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!
pH of Au by Vanessa Couto Johnson Parlor Press, January 2023
Through chemistry, alchemy, citizenship, and social connections, the speaker of pH of Au navigates location and displacement, physical and otherwise. A Brazilian, a Texan, a granddaughter, a periodically long-distance partner—through her various identities, some properties of gold manifest.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Mare by Seth Christian Martel is a graphic novel that takes readers on a paranormal adventure with Indigo, a post-senior-year teen whose next steps are uncertain due to her rocky home life. As with any good YA story, Indigo has a best friend who is both a sidekick and a guide. Kasia is the steady rock with a summer internship and plans to go to medical school, a foil to Indigo’s widowed and now divorced alcoholic father whose need for caretaking causes Indigo to lose her job. All of these could be contributors to Indigo’s strange nightmares in which she is possessed by some ethereal being. Concern for Indigo’s health due to lack of sleep leads the two teens to explore remedies for her nightmares, or a “Mare” as they learn from a book – “the spirit of someone wronged that saps its victim’s energy at night.”
The images throughout are black and white with graywash and bold outlines that add a sense of 3-D. Blue enters as highlights in Indigo’s hair and as she transitions into her sleep-induced possessions. The full blue hue wash with white electric scribbles creates the eerie effect of paranormal embodiment. The pacing drives readers through several well-connected layers of development: teen summers, angst over outfits, indie band concerts, and crushes, but also the mystery of The Mare and Indigo’s finally coming to solve it.
My only criticism is that I wished the story was longer and more developed. There were details left unexplored that would have helped connect readers more to the main characters and repulsed us from others. The psychopathology related to The Mare is present but also underdeveloped, especially for as serious a topic as it is in our society.
This could also certainly leave room for a sequel or series. There were enough dropped clues and lesser-developed content to make The Mare a solid premier to connect with subsequent storylines, and Indigo is endearing enough to create a following.
The Mare by Seth Christian Martel. graphic mundi, March 2023.
Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.
The Exhausted Dream by Joshua Edwards Marfa Books, March 2023
Also known as A Monthly Account of the Year Leading Up to the End of the World, by AGONISTES, Prophet and Fulfiller, this is Joshua Edwards’ longish poem in iambic pentameter about Love, Television, Philosophy, Prophecy, and the transience of Worlds. It’s also about the swiftness of iambic time, as the reader’s experience of the book’s nominal subjects is secondary to their experience of time as structured in this way. Sitcoms, French restaurants, favorite museums, incense, Atlas, and Caspar David Friedrich are all grains of sand in this small, though finely shaped hourglass.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Failures of the Poets by Anthony Robinson Canarium Books, April 2023
After more than 20 years of publishing poems in magazines and chapbook, Anthony Robinson has brought together an incredible collection for his long-awaited first full-length book, Failures of the Poets. Full of beauty, heartbreak, humor, pain, absurdity, sorrow, friendship, and love, as well as bridges, family, lakes, God, feathers, and food, this is a book brimming over with thinking and with things, as Robinson’s intense attention collides with the world. “All winter we waited / For the sun and now he’s here but will / He make it through another year?”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Spring 2023 issue of The Kenyon Review includes a folio of literature in translation guest edited by award-winning translators Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Jeremy Tiang. The issue also includes poetry by Kwame Dawes, Timothy Donnelly, K. Iver, and Danusha Lameris; fiction by Sam J. Miller, Michael Tod Powers, J. T. Sutlive, and Lindsay Turner; nonfiction by A. J. Bermudez; and the winner of the 2022 Short Fiction Contest, judged by Karen Russell. The cover art is by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.
