour 2016

first-folioThe Folger Shakespeare Library, in partnership with the American Library Association (ALA) and Cincinnati Museum Center, has announced the tour sites for its 2016 national traveling exhibition of First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare.

The First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. John Heminge and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, compiled 36 of his plays, hoping to preserve them for future generations. Many of Shakespeare’s plays, which were written to be performed, were not published during his lifetime. Without the First Folio, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays — including “Macbeth,” “Julius Caesar,” “Twelfth Night,” “The Tempest,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “As You Like It” — would have been lost.

The exhibition will tour the original 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare to all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. The locations include 23 museums, 20 universities, five public libraries, three historical societies and a theater. The list of sites with dates can be viewed here.

The national tour of the Shakespeare First Folio is part of the Folger’s Wonder of Will initiative in 2016 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

The Daily Vonnegut

Kurt-VonnegutThe Daily Vonnegut is a site of reviews of Vonnegut’s work, interviews with Vonnegut friends and scholars, links to Vonnegut-related resources, trivia, and “all things KV.” Writer Chuck Augello, who is also fiction editor of Cease, Cows, and long-time Vonnegut fan John Rebernik are the editors keeping the site fresh with a video of the month and a trivia challenge, in addition to other content. And they are looking for works by others to post on the site. Writers can send up to 2000 words on “How has Kurt Vonnegut and his work impacted your own work and your life?”

Books :: Iowa Poetry Prize

study-for-necessity-joellen-kwiatekStudy for Necessity by JoEllen Kwiatek was released in April 2015. Winner of the 2014 Iowa Poetry Prize from University of Iowa Press, “Kwiatek’s poems emit the uncanny luminosities of the artists’ worlds they refer to: those of Caspar David Friedrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Odilon Redon. Each is a ‘token of strangeness’ built with delicacy and restraint, embodying, vivifying what the poet calls the mind’s ‘lonesome flourish.’ Like entries in a recondite log, or the etchings, or tracks, of a complex consciousness, this work cannot help but identify its own material and spiritual corollaries: a bridle worn to threadbare, a voyage that ‘grows more & more captivating. More terse.’ It is, as one poem puts it, as if seeing / were a form of radiant / isolation. And yet the presence established over the course of the book is profoundly connective, rich with acute physical apprehension and charge. It moves under pressure toward its singular end, its very ‘necessity,’” says judge Emily Wilson.

Read an excerpt of Study for Necessity or pick up at copy at the University of Iowa Press website.

2015 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize Winners

chelsea-jenningsdecember literary magazine Spring/Summer 2015 includes the winners of their annual Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. First Place: Chelsea Jennings [pictured] for her poem “Heirloom” and Honorable Mention Sam Roxas-Shua for his poem “A Beast in the Chapel.” Contest judge Mary Szybist commented on the finalists, “It was difficult to select a winner from among the many terrifically interesting poems that were submitted to this year’s contest. In the end, however, these two poems . . . were the ones that took hold in my imagination, haunted me, and compelled me to return to them.”

Kenyon Review EcoPoetry

kenyon-review-mayjune15Having made the shift from publishing quarterly to publishing bimonthly in print, Kenyon Review Editor David H. Lynn writes, “One of the advantages of our new format – fewer pages and more frequent publication – is a greater flexibility and the opportunity to be more adventurous. In this issue of the Kenyon Review we flex those muscles for the first time, offering a special section devoted to poems that share ecological themes and concerns.” Curated and introduced by Poetry Editor David Baker, “Nature’s Nature: A Gathering of Poetry” features works by over 20 poets.

Lynn writes that this feature is not a “one-off,” but will continue. “The Kenyon Review‘s engagement with the ecological world and with science more generally will increase in coming years. Writing about science—by scientists on their own work and by other writers on scientific topics—is a challenging area we intend to explore more fully. Indeed, I’m interested in expanding the categories of literary writing beyond the often constrained arenas of much fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry we see today, to include ecology and science more broadly, as well as travel, history, and so on.”

Poem :: Margaret Zhang

I am Stapled to Your Alabaster Skin
by Margaret Zhang

For your wedding, you wore a bleached dress,
frills spilling over splintered bark skin.
The church sheltered us from thunder’s tantrums
as you sat at the organ, stapling pages to
your membrane. . .

