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!
Registration Deadline: December 1, 2024 Based in the historic pueblo mágico of Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico, TSWW offers workshops for writers at all levels. Written works are read and critiqued in a supportive, participatory setting, with one-on-one mentoring sessions. Special events include guest speakers, craft discussions, and Fiesta Night featuring regional food and music. Discount for NewPages applicants before October 15. View flyer for a link to our website and to learn more.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
The Colorado Authors League (CAL) supports and promotes its community of published writers while connecting with and adding value to the reading world. Formed in 1931, authors become members to: keep up with changes in the craft of writing, publishing, and marketing, gain greater visibility for their writing, join a group of like-minded people who love writing. View our flyer to see new releases by members and a link to our website.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Submit published or unpublished poems to the 22nd annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers and co-sponsored by Duotrope. We will award $3,500 for the best poem in any style and $3,500 for the best poem that rhymes or has a traditional style. The top 12 poems will be published online. Final judge: Michal ‘MJ’ Jones. Fee: $22 for 1-3 poems. View flyer for more information and a link to submit.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Alaska Quarterly Review‘s annual summer and fall 2024 double issue marks a milestone as AQR’s 80th book-length edition! Its five stories, a collection of poems by forty-four poets, and eleven narrative essays on the themes of human-animal interactions and welfare provide exceptional content for readers to enjoy as they transition from one season into the next.
Featured writers include Josh Bell, Richard Chiappone, Lindsey Drager, Marc Bekoff, Ann Linder, Peter Balaam, Emily Raboteau , Nina McConigley, Kai Carlson-Wee, Derrick Austin, Daniel B. Summerhill, Jane Hirshfield, Maggie Smith, Todd Turnidge, Frank X. Gaspar, Kim Addonizio, Jenni Qi, Matt Donovan, Rebecca Foust, Dion O’Reilly, George Bilgere, Dean Rader, Dorianne Laux, Lisa Allen Ortiz, Donna Spruijt-Metz, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Ama Codjoe, Veronica Kornberg, Kelli Russell Agodon, Jamaica Baldwin, and so many more, with cover art photo by Marion Owen. See a full list of contributors on the publication’s website.
35 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! After what feels like a super long and busy week, another weekend looms before us. If you have the time and energy, NewPages is here to help you along with your submissions and publication goals with our weekly submissions roundup.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Speaking of which, our September 2024 eLitPak is now available!
Words That Mend: The Transformative Power of Writing Poetry for Teachers, Students, and Community Wellbeing by Sarah J Donovan, et al. Seela Books, September 2024
A compelling look at writing poetry as a powerful transformative agent to support teachers, their students, and community. Words That Mend includes practical ways for teachers to engage in poetry writing providing prompts, instructions, and invitations for teachers to nurture their writing lives. The authors candidly share their personal stories of trauma, pain, and loss, as well as incredible stories from the classrooms and community events. These teachers warmth and love for teaching emphasize that processing traumatic or tragic events through poetry writing has become a step toward recovery and rediscovering hope at a time when the teaching profession most needs it.
Additional authors include Jennifer Guyor Jowett, Denise Krebs, Tamara Belko, Barbara Edler, Wendy Everard, Kim Johnson, Leilya A. Pitre, and Margaret Simon.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that 30 percent of unhoused Americans are children and their caretakers. And while every school district is mandated by federal law to address the needs of kids living in shelters, doubled-or-tripled up, in cars, or on the streets, The Three Melissas underscores the learning challenges that result from housing precarity.
The Three Melissas: The Practical Guide to Surviving Family Homelessness, a self-help manual for those navigating extreme poverty, was written by long-time advocates Diane Nilan and Diana Bowman for the unhoused, but it centers on the experiences of three women named Melissa. One lost her home after fleeing domestic abuse, another was evicted after becoming too ill to work, and the third lost her home in a hurricane.