Taking its name from a line in Rilke’s second Duino Elegy, “For our own heart always exceeds us,” at its core, this is a book about new love and underlying illness. A lyric pursuit of our existence among the natural world, these poems keep in mind that existence is transient. They straddle reality lines, often stepping over into dream spaces or pushing against a linear world. But they are solidly of this world, its ground and various bodies of water, where a boy can become a field and a girl can drown in the rivers of her own body. At once intimate—“I would know you in someone else’s life, someone else’s storm cellar”—and expansive—“We rape the landscape / we can see, start with what covers the light”—Osowski is a poet of language, of notice, and of inquiry. Rilke writes, “Wasn’t love and departure placed so gently on shoulders that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?” Exceeds Us is interested in that substance and the notion that our lives are not singular. These poems exceed the pair at their center, they exceed the one life we’re granted, and they are not bound to the laws of our earth. “Prove how weather is not a god and I’ll believe in you.”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Spring has officially sprung and while weather has been a little less winter-like in our neck of the woods, it’s still not the warmest. If you’re weather forecast is just as fickle as ours, here are some great submission opportunities to use as an excuse to stay put and indoors this weekend.
Next Friday is the deadline to enjoy a 20% off discount on annual subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. This makes it just $40. Consider subscribing today to get first access to submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site.
Let’s dive into our weekly roundup of submission opportunities without further ado.
NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Literary Magazines and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay the most up-to-date on all things literary!
American Poetry Review, March/April 2023 Arkansas Review, December 2022 The Baltimore Review, Winter 2023 Bennington Review, 11 Blink-Ink, 51 Bomb, Spring 2023 Booth, 18 Catamaran, Spring 2023 Chinese Literature and Thought Today, 53.3-4 Colorado Review, Spring 2023 Communities, Spring 2023 Copper Nickel, Spring 2023 Cutleaf, 3.4 & 3.5 ecotone, Fall/Winter 2022 EVENT, 51.3 Feminist Studies, 48.3 Gay & Lesbian Review, March/April 2023 Georgia Review, Spring 2023 The Gettysburg Review, 34.2
Fittingly, I read Saving Time by Jenny Odell during my Spring Break and during the shift to Daylight Savings Time. The latter exemplifies Odell’s critique of time as a construct, especially one that portrays time as a series of boxes to fill. She sees such approaches to time as problematic in two ways: 1) they help create the idea that there is an inexorable future coming; 2) they reinforce systems of control. Odell draws from a variety of subjects—apocalyptic language, incarceration, productivity, climate change, and geography, for example—to reveal how those in power use time to reinforce hierarchies, often based on race, ability, or gender, but especially socioeconomics. Odell questions the assumptions embedded in such systems, such as whether one person’s hour is actually equal to another person’s, an idea that seems to be logically true, but that Odell shows to be nothing but another construct. During my Spring Break, Odell might be pleased to see, I’m not using my time productively, at least not as typical Western societies see productivity. Instead, I’m engaging in creativity for its own sake, including writing this review. Her book isn’t self-help or time management, so readers shouldn’t expect tips for living, but they should expect Odell to help them see time—and, thus, the world—differently.
Saving Time by Jenny Odell. Random House, March 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
The London Revolution 1640–1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England chronicles England’s history through the revolution in 1641–1642, which toppled the feudal political system, and its aftermath. It explores how the growing capitalist economy fundamentally conflicted with decaying feudal society, causing tensions and dislocations that affected all social classes in the early modern period. In contrast with most other works, this book posits that the fundamental driving force of the revolution was the militant Puritan movement supported by the class of petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers, instead of the moderate gentry in the House of Commons. This is a peer-reviewed publication.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
General Release from the Beginning of the World by Donna Spruijt-Metz Parlor Press, January 2023
In General Release from the Beginning of the World, Donna Spruijt-Metz attempts to reconcile the death of the father, the lies of the mother, a hidden half-sister, and the love for a daughter – with the impossible desire to banish the past from the present. She examines shifting relationships with the holy, referred to in the book only as ‘YOU.’ She asks: “Do YOU hear / a whisper / in YOUR // constant night / -and then listen?” She breaks her own heart to touch yours.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The online literary magazine Tint Journal Spring 2023 includes 25 new stories and poems by authors from 23 different countries who choose to write in English as their non-native, or second language. Tint Journal‘s issues are not themed, yet – reflecting the state of the current world – most texts in this particular issue deal with relationships, to place, history, teachers, students, relatives, neighbors and with the relationship to oneself. Tint also just relaunched their entire website. Now, visitors can find an interactive worldmap on the landing page, showing the geographical backgrounds of almost 200 authors that the magazine has assembled to date.