Read the rest and more great writing in the Spring 2015 Canvas, an online litereary publication “for teens, by teens,” a project of the Writers & Books Literary Center in Rochester, New York.

Brevity Special Issue: The Experience of Gender

sarah-and-silas
The Experience of Gender is the theme of Brevity #49. This online issue of “concise literary nonfiction” features work from Kate Bornstein, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Ira Sukrungruang, Brian Doyle, Eunice Tiptree, Judy Bolton-Fasman, Sandra Gail Lambert, Cade Leebron, Deesha Philyaw, Jessica Hindman, Jody Keisner, Madison Hoffman, Mark Stricker, Samuel Autman, and Torrey Peters.

Guest Editors Sarah Einstein and Silas Hansen write, “These brief essays shine a light on the intersections of gender and race, sexuality, disability, faith, and social class, interrogate our strongly-held beliefs about what gender is and what it means, and show us how to embrace and celebrate gender fluidity.”

The Brevity craft section includes “Writing Trans Characters” by Pamela Alex DiFrancesco and memoirist Judy Hall’s “Balancing Act,” writing about her own transgender daughter tells readers, “But when it comes to writing about my children, there is another type of fear: I don’t want to screw it up.”

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

american-short-fiction-spring15
This striking mixed media, cut and paste collage on the cover of American Short Fiction is “The Swimmer” by B.A. Lampman, an artist in Victoria, B.C. See more of her intriguing work on her website, where she has some original works, prints, and cards for purchase.
south-dakota-review-51I can’t stop loving South Dakota Review‘s larger format publication, giving true space to the work within, as well as to the cover art. The whole publication has a kind of dark chocolate frosting feel: rich and luxurious. Lee Ann Roripaugh is credited for this cover art.

The Fiddlehead Contest Winners

The Spring 2015 issue of The Filddlehead includes the winners of their 24th annual Tell It Slant literary contest:

fiddlehead-spring15Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize
Sean Howard, “Cases (Unbound Poems, from Nova Scotia Reports)”

Honorable Mentions
Michael Prior, “The Hinny”
 Julie Cameron Gray, “Skinbyrds”

Short Fiction First Prize:
Lisa Alward, “Cocktail”

Honorable Mentions
David McLaren, “[nar-uh-gan-sits] a Rhode Island Thanksgiving”
Kari Lund-Teigen, “Something Like Joy”

These works can be read on The Fiddlehead website along with commentary from Editor Ross Leckie on the winning entries.

Vera’s Will

In a family saga that spans two countries, a half-century, and three generations, Shelley Ettinger’s Vera’s Will is both historical document and social commentary, deftly couched in beautifully written fiction. The story opens with Randy, a young lesbian, reflecting on her past while attending her Grandmother Vera’s funeral. It is at this emotionally tumultuous service where Randy meets and reacquaints with her grandmother’s friends that she has a startling realization: both her deceased grandmother and her favorite aunt are also gay. Continue reading “Vera’s Will”

Safekeeping

Jessamyn Hope’s debut novel opens with Adam, a 26-year-old drug-addicted burnout, fleeing from New York City to Israel. Adam’s caretaker and closest companion, his grandfather, has recently died. During the airplane ride, Adam broods on whether American authorities are following him. Experiencing withdrawals and toting an odd assortment of belongings, including an elaborate gold brooch, he volunteers to work on a kibbutz. He’s searching for someone. The circumstances of his grandfather’s death, the significance of the brooch, and the identity of whom Adam is searching for drive the thoughtfully plotted Safekeeping. Continue reading “Safekeeping”

Unaccompanied Minors

Unaccompanied Minors, winner of the New American Fiction Prize in 2013, is a slim volume of seven short stories about young adults facing teenage pregnancy, homelessness, prostitution, the death of a child on his babysitter’s watch, and so on. “Shelter,” the first story in the book, is an odd choice for an opening, in that the story largely relies on the limited shock value of having homeless teenagers for its protagonists. Reminiscent of Dorothy Allison’s project to represent the lives of young poor women from the South, Jones’s story is less angry, but similarly features young characters who hide their vulnerability behind tough facades and speech that is likewise patina’d with derogatory slang. Continue reading “Unaccompanied Minors”