They’re a sympathetic trio, and this slim volume provides a firsthand account of how they’ve accessed school resources, shared space, and found nutritious food, seasonally appropriate clothing, culturally sensitive medical and psychiatric care, and permanent shelter. But unhoused individuals are not the only readers who will benefit from their strategies: Social workers, teachers, school administrators, medical staff, and other ‘helping professionals’ will get an up-close introduction to the indignities that follow the loss of a home and the difficulties of navigating often-callous bureaucracies. Complete with recommendations for lawmakers, The Three Melissas also suggest numerous policy shifts to benefit undomiciled families.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
“Summer Nights” is the them of Blink-Ink #57, apropos for this seasonal quarterly installment of the tiny, independent journal that always packs a big punch for readers. Submitting stories of “approximately 50 words,” writers in this issue help readers capture those beautiful and mysterious moments of summer: the stars, fireflies, sparks from campfires, a thousand points of light against the velvet dark, air as soft and warm as breath – both from long ago memories, recent encounters, or just creations from a writer’s mindscape of impossible dreams, or maybe yet to come to fruition.
Writers featured in this issue include Jennifer Mack, Angela James, Kendra Cardin, Katheryn Kulpa, Eileen M. Hector, Daryl Scroggins, Sarah Shum, Kathryn Silver-Harjo, Susan Israel, Cameron Vanderwerf, E.C. Traganas, Carolyn R. Russel, Emery Caroline Little, and many more, with cover art by Gemma Mathewson.
Note: Blink-Ink has announced that subscriptions rates will be increasing as of December 1, “so now is the time to save a few dollars and sign up or renew.” Who doesn’t love a bargain? And subscriptions are great for holiday gift giving!
In Kursid Kids: Winter Turns [Book Two], the Kursid family are in a downward spiral. After breadwinner Koal loses his job, he, his wife, and three kids are evicted from their home. Despair forces them to take shelter in the woods, and as they try to evade the authorities something miraculous happens: a magic cat enters their lives and grants the two older kids special powers.
As a result, Winter, the oldest, can now morph between a human boy and a flying-swimming creature capable of hearing the area’s iron-handed ruler strategize about jailing the adults and breaking up the family. His sister, seven-year-old Pearl, has been given a different ability; to date, she has been able to warm even the coldest of hearts by a touch of her hand. But will this work on a greedy Magnate eager to make an example of the Kursids? It’s tense set-up and is left unresolved in this second of three intertwined books. (The first was released in 2022; the publication date of the third has not been disclosed.)
The books, written by a grandson and grandmother, weave a social justice fantasy into the harsh realities of class inequality. It’s a compassionate introduction to the day-to-day struggles of homeless families.
Kursid Kids: Winter Turns [Book Two], Creative author, Ronan Russell; Technical author, Pat LaMarche, Illustrated by Aron Rook. Charles Bruce Foundation, September 2024.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Glitter Road, January Gill O’Neil’s most recent poetry collection, is about change. The poems tell the story of a speaker entering new chapters in her life after the loss of her life partner. Part of that new chapter illustrates her adventures and the exploration of her new identity on new soil: The South.
So many Southern voices, cultures and influences fill these pages. There, change is everywhere: “Here’s the nadir of our suffering, which started in one place to end in another.” We are called to the attention of the South’s gruesome past with racism and division, and Gill does not shy away from braiding culture shock and a land littered with a violent history against a backdrop of Mississippi landscape, the river often speaking in metaphor to the possibilities of change, even for the South itself.
We also bear witness to the change in family; the speakers’ relationship with her young children, as well as another chance at romance with a new, budding love. O’Neil describes the Southern landscape as “A repository for memory preserving a shared moment as when two people have loved each other well the topography transforms, diverges over time, cleaves a clearer path to where it was always meant to go.” And what a gentle, intimate way of writing how to embrace change in an unfamiliar land, and perhaps even how to leave the door open for more.