Authors in Tint Spring ’23: Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò, Isabella Cruz Pantoja, Italo Ferrante, Jee Ann Marie E. Guibone, Douglas Jern, Yael Kastel, Caroline Kuba, Daniel Loebl, Gershom Gerneth Mabaquiao, Ethel Maqeda, Jael Montellano, George Nevgodovskyy, Adriana Oniță, Mandira Pattnaik, Karolina Pawlik, Ranjiet, Neha Rayamajhi, Philipp Scheiber, Oindri Sengupta, Leyla Shukurova, Bianca Skrinyar, Leah Soeiro Nentis, Wambui Waldhauser, J.M. Wong, Huina Zheng.
Each text contribution was published with a visual artwork by international artists (curated by Vanesa Erjavec) and a short interview with the author. Many of the texts can also be heard as audio clips, read by the writers themselves.
Artists in Tint Spring ’23: Angelica Atzin Garcia, Suresh Babu, Lena Baloch, Leslie Benigni, Jack Bordnick, Michaela Caskova, Nathan Cho, Kate Choi, Suzette Dushi, Vanesa Erjavec, Gianluca Fascetto, Karen Fitzgerald, Diamante Lavendar, Serge Lecomte, Anton Mandych, Adriano Marinazzo, Megan Markham, Alexiane Montpetit, Adriana Oniță, Linnea Ryshke, Virgil Suárez, Claire Townsend, Rebecca Unz.
EVENT’s latest Notes on Writing Issue, 51.3, features notes by Aimee Wall, Sydney Hegele, and Brandi Bird, along with nearly 70 pages of poetry by 23 poets, fiction by Ben Lof, and M.C. Schmidt, and reviews by Sadie Graham, gillian harding-russell, and Michael Lake. Cover art Hello Yellow! by Catherine Babault, 2022.
Explorers Kristen and Ville Jokinen met and fell in love while scuba diving in Vietnam. Ville then left his native Finland to join Kristen in Oregon and together they embarked on a life-changing two-year cycling adventure covering 18,000 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. Despite never having cycled further than around the block, they persevered unrelenting, punishing rain and wind, altitude sickness, dog attacks, bike accidents, and countless flat tires to cycle between the ends of the earth. Kristen and Ville believe that kindness connects us to our shared humanity. They held babies, attended quinceañeras, drank pulque, played soccer, and visited schools. People in Mexico, Central America, and South America invited them into their hearts and homes, allowed them to camp in their fields and farms, and acted as personal tour guides. Kristen and Ville are love on wheels, and who doesn’t need a little more love in their lives?
Readers and writers will be delighted to discover Arboreal Literary Magazine, a quarterly of poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art available for purchase in print or free online. For the purchase of the print, or “Dead Tree” edition, the publication is donating a portion of the proceeds to One Tree Planted, a nonprofit that promises to plant one new tree for every dollar raised.
The name, from the Latin arboreus, the editors explain, “initially didn’t have any deeper meaning beyond the lyrical beauty of the word and its relevance to our names (Crabtree and Woods). Yet, after long discussion, we realized it is the perfect title for a publication committed to long-term artistic growth and a ‘big picture’ mission to help our readers, our contributors, and ourselves ‘see the forest for the trees.’”
The newest issue of Room(46.1) is themed “Around the Table: Asian Voices.” Editor Michelle Ha introduces the volume, “When we first sent out the call for this issue, we invited Asians from all different backgrounds, ethnicities, and communities to come sit around the table with us and share their stories. The name ‘Around the Table’ came from the realisation that for a lot of Asian cultures many moments, activities, and memories are done and made around the table. In this sense, I wanted this issue to feel similar to that. The dream for 46.1 has always been about supporting and uplifting the voices of Asian writers and artists, as well as to curate this issue as a platform to showcase the vastness that is the Asian collective. As the issue progressed, it became more than that. ‘Around the Table’ became a home to these incredibly wonderful, joyful, and vulnerable pieces that share individual experiences for the collective.”