My Feelings

My Feelings, the aptly primal title of poet and memoirist Nick Flynn’s fourth poetry collection, appropriately marks the book as the end product of long winnowing—an unequivocally subjective appraisal of life’s equivocations. In My Feelings, Flynn brings a memoirist’s robust conception of personal history to the page, crafting finely textured poems about what it means to live in the ever-growing aftermath called the present. To underscore the subjective nature of his collection, Flynn even includes a disclaimer telling readers that “[t]he word ‘my’ in the title is meant to signify the author.” Continue reading “My Feelings”

A Long High Whistle

According to the author, poetry anthologies are “like a museum exhibition.” They certainly suit every imaginable reading need: fulfilling the core curriculum; completing the home, school, or public library; satisfying the rare book collector; providing access to a favorite writer in one place. Now there is an exceptional anthology about poetry that is both quotable and useful. Readers of The Oregonian are already familiar with poet David Biespiel’s monthly column that ran between 2003 and 2013. Now selections from the series (ended by the author, not the newspaper) are available in A Long High Whistle; Selected Columns on Poetry. Continue reading “A Long High Whistle”

Cannot Stay

In these eleven essays that make up Cannot Stay: Essays on Travel, Kevin Oderman journeys widely: from Latvia to Italy to Turkey; from Indonesia to Cambodia to Vietnam. Oderman does not feign to completely absorb the cultures in which he travels. Who could in a week or a month? No, he does something better; he delves into an aspect or a couple aspects of a culture or its history. These aspects—whether a painting, a dance, a temple, a house, or a puppets show—he describes so intricately that, while I read, his obsessions became my obsessions, and, when I finished, I remembered my own obsessions, and was inspired to explore them with the same kind of passion and precision. Continue reading “Cannot Stay”

A Portal to Vibrancy

The particulars of a Catholic girlhood have endured through centuries. Friends, enemies, and colleagues never tire of offering unsolicited psychoanalyses of that guilt-laden live, learn, and worship by rote existence. What outsiders will never understand is that abiding by those rules leads—if one is willing—to a freedom they can never appreciate. Continue reading “A Portal to Vibrancy”

Metamericana

A good poem places pressure on language in an interesting way. This mantra can be peeled from the pages of Seth Abramson’s Metamericana. However, his secret seems to be that a good poem places pressure on ideas in an interesting way—that a good idea places pressure on old ideas in an interesting way. Philosophy places pressure on technology and technology places pressure on philosophy. All of this interacts in a swirling and kaleidoscopic manner. Continue reading “Metamericana”

a/0

Hemmed in by questions, suspended over days that mete out incremental evidence, with an investigative protagonist alternating between the archive and the street, this little chapbook—a/0—is an exemplar of the detective genre. But it is so much stranger than most. One wants to say Pynchon or Murakami. No usual suspects here, and the universe is not what you think. Continue reading “a/0”

Short Talks

“Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.” So reads the one sentence biographical author note as retained in this new edition of Short Talks, the poet Anne Carson’s first book of poetry originally published by Brick Books in 1992. In the years since its publication Carson has made a considerable name for herself as a poet, essayist, and astutely adept translator of Greek, with her translation of Sappho in particular garnering much well-deserved acclaim. While Carson has always kept her personal details on the relative down low even as she has, at times, courted a fair bit of notoriety, and while concision is a definitive hallmark of her oeuvre, the brevity of this bio note is thus at once both disarming and appealingly elusive, especially for a poet of her stature. Continue reading “Short Talks”

A Solemn Pleasure

A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write opens with “A Room in London,” a rumination on the physical space Melissa Pritchard occupied while temporarily living and writing in a borrowed London flat. This particularly brief piece (four pages) introduces the collection by touching on topics more thoroughly explored later in the book: Pritchard describes herself at work, presents her belief in writing as a spiritual—often religious—act, and embraces the essay’s ability to successfully grow around an ill-defined plot. Continue reading “A Solemn Pleasure”

Vine Leaves Seeks Prose Editor

vine-leave-14Vine Leaves Literary Journal is looking for “a dedicated and vignette-loving editor to help us navigate our impressive prose submissions.” They are hoping for someone wanting to stick around for a while who will make a 10-15 hour monthly volunteer commitment. For a full job description, click here. Deadline June 15, 2015.