Glitter Road by January Gill O’Neil. CavenKerry Press, February 2024.
Reviewer bio: Lauren Crawford holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. A native of Houston, Texas, she is the recipient of the 2023 Willie Morris Award, a finalist for the 2024 Rash Award, third place winner of the 2024 Connecticut Poetry Award, and the second place winner of the 2020 Louisiana State Poetry Society Award. Her debut collection, Catch & Release, is forthcoming in 2025 with Cornerstone Press as part of the University of Wisconsin’s Portage Poetry Series. Her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Passengers Journal, The Appalachian Review, Prime Number Magazine, SoFloPoJo, The Florida Review, Red Ogre Review, Ponder Review, The Midwest Quarterly, THIMBLE, The Worcester Review, The Spectacle and elsewhere. Lauren currently teaches writing at the University of New Haven and serves as the assistant poetry editor for Alan Squire Publishing. Twitter @LaurenCraw4d
This guide to publishing poetry is designed for the poet on a journey from facing a pile of poems to celebrating at a book launch. If you have been writing poetry for some time and have accumulated a volume of work, this guide is designed to meet you where you are in your book creation or publication process. It is organized into five sections to mimic the distinct phases of conceiving, arranging, editing, publishing, and promoting a poetry collection. Each section provides a mix of theoretical materials and practical assignments to demystify and ground the publication process.
33 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
If you are superstitious and don’t want to tempt fate by going out on Friday the 13th, NewPages has plenty of reasons to keep you safe at home with our weekly submission opportunities roundup for the week of September 13, 2024.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Speaking of which, our September eLitPak is slated for release next Wednesday!
In American Scapegoat, Enzo Silon Surin’s second full-length collection of poetry, the poet writes from a weightiness of being a Haitian-born immigrant to America and the “weight of the wait” for the country to fully reckon with its history of violence and injustice.
“if you’re black, like me, and were born mourning your rotations around the sun, you’re a full breath closer to the grave.”
Enzo Silon Surin takes on the myth, ethos, and pathos of America in his poems, and he pulls no punches. Nor should he. There is necessity in bringing to language for readers what the Black body experiences “when / it is being / sized up.” What those persecuted “felt,” the manner of their deaths, whether bullets, rope, or a knee to the neck, must be told. The poet is “writing in the hope that you will care about [his] early / demise, enough to be moved by how often [he] find[s] [him]self on [his] / knees.
Parts “appeal,” testimony, “vigil,” and sermon, Enzo Silon Surin is “in search of something whole and tender.” He “rebel[s] against the Union / by putting” a “felt-tip” pen in his hands and making “black characters” live again in the movies and in our collective “memory.” Enzo Silon Surin writes their “name[s]” and claims his among poets.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
90 Ways of Community: Nurturing Safe & Inclusive Classrooms Writing One Poem at a Time by Sarah J Donovan, Mo Daley, Maureen Young Ingram Seela Books, September 2024
For writing poetry in grades 6-12, this indispensable resource guides teachers through a year-long journey of poetic engagement, fostering a safe and inclusive environment where every student feels valued and heard. Grounded in social emotional learning and trauma-informed pedagogy, the authors provide practical, adaptable lessons that seamlessly integrate poetry writing into any curriculum.
With a clear framework developed by experienced educators, 90 Ways of Community is designed for teachers at all levels, from novices to veterans. Each chapter begins with a heartfelt “Dear Teacher” letter, offering context and support, while thematic clusters of prompts inspire creativity and connection. The book covers a wide range of topics, from celebrating individuality to extending community and healing through poetic expression. The authors draw on real classroom experiences and the collective wisdom of a community of teacher-poets.
90 Ways of Community is more than a collection of prompts—it’s a roadmap to building a classroom culture where poetry becomes a vital tool for learning and growth. Join in nurturing the hearts and minds of students, one poem at a time.