The cover art, Protect Asian Lives by Paige Jung, “was created in response to the eight lives – six of them belonging to Aisan women – that were unjustly taken on March 16, 2021, during the Atlanta spa shootings. Five portraits, of different ages and backgrounds, are depicted to put faces to the Asian diaspora and call attention to our safety that is being threatened due to racism, fetishization, and discrimination. The piece offer an ironic justaposition of joyful, bright colors with fierce and burdened expressions. It is a cry for justice and for solidarity.”
If you don’t know about literary magazine The First Line, it is a quarterly print publication in which all pieces start with the same opening line. They also have The Last Line in which all pieces must end with the same line. You can learn more about them here.
They have announced their line-up of first and last lines for 2023. There is no fee to submit. Fiction and nonfiction only. You are not allowed to alter the first or last lines in any way.
Summer 2023 First Line
All the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays.
Due date: May 1, 2023
Fall 2023 First Line
As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor.
Due date: August 1, 2023
Winter 2023 First Line
It was the farthest north they had ever been.
Due date: November 1, 2023
The Last Line for 2023
Samir was never one to back down from a challenge.
Eleanor Catton’s title, Birman Wood, should immediately make the reader think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; however, Catton isn’t writing a contemporary retelling. That said, Catton’s characters have ambition and are willing to do what they need to do to achieve those ambitions, but the characters are more nuanced than in a typical tragedy. Mira has created Birnam Wood, a collective that legally (and not) plants crops in undeveloped areas, but is struggling to stay afloat and might suffer because of Mira’s ego. She meets Robert Lemoine—an American billionaire who has created the persona of a doomsday prepper to purchase land in New Zealand for which he has other, even-less-savory plans—and he agrees to help Mira fund a development on the land he has not quite purchased. Tony used to be a member of Birnam Wood, but he has been teaching overseas for the past several years and now wants a career in investigative journalism, so he sees a career-propelling story in Lemoine’s plans. Shelley has been working with Mira since Tony left, but she’s now considering leaving Birnam Wood, tired of Mira and of living on the margins. While the clearest tragedy in the novel is climate change—the moving of woods, in a different sense—there will be others, and, as in a Shakespearean drama, perhaps nobody is innocent.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, March 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either? A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Emily Lee Luan is the author of I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Down to the Bone: A Leukemia Story by Catherine Pioli, trans. J.T. Mahany graphic mundi, December 2022
When Catherine is diagnosed with acute leukemia, a deadly form of cancer that attacks the immune system, her life is turned upside down. Young and previously healthy, she now finds herself catapulted into the world of the seriously ill—constantly testing and waiting for results, undergoing endless medical treatments, learning to accept a changing body, communicating with a medical team, and relying on the support of her partner, family, and friends. A professional illustrator, Catherine decides to tell the story of her disease in this graphic novel, and she does so with great sincerity, humor, and rare lucidity. We accompany her through the waiting, the doubts, the fears, and the tears—but also the laughter, the love, and the strong will to live.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
In Springtime, Sarah Blake’s epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals. Something brought them to the woods that nearly killed them, and they’re not sure they want to live through this experience either. But the world surprises them again and again with beauty and intrigue. They come to meet a pregnant horse, a curious mouse, and a dead bird, who is set on haunting them all. Blake examines what makes us human when removed from the human world, what identity means where it is a useless thing, and how loss shapes us. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all—just the strangeness of the woods. Includes an art portfolio by Nicky Arscott.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Mare by Seth Christian Martel graphic mundi, March 2023
Everyone else may be enjoying the summer, but Indigo’s life isn’t going so well. Her dad’s marriage just ended in a very public divorce, and now he’s drinking again. Indy barely graduated from high school, she just lost her job, and she doesn’t know what to do with her life. The stress is causing her nightmarish sleep paralysis—or so she thinks. Indy confides in her best friend, Kasia, who blames “The Mare” for her troubles—the spirit of someone wronged that saps its victim’s energy at night. It sounds crazy to Indy, but is it? Steeped in the nostalgia of lazy summers and mixtapes, concert tickets, and coffee, The Mare is a story about friends, family, and finding one’s way—with a touch of the supernatural and a powerful, surprising twist.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love by Aby Kaupang Parlor Press, February 2023
Aby Kaupang’s & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love invokes life’s relentless suffusion of “&,” forging a conjunctive body in which an inevitable landscape of contemporary crisis, suicide, disability, failed promises & the quotidian accrue. In the Sisyphean challenge of day after day, how does one helm stone? Through the page’s shattered frame, & in formally audacious exchanges, Kaupang risks recombinatory possibilities arising not as recovery, per se, but as endurance, awe, & possibly joy. Inflorescence is cyclic, turns towards fodder, feeds the day, recedes. The poems are beautifully complemented by images of James Sullivan’s sculptures, one of which adorns the book’s cover.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author’s stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family’s experiences in searching for answers, Lunday interrogates the broader cultural and conceptual responses to the phenomenon of missingness by connecting his stepfather’s case to other true-life disappearances as well as those portrayed in fiction, poetry, and film. In doing so Disequilibria explores the transience in modern life, considering the military-dependent experience, the corrosive effects of war, and the struggle to find closure and comfort as time goes by without answers.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Deadline: March 27, 2023 Until March 27, Sans. PRESS is looking for stories for our fifth anthology! Passageway is for stories that dare to experiment, that cross further than they have ever been before, and that encounter whatever may come with hope and open arms. All genres welcome, as long as they explore a story of crossing over to the unknown. Visit website and view flyer for more information.