GT March Family Matters Winners

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their March Family Matters competition. This competition is held twice a year and is open to all writers for stories about family of all configurations. The next Family Matters competition will take place in September. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.

Clare-Thompson-Ostrander-PWFirst place: Clare Thompson-Ostrander [pictured], of Amesbury, MA, wins $1500 for “The Manual for Waitresses Everywhere.” Her story will be published in Issue 97 of Glimmer Train Stories. This is her first national publication.

Second place: Wendy Rasmussen, of Seattle, WA, wins $500 for “Mesopotamian Nights.” Her story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train, increasing her prize to $700.

Third place: Paula Tang, of Riverside, CA, wins $300 for “Little China House.”

A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.

Deadline extended! Short Story Award for New Writers: June 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 1500-5000 words, but can go up to 12,000. First place prize is $1500. Second/third: $500/$300. Click here for complete guidelines.

The Children’s Corner

louisville-spring2015NewPages loves to encourage young readers and writers, evidenced by our Guide for Young Authors which lists publications with content by and for young readers as well as carefully vetted contests for young writers. Listed on our resources is the The Louisville Review, which features “The Children’s Corner” in every issue, publishing poetry from students in grades K-12. Their newest issue (spring 2015) features works by Kristin Chang, Diamond Woods, Diamond Hoffman, Ella Lombard, Mary Moore, Shirley Lu, and Shakthi Shrima. If you know young readers and writers, please encourage them! [Cover Photo: Manikin by Jack Daily]

Sin Fronteras Expands Its Borders

sin-fronteras-19Sin Fronteras / Writers Without Borders print journal has been around for 19 years, but as Co-editor Ellen Roberts Young tells us, “We have only in the last two years begun using the web to tell the wider world that we exist.” Publishing fiction, poetry, nonfiction, aesthetic reviews, as well as short plays, submissions are currently open until June 30. “Writers from around the U.S. and beyond are included issue #19,” Young says. “We’d like to hear from more.”

Though Sin Fronteras is based out of Las Cruces, New Mexico, Young warns the biggest mistake writers make in their submissions: “Sending something because it is about New Mexico instead of sending fully polished work. In deciding what to submit, remember that the border between the U.S. and Mexico is not the only border that raises issues. We are interested in work that describes or challenges borders of all kinds: physical, social, intellectual.”

Tribute to Larry Levis

larry-levisThe Southern Review spring 2015 begins with a twenty-some page tribute entitled, “Larry Levis: Unpublished Poems and the Cast of His Nest.”

In her Editor’s Note, Jessica Faust explains how she was first asked about publishing some of Levis’s unpublished poems which were being compiled for a book edited by David St. John. “In subsequent conversations with other contributors, I came across many poets who had been either mentored by Levis or influenced by his work. I was not surprised: my own admiration for Levis’s work draws me to writing that echoes his style and subjects. What began as a suite of Levis poems grew into a tribute that would also include works by writers he taught or inspired or who were his friends.”

The selection includes an introduction by David St. John, five poems by Levis, and poetry by Philip Levine, David St. John, Ryan Teitman, Peter Everwine, Anna Journey, John Estes, and Joshua Poteat.

High School Writing Contest Winners

sierra-nevada-review-26The newest issue of Sierra Nevada Review features select winners of their 5th annual High School Writing Contest, a national competition for high school juniors and seniors. Chosen from a record 525 entries from students across the United States, the winners in each category receive a cash prize of $500 for first place, $250 for second and $100 for third, and the $100 Local’s Prize honors student writers from Nevada and California. The winners also receive a $20,000 scholarship offer from SNC and consideration for publication. For a full list of winners, visit SNR’s website here. Included in the issue:

Fiction
First Place: Emily Zhang (Boyds MA), “Midwestern Myth”

Non-Fiction
Lindsay Emi (Westlake Village, CA), “Latin Class in Seven (VII) Parts”
Gabriel Braunstein (Arlington MA), “Family on the Commuter Rail”

Poetry
Oriana Tang (Livingston NJ), “Bildungsroman”

Books :: Open Book Poetry Competition

bottle-bottles-bottles-bottles-lee-uptonThe Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Poetry Competition’s 2014 winner has been released at the beginning of the month. Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles was selected by Erin Belieu. Of her selection, Belieu says, “This is without a doubt my new favorite book. Upton has long been a well-respected poet, prose writer, and literary critic, but she deserves much more popular attention, including yours.”