Pictura Journal is a new online journal publishing poetry, prose, and visual artwork three times a year (April, August, December), with the editors favoring “concrete images and work grounded in a strong sense of place.” The journal’s name itself, says Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief Alicia Wright, comes from this same desire for story.
“I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of ‘image as narrative,’ and I wanted a name that made the same statement. I couldn’t tell you the first time I read the Latin phrase ut pictura poesis (and it would take some work for me to recall any more of the specifics of Ars Poetica), but when I was formulating the idea for the journal, ‘as is poetry, so is painting’ pointed directly at what I was aiming for. So: Pictura. I want to publish work that values the concrete image as a storytelling device, and artwork that fits well alongside it.”
The Lake September 2024 issue is now available online if you are looking for the best in contemporary poetry from new and established poets. This newest monthly installment features works by Ian Badcoe, Mark Belair, David Capps, Charlotte Cosgrove, Clive Donovan, Arvilla Fee, Lesley Caroline Friedman, Ann Heath, Chris Kinsey, Claire Scott, J. R. Solonche, and Jeffery Allen Tobin. Readers will also enjoy book reviews of Sarah Wimbush’s Strike and Ian Clarke’s Staying On. One Poem Reviews, which share a poem from a recently published collection, include works by Smitha Sehgal, Leslie Tate, and Angela Topping.
The eight short stories in Dogs and Monsters, Mark Haddon’s latest collection, run the gamut between the touching and the creepy. Most are adaptations of well-known tales: The Myth of the Minotaur; The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells; Zeus’ granting of eternal life, but not eternal youth, to his daughter’s mortal lover; and the suffering of St. Anthony the Great, among them.
In this contemporary retelling, Haddon interrogates important themes including maternal love, sexuality, religious devotion, fear, the cruelty of teenagers, bias against the disabled, and lust.
“St. Brides Bay” introduces a divorced woman whose role in her daughter’s wedding brings up a series of what-ifs about her own partnership choices. It’s a poignant, stinging reflection on the road not taken. Similarly, “The Mother’s Story” addresses maternal love for a disabled son, a child who is scorned by his community and rejected by his father. Like the king’s wife in the story of the Minotaur, gossip about the child’s lineage persists, isolating the pair. Whether love is enough to sustain them remains an open question.
As the title suggests, dogs play a role in many of the tales. But they are not always humankind’s best friends. Indeed, the boundaries between humans and animals are often murky as they serve as both savior and antagonist.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
31 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
It is September. Time for color changes, spooky season, and pumpkin spice. It also means that submissions are opening for autumn and winter issues of literary magazines. NewPages is here to help you find a home for your work with our weekly roundup.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
Informing the storyline for The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, I.M. Aiken worked on ambulances off and on since the 1980s, starting in the Boston area where she was born and raised. She served one tour in Iraq with the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division, and now lives in Vermont.
This novel is based on her 40 years of work in the paramedic field and centers on main character Alex Flynn. Following in the footsteps of their beloved Boston cop father, Alex trains as an EMT and spends years chasing emergencies in an ambulance. But the person Alex becomes is a far cry from the hero they signed up to be.
Over four decades in public safety, Alex encounters a changing America, where veterans are left to rot on streets, women are welcome in dangerous fields but abusers still walk free, and service providers are subjected to intense public scrutiny while being denied the resources they need. After moving from bustling Boston to small town Vermont, Alex discovers an escalating feud between emergency operators and must decide which to protect: their community or their legacy.
The online literary and art magazine 805August 2024 offers readers one final glimpse of summer, on the cusp of fall, just as Margaret Lynch writes about cancer, “teetering between the joy of life and fear of death,” and debut poet Anna Han “pens the boundless possibilities that bloom in a child’s heart.” Readers can enjoy more poetry by Logan Foster, Lisa Loop, Alicia Rebecca Myers, Charlene Pierce, Ivy Raff, Ahrend Torrey; fiction by A.C. Langlois , Sherri Moshman-Paganos, Zach Keali’i Murphy; creative nonfiction by Angela Abbott, Paul Grussendorf, Kira Rosemarie, Olivia Wieland; and art by Jake Huang (cover art), Janina Karpinska, Lauren McGovern, Marsha Solomon, and Sabahat Ali Wani.