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Exile Editions publishes literary and speculative fiction, indigenous fiction, nonfiction, poetry – and our annual fiction and poetry competitions have awarded over $125K the past decade. Visit website and view flyer to learn more about upcoming submission opportunities.
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Deadline: April 15, 2023 South 85 Journal is open for submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction until April 15, 2023, for our summer issue. As the literary journal for the Converse University Low-Residency MFA program, we are entering our 11th year of publication. Our editorial staff is comprised of experienced readers, writers, and editors who carefully consider every work of writing they receive. Visit website and view flyer for more information.
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Minimalist Wisdom is the theme of the spring 2023 issue of Still Point Arts Quarterly, featuring art and photography, fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. Widely praised for its rich and valuable content and splendid presentation. Intended for artists, writers, nature lovers, seekers, and enthusiasts of all types.
CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS announces a 357-page anthology of poetry and prose devoted to the climate crisis featuring work by Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, J. Drew Lanham, Linda Hogan, Luis Alberto Urrea, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Patricia Spears Jones, Lidia Yuknavich, Cynthia Hogue, Jesse Tsinijinnie Maloney, Alice Zheng, Richard Jackson and more. Purchase at our website. Profits donated to Endangered Species Preservation.
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Registration Deadline:May 7, 2023 NYWW Workshops (fiction, poetry, cnf, translation, travel), panels, readings, excursions in Mexico City with Kim Addonizio, Ravi Shankar, and Tim Tomlinson. Workshops M/W/F mornings, T/Th/S afternoons. Readings, panels, events on four evenings. In Vallodolid, four late afternoon gatherings for talks, panel discussions, consultations, readings. Other events include visits to cenotes and the Mayan Ek Balam ruin. ¡Danny Caron provides music! Visit website or view flyer to learn more.
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Deadline: April 1 Submit one humor poem to Winning Writers’ 2023 no-fee Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest to win $2,000 and online publication. Accepts published and unpublished work. Co-sponsored by Duotrope. Recommended by Reedsy. Judged by Jendi Reiter and Lauren Singer. Winners announced on August 15. View website.
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Our Lady of the Lake University’s 100% online Master of Arts-Master of Fine Arts (MA-MFA) and Master of Arts (MA) in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice prepare critically engaged and socially aware scholars, writers, educators, and professionals. This nationally unique, virtual program combines creativity with practical skills and critical knowledge, while keeping in mind the pursuit of social justice. View flier or visit website to learn more.
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Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Feeling amazing about your latest work and want to find a home for it? Or do you want to try your hand at submitting to a writing contest? NewPages is here to help with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
Here in the Midwest weather is trying to act more like spring. Let’s hope warmer weather with a break in storms is finally on the way. Don’t forget NewPages is offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. This makes it just $40. Consider subscribing today to get first access to submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site.
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Let’s dive into our weekly roundup of submission opportunities without further ado.