You can start by checking out Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles on the CSU website.

New Lit on the Block :: Julep Journal

julep-journal-winter2015Based out of Nashville, Tennessee, Julep Journal has just issued its third print volume to complete its first year of publication. Named, as you might well have guessed, after the delightful southern cocktail, the editors comment, “We identify with it. It’s Southern by origin and in spirit. It’s refreshing, clean. It’s simple but has innumerable variations.”

In keeping with that refreshing spirit of variation, Julep publishes all genres – fiction, poetry, creative essays, academic treatises – and, according to the editors, “we especially love pieces that exist between or beyond those boundaries. In other words, if it doesn’t fit in with more rigid, binary journals, there is a home in Julep.”

Giving this new writing a home are founding editors Joseph Storey, Kevin Foster and Greg Frank, and editors Brittney McKenna and Theron Spiegl, who “like good Southerners, believe in the power and beauty of a fine physical object.”

When asked the motivation for starting up a literary magazine, the editors go back: “Years ago, we would sit around coffee shops and complain about the state of cultural journals. So many do little more than spin the wheels of their chosen genre, advance a binary political position with an inherently limited type of nuance, or represent only a corner of a region. We dreamt of a journal that advances art, represents the spectrum of the creative work of a region, and pushes beyond political binaries. The narrative of the Southern Renaissance, Nashville and the surplus of its creative economy, was rolling at the time. So we decided to start a journal as a platform for the work that was happening.”

As such, readers of Julep can expect to find anything and everything that fundamentally excellent writing and visual art. “A distinctly Southern, non-binary artistic and cultural perspective,” the editors promise readers. “The best work of upcoming Southern intellectuals and artists.” The most recent issue features works by Eileen Fickes, Stephen Mage, Daniel Pujol, Cameron Smith, Matthew Truslow, Jessica Kennedy, and featured artist Robert Scobey.

While publishing as a triannual the first year, the editors are planning to extend the length and cultural commitment of each journal and move to biannual printing. “We want every issue to eclipse the last in cohesiveness of theme, quality of work, and physical beauty. In order to accomplish this, we’re planning to publish twice yearly rather than thrice, with a greater range of art. We also want to build and grow our partnerships with artistic and cultural institutions across the South, including cohosting events of all types. Why create if it’s not ambitious?”

For writers, the editors are always accepting new pieces. The next issue will be available in mid-June, with plans to select pieces for Issue Five by the end of July. Visit the Julep website for more specific information about genres.

The most unique quality of Julep’s model is editorial. We reject the notion that ideas – and the attempts of writers and artists to express those ideas – exist in a vacuum. Julep’s team of editors support writers as they hone – and even sometimes create – their pieces. It’s a messier process, but the pieces turn out better and the final product is more thematically cohesive.

Craft Essays :: Tishman Review

tishman-reviewIn addition to publishing short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction and book reviews year-round, The Tishman Review keeps a regularly updated Craft Talk Blog that features interviews, commentary, reviews, and craft essays. These essays come in many styles: analyzing other’s work, “On Writing Towards Both the In-group and the Outliers” by Linda Michel-Cassidy; soul-bearing commiseration, “The Rejection Blues” by Jennifer Porter; confessional, “On Writer’s Block” by Maura Snell; writing practice, “Breaking Lines” by Barrett Warner; an editor’s perspective, “An Authentic Voice” by Jennifer Porter; writer-to-writer extensive focused discussion, “Objects in First-Person Fiction, or The Unreliable Narrator’s Stuff” by Linda Michel-Cassidy; and a thumping substantial analysis turned conversation between works by Calvino, Woolf, and Agee, “Lightness in Childhood” by Jennifer Porter.

PWs LGBTQ Feature

rainbow-booksPublishers Weekly’s May 25 LGBTQ feature kicks off a month-long look—in print, online, and elsewhere—at various corners of LGBTQ publishing. Below are topics already covered (each are linked to their full article on the PW site), with more issues planned for June, such as finding, publishing, and marketing LGBTQ titles, romance, comics and manga.