W. E. B. Du Bois Souls of Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation by Paul Peart-Smith Rutgers University Press, April 2023
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” These were the prescient words of W. E. B. Du Bois’s influential 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. The preeminent Black intellectual of his generation, Du Bois wrote about the trauma of seeing the Reconstruction era’s promise of racial equality cruelly dashed by the rise of white supremacist terror and Jim Crow laws. Yet he also argued for the value of African American cultural traditions and provided inspiration for countless civil rights leaders who followed him. Now artist Paul Peart-Smith offers the first graphic adaptation of Du Bois’s seminal work.
Peart-Smith’s graphic adaptation provides historical and cultural contexts that bring to life the world behind Du Bois’s words. Readers will get a deeper understanding of the cultural debates The Souls of Black Folk engaged in, with more background on figures like Booker T. Washington, the advocate of black economic uplift, and the Pan-Africanist minister Alexander Crummell. This new release vividly conveys the continuing legacy of The Souls of Black Folk, effectively updating it for the era of the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter.
The March 2023 issue of Poetry features “How It Continues to Astonish: The Poetry of Ann Lauterbach” with an introduction by Richard Deming, as well as works by Kinsale Drake, Nam Le, Dorothea Lasky, Yahya Hassan, Jenny George, Laura Villareal, Jay Deshpande, Ari Wolff, Cathleen Calbert, Rodolfo Avelar, KB Brookins, Yuki Tanaka, and Yahya Hassan translated by Jordan Barger along with notes on the translation. The “Not Too Hard to Master” series of poets writing on forms and sharing a prompt features Terrance Hayes in this second installment.
Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau (HB) and Anne Casey (AC) is an epistolary exchange written between Northern California and Sydney, Australia in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Bourbeau puts it in “The letting,” the poem-letters track the “conjunction” of how “People have become numbers, corridors are morgues” with “the tenacious need of green to grow.” In “Coastal descent,” Casey adds her “changing / tableau” from Australia’s “megafires” and “wreckage.” There’s the feeling from these pandemic dispatches, from their different continents and opposite seasons, that the description of each poet’s physical and natural surroundings offers solace, connection, and awareness; a saving formula, as Bourbeau writes in “This is not an inauguration poem” against “heat and fire and fear.” Throughout the exchange, the poets look more carefully, more completely at flowers, insects, and animals, at the “never before noticed” (“Equinox,” HB).
A high point in the exchange came via the corresponding poems “Our Prime Minister stands by” (AC) and “Pause” (HB), where the poets confront “gendered violence” (AC) and “value” (HB). In her poem, Casey takes on “this country // long at war with / its women”; while Bourbeau notes “Next week will mark my menopause.” I hoped for more of this direct engagement “with things we have been taught / are not worth savoring, / hold no value” (“Pause,” HB), but the poems relegated these gender concerns to subtlety and foregrounded lockdown, exile from family, daughters’ relationships to fathers, and Mother Nature: “this messy line between accustomed / and detached” (“Richter’s scale,” HB). Regardless of what I hoped for, Some Days the Bird is Heather Bourbeau’s and Anne Casey’s “song / of survival” (“Days of wild weather,” AC), “their song of freedom” (“Season’s greetings,” AC) across a “relentless distance” (“Solstice,” HB).
Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey. Beltway Editions, 2022.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/
Young Writers and Artists 2023 from Cholla Needles is the eighth edition in this series. The editors write, “We deeply thank the students for taking their time to create and share the wonderful work you’ll find within these pages. And, of course, all of this would be meaningless without you, the reader. We are blessed to continue a great relationship with the Mojave Desert Land Trust to have these special youth issues appear twice a year. Mary Cook-Rhyne leads the educational arm of MDLT and has created curriculum and classroom units available to teachers of all grade levels that explain the uniqueness of the Mojave Desert with age-appropriate activities.”
Icelight, Ranjit Hoskote’s eighth collection of poems, enacts the experience of standing at the edge—of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours or going up in flames. Yet, the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany. In the title poem, we meet the Neolithic cave-dweller who, dazzled by a shapeshifting nature, crafts the first icon. The ‘I’ of these poems is not a sovereign ‘I’. A questing, questioning voice, it locates itself in the web of life, in relation to the cosmos. In “Tacet,” the speaker asks: “What if I had / no skin / Of what / am I the barometer?” Long committed to the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic, Hoskote embraces talismans, premonitions, fossils: active residues from the previous lives of people and places. Icelight is a book about transitions and departures, eloquent in its acceptance of transience in the face of mortality.
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The Spring 2023 issue of Rattle (#79) features a Tribute to Irish Poets. From Yeats to Boland and Heaney, Ireland has a long tradition of producing great poets. Rattle editors take an opportunity with this issue to look at what’s going on there now. The theme includes seventeen poems by Irish poets and their always-interesting contributor notes, and a conversation with Frank Dullaghan, a poet who has lived an interesting life in both Ireland and abroad. The open section features twenty-one poets exploring their perspectives on life. Cover art by Joseph Lynch.
Publishing quarterly online, the San Francisco Youth Anthology offers middle-school, high-school, and college-aged writers and readers of any age a platform for all genres of creative writing. Based in San Francisco, the publication only accepts submissions from San Francisco and the surrounding areas, but they are open to readers from around the globe.
As Editor Ava Rosoff explains, “SFYA began with the desire to start a magazine and initiative for young writers to help them showcase their work in an anthology, captured in the ‘Youth Anthology’ part of the name.” She and her editor peers saw SFYA as “a way to foster a community of youth writers in the San Francisco Bay Area and encourage young writers to share their work with the greater community.”
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea in Suggest Paradise. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Our Beautiful Reward, ed. Catherine Rockwood Reckoning Press, March 2023
Our Beautiful Reward is a collection of works from Reckoning Press, a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. This special issue on bodily autonomy, edited by Catherine Rockwood, was anthologized on the occasion of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and features work by Mona Robles, Linda Cooper, Dana Vickerson, Leah Bobet, Laurel Nakanishi, Robert René Galván, Anna Orridge, Taylor Jones, Julian K. Jarboe, Dyani Sabin, Annabelle Cormack, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Taylor Jones, Amber Fox, Juliana Roth, Mari Ness, Riley Tao, Taylor Jones, M.C. Benner Dixon, and Marissa Lingen.
There will be a free virtual launch event for the publication featuring eight contributors. For more information and to RSVP, click here.
The Main Street Rag Winter 2023 features an interview with Jim Lundy involving the history of the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Also in this issue, readers can enjoy poetry by L. Ward Abel, Melissa Apperson, Susan Ayers, Carol Barrett, Maria Berardi, Mike Bove, Terri Drake, Sam Capps, Ricks Carson, Robert Cooperman, Steve Cushman, Barbara Daniels, Abigail Dembo, Patrick Dungan, Michael Flanagan, Tony Gloeggler, Earl Carlton Huband, Judith Janoo, Becky Nicole James, Mike James, Garret Keizer, Casey Killingsworth, Jennifer LeBlanc, Justin Lacour, Richard Levine, Mary Makofske, Ronald J. Pelias, Erik Rosen, Janet M. Rives, Bret Roth, Claire Scott, William Snyder, Jr., Shaheen Dil, Tom Whalen, James Washington, Jr., Frederick Wilbur; fiction by Chris Daly, Brett Dixon, Peter Fraser, Paul Juhasz, Eugene Radice, Beate Sigriddaughter, Karen Sleeth; images by Rebeccah Williams Connelly, Karen Pelosi, Michael Woodruff, Lynn Black, Jill L. Rausch; and a slew of book reviews.
Our Share of the Night, Mariana Enriquez’s second novel, is a welcome addition to the emerging genre of Literary Horror. Well-defined lines have been drawn to distinguish “literary” fiction from horror, sci-fi, fantasy etc. Enriquez is becoming a name that is defying the pretensions of such categorization.
Our Share of the Night is a family history, primarily following Gaspar throughout his childhood and adolescence. His father, Juan – a medium for a Satanic cult – strives to help Gaspar avoid his fate of also becoming a medium. The story spans 37 years and has the backdrop of Videla’s military dictatorship, a theme common amongst contemporary Latin American writers.
Like with Hereditary and other recent Art House Horror films, a big part of the novel’s success can be attributed to its commitment to allegory, rather than simply using horror tropes for their shock value. The otherworldly forces, with their power to make people disappear, hold clear parallels with the military dictatorship in Argentina.