What authors, editors, and others would like to see next from LGBTQ publishing
How some key LGBTQ publishers are pushing boundaries in the category
How official classifications of LGBTQ books have evolved over the decades, and what that’s meant for readers
How religion houses are adapting to shifting public opinion around LGBTQ issues
How transgender characters are being depicted in books for children and young adults
Why one transgender author writes about all sorts of experiences, not just her own
How a Philadelphia AIDS charity stepped in to keep the historic Giovanni’s Room bookstore thriving

In addition, PW is running a “Queering the Title” contest, #queerabook. “We want to hear your boldest ideas for titles of LGBTQ books that don’t exist—yet. Yes, it’s a fun game, but it’s also a way of getting people to think about how much space there is in the ‘canon’ for queer and trans stories.” Twittering begins June 1.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

stoneboat-spring2015The Spring 2015 issue of Stoneboat Literary Journal features “Creation” by Gordon Gohr, a stunning image which will draw interested readers to the photo essay within by Mariko Nagai, “Hiroshima: The Occupation Period.”
main-street-rag-spring15Main Street Rag Editor and publisher M. Scott Douglass also contributes to this issue’s cover. A dog will always make my pick for the week, and this one, with animals stacked lazily about just looked too comfortable to pass up.
mamalode-shybaI guess the theme for this week’s covers could be “things that are stacked” or something like that. Mamalode makes it for its special edition “Better Together.” Jessica Shyba’s photo models are two of her four children and her dog, Theo.

Open Season Award Winners 2015

The Malahat Review #190 features the winners of the 2015 Open Season Awards:
malahat-review-190
Poetry
Rebecca Salazar, “synaesthesia”

Fiction
Wanda Hurren, “Rain Barrel”

Creative Nonfiction/Memoir
Michael Carson, “The Neanderthal and the Cave”

The publication includes an interview with each winning author which are also available on the publication’s website here.

[Cover Art: Étant donné: the Loris perched on his neoclassical plinth, 2008. Polystyrene, concrete adhesive, paper, paint / 68 in. × 24 in. × 21 in. / Collection of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art / Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay]

Owl of Minerva Award 2015

ChelseyClammer 02Minerva Rising literary journal “Celebrating the creativity and wisdom in every woman” offers a $500 scholarship to provide one woman with financial support to further her writing endeavors, awarded during Women’s History Month. The Owl of Minerva Award application requires women writers to answer the questions provided on the award page here. The judges will read for clarity as well as creativity. Writers may answer the questions in the genre they feel best represents each applicant. The application period ends June 1, 2015. Winner will be announced Fall 2015. [Pictured: 2014 Owl Award Recipient Chelsey Clammer]

Books :: Miller Williams Poetry Prize

reveille-george-david-clarkThe Miller Williams Poetry Prize is annually held by the University of Arkansas Press. Each year, three finalists are announced with one winner of $5000 and publication.

George David Clark, with his first collection of poems Reveille, is the 2015 winner. Editor-in-Chief of 32 Poems Magazine, Clark has also earned the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry and a Lily Postdoctoral Fellowship, among other honors.

Published this past February, Reveille, the publisher’s website says, “is rooted in awe and driven by the impulse to praise. At heart, these are love poems, though their loves are varied and complicated by terrible threats: that we will cry out and not be answered, fall asleep and never wake. Against such jeopardy Reveille fixes our attention on a lightening horizon.”

Readers can pick up a copy of this prize winner from the University of Arkansas Press website.

Drunken Boat Open Positions

Drunken Boat Looking For a Director of Development, Publicity & Marketing Director and Executive Assistant

Director of Development Position
The Director of Development is responsible for long-term financial planning for the organization in collaboration with the Founding and Managing Editors, including developing fundraising initiatives and campaigns; soliciting donations; writing grant statements and narratives; creating an annual grant application schedule; and working with senior editorial staff and advisory board to develop funding opportunities. This is a senior-level position, requiring a time commitment of approximately 5-7 hours a week.

Publicity & Marketing Director
The Publicity & Marketing Director is responsible for implementing our publicity and marketing strategy through traditional and new media outlets. This is a senior-level position, requiring a time commitment of approximately 5-7 hours a week. Responsible for overseeing promotion and social media staff in collaboration with the Assistant Managing Editor; selling and exchanging online ads; scheduling issue-launch publicity; maintaining Drunken Boat’s Twitter and Facebook accounts according to best practices; and developing and maintaining ongoing social media campaigns.

How to apply
Applicants with familiarity with working online and working in publishing are preferred. This is a great opportunity to be involved with an independent publisher that publishes books and a highly-acclaimed journal and that reaches over a hundred thousand unique visitors annually worldwide. If you’re interested, please send a CV and cover letter describing your interest to Managing Editor T.M. De Vos at [email protected]

Executive Assistant Position
The Executive Assistant will work directly with the Executive Director on a number of projects, including preparing books for publication, coordinating our reading series and partnering with other arts organizations. If you’re interested, please send a CV and cover letter describing your interest to Executive Director, Ravi Shankar at [email protected]

Happy 5th Raleigh Review!

raleigh-reviewHappy 5th Anniversary to Raleigh Review Literary & Arts Magazine! Started by Rob Greene in 2010 while completing his MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University, Raleigh Review has evolved into a non-profit organization that publishes an award-winning literary magazine and offers literary programs to a broad audience. The premier anniversary issue features poetry by Mark Smith-Soto, Joseph Bathanti, and Ellen Bass, among others, and fiction by Carrie Knowles, Randall Brown, and Petrina Crockford. Cover art is by Geri Digiorno with full-color interior art by Laurence Holden. Congratulations Raleigh Review – here’s to many more great years of publishing!

Midwestern Gothic – Spring 2015

Midwestern Gothic is “dedicated to featuring work about or inspired by the Midwest, by writers who live or have lived here.” On their About page, the editors say, “we take to heart the realistic aspects of Gothic fiction. Not every piece needs to be dark or twisted or full of despair, but we are looking for real life, inspired by the region, good, bad, or ugly.”

Continue reading “Midwestern Gothic – Spring 2015”

Boston Review – March/April 2015

Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, which publishes six issues per year, recentlycelebrated its fortieth anniversary, and that level of time and experience is evidenced by the high quality of the writing and the magazine’s simple yet elegant design. Aesthetically, I enjoyed how the poems were contained within thinly outlined boxes, the dimensions of which changed to best suit the need of each individual piece. Continue reading “Boston Review – March/April 2015”

New Interview Series on NewPages!

FanningWe are excited to announce the inaugural interview in our new series: NewPages Interviews with Creative Writing Teachers.

Our first interivew features Robert Fanning, author of Our Sudden Museum (forthcoming, Salmon Press), American Prophet (Marick Press), The Seed Thieves (Marick Press) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, and other journals.

In these interviews, writers who also teach discuss publishing, teaching, the business of editing and managing literary journals, and, of course, their own work and process. They offer advice and hard-won wisdom for burgeoning writers and their teachers. We also ask them about their favorite music, and who knows, maybe a favorite writer or two, and a great coffeeshop or beer to add to your “must try” list.

The interviews will be conducted by teacher/writer and editor of Pea River Journal, Trish Harris.

Please help spread the word!

Salt Hill – 2015

Syracuse, New York was the center of a major salt-mining industry in the 18th and 19th centuries, such that it acquired the nickname “Salt City.” This fact may explain the name of the literary magazine Salt Hill, which bears the logo of a little glass salt shaker. The magazine itself only says: “Salt Hill is published by a group of writers affiliated with the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.” Continue reading “Salt Hill – 2015”

New England Review – 2015

New England Review is a giant among literary magazines, published quarterly by Middlebury College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont. The current issue shows why New England Review deserves its sterling reputation. At 200 pages, it is filled with quality poetry, fiction, essays, and translations. There is no artwork, but as for literature, there is something for everybody: avant-garde free verse, stories set in slums and in high-rent New York, an academic piece on Herman Melville, and a reprint from an 1871 book on the old New England courtship rite called “bundling.” Continue reading “New England Review – 2015”

Passages North -Winter 2014

Quite notable in the 35th issue of Passages North is a section called Hybrid Essays that pushes creative nonfiction to daring forms of inventiveness and complexity. Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s hyper-short, personal pieces are exercises in compression, gleaming with economy and calculation; each less than a page long, one might mistake them for flash-fiction pieces, such as “In Gratitude to the Dream Sequence,” which meditates on power in the confines of the bedroom against power in the confines of the boardroom: “Afterward, be glad because she will not turn into your boss and tell you you’re fired.” Continue reading “Passages North -Winter 2014”