Enriquez is keen to explore the psychological effects of the narrative on her characters. A great deal of time is given to exploring the damage done to Gaspar through his involvement with the Occult. Gaspar also suffers real-world problems that are at times more psychologically devastating than the Occult horrors that fill the story.
These real-life problems are not sidelined; as it is put following a Satanic ritual, “we get hungry and we eat. . . we need to meet with the accountants. . . what happens is real, but so is life.”
Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enriquez; Illustrated by Pablo Gerardo Camacho; Translated by Megan McDowell. Hogarth Press, October 2022.
Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton and a range of Latin American writers.
NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry adjacent islands, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Ugly Duckling Presse & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love, Aby Kaupang, Parlor Press Before After, Owen McLeod, Saturnalia Books Between Twilight, Connie Post, NYQ Books The Book of John, Lindsey Royce, Press 53 Boy, Tracy Youngblom, CavanKerry Press Crisis Inquiry, Tony Iantosca, Ugly Duckling Presse The Day Every Day Is, Lee Upton, Saturnalia Books Dreamer: Poems in Culture, Alan Botsford, Cyberwit.net Ephemera, Sierra DeMulder, Button Poetry Exceeds Us, Leah Poole Osowski, Saturnalia Books The Exhausted Dream, Joshua Edwards, Marfa Book Company Exilium, Maria Negroni, Ugly Duckling Presse Failures of the Poet, Anthony Robinson, Canarium Books Far from New York State, Matthew Johnson, NYQ Books The Fight Journal, John W. Evans, Rattle Poetry
In the summer of 1962, a group of young Native American puppeteers travel in a converted school bus from the White Earth Reservation to the Century 21 Exposition, World’s Fair in Seattle, Washington. The five Natives, three young men and two young women, have endured abandonment, abuse, poverty, and find solace, humor, and courage with a mute puppeteer—a Native woman in her seventies who writes original dream songs, and creates hand puppets and ironic parleys that mock the ghosts of authority. Dummy Trout, the mute puppeteer, also figured in Vizenor’s previous books, Native Tributes and Satie on the Seine. The troupe attends a performance of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and they create a puppet parley for Wovoka, the inspiration of the Native American Ghost Dance Religion.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder has a girl, and cold case, and a killer on the loose. All this in the small town of Fairview, where Pippa “Pip” Fitz Amobi lives. Years ago, Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, whose guilt drove him to suicide. But Pip doesn’t believe that’s the real story. This thrilling mystery is full of red herrings and revealed secrets, and no one is innocent. Jackson both sympathizes with and implicates characters, and takes advantage of readers’ assumptions to lead them away from the truth. Readers who love murder mysteries and strong female characters will be compelled to keep reading until every curiosity is satisfied.
Reviewer bio: Indigo Stephens is a violinist and a book lover. She enjoys reading books with strong female characters, especially sci-fi, murder mysteries, and Dystopian YA. Veronica Roth is one of her favorite authors, and one of her favorite series is A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
Rooted in the Midwest but at home anywhere, Glenna Luschei has spent over fifty years writing and supporting other writers in the midst of adventures that have taken her around the globe. Now in her late eighties and as vibrant as ever, Luschei has crafted a collection that comprises a retrospective of her life: her youth during World War II; her adventures in New Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and elsewhere; and her ongoing love affair with the arts. Luschei relives highs and lows through these poems and reminds readers to live life to the fullest as we never know if tomorrow will be our last day.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Another week and more storms. Mother Nature is sure giving us a great reason to stay inside to write, edit, and submit, isn’t she? In good news, NewPages is offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. This makes it just $40. Consider subscribing today to get first access to submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site.
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The newest issue of Chinese Literature and Thought Today (vol. 53, no. 3–4, 2022) examines Chinese literature and culture in the time of contagion, and offers part two of a special section “Re-Aestheticizing Labor.” The featured scholar is Deng Xiaomang, an important philosopher and public intellectual. Moving to a mostly digital format, this full issue is available to read through Taylor & Francis Online. More developments are in the works for this already outstanding publication of intellectual literary culture – stay tuned!