Chestnut Review’s Summer 2024 Issue ushers in a new season at the magazine, Volume Six, Year Six (6:1). Editor-in-Chief James Rawlings’ interview with Chestnut Review Chapbooks author, Javeria Hasnain (SIN), opens this issue with cover art by Jules Ostara whose wild and unpredictable, “Ink Flowers,” sets the scene for stubborn artists and writers.
Contributors also include writers Esther Ra, Beth Anstandig, Em Townsend, Elane Kim, Chiwenite Onyekwelu, Alvin Kathembe, Nikki Ummel, Iyanuoluwa Adenle, Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi, Audrey Gamache, Andrew Nickerson, Caroline Beuley, Chidera Solomon Anikpe, J. L. Bermúdez, and art by David Sheskin, Roger Camp, Anselmo Alliegro, and Charles Byrne.
Readers are immersed in work that examines tensions with family, forgiveness, queerness, religion, astronomy, grief, childhood, animals, gothic, natural spaces, city streets, girlhood, and—as always—humanity. Like the chestnut trees that persist, this summer issue values the stubborn belief in each individual’s own worth, in the art of their hands, eyes, and mind.
Sally Ashton’s fifth book Listening to Mars offers readers “thought experiments otherwise known as poems” while “trying to understand” the COVID-19 health crisis, which brought with it death, uncertainty, anxiety, social upheaval, and political protest. Across the globe, “People began to die” or were “separated” from their families while “shelves emptied” and “we were forced to watch the execution of an innocent man in slow motion, over and over.” In other words, “the really big tragedies [of] these days.”
Conjuring “The Dark Night of the Soul,” by St. John of the Cross, and “In a Dark Time,” by Theodore Roethke, Ashton endeavors to “make sense of a dark time” via a Sci-Fi space curiosity. Imagining life on Mars seems to offer artistic escape to the poet, while calling out billionaires’ plots for a “backup planet” bolsters the purpose of her expression. In the moon’s waxing “curve,” a welcomed companionship; the “Stay-at-home orders to ‘flatten the curve’” a source of “panic.” The poems centering on celestial spheres in the Milky Way Galaxy act like points on orbital planes beaming attention back to Earth. The gravity of the situation on Earth is inescapable.
Planetary health and human anguish are also suggested in Ashton’s go-to poetic forms: the monostich and prose paragraphs. The spacious singular lines and dense text blocks suggest the themes and thematic tensions of the poems. The monostiches enact isolation, alienation, and lacunae; prose poems evoke connection, extension, and protest (of form). The collection also includes haibun and “haiku-ish” expressions. These Japanese-derived forms offer lyric qualities adept at managing grief and important to balancing “present danger” in the poems. The “sad trombone” and “highs of panic” brightened by “glints of light.”
Ultimately, the poet seeks “words that make the world look like what it feels like.” In a dark time, Sally Ashton finds her “way with a pen.”
Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton. Cornerstone Press, February 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
Literary magazines offer readers the newest in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, artwork, and hybrid forms both in print and online. Keep your reading fresh by checking out the New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!
Each month, we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content information for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
Still plenty of time to enjoy summer reading. To help you achieve that goal, check out the August 2024 New Books Received. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
The main plot of The Spoiled Heart, Sunjeev Sahota’s latest novel, follows Nayan Olak as he campaigns for General Secretary of Unify, a British trade union he has been a member of since he began working. However, his campaign receives a stronger-than-expected challenge from Megha Sharma, a DEI officer who has worked there for roughly a year.
They represent two different approaches to race, though both are of Indian descent, largely due to their class differences: Nayan’s parents struggled financially, while Megha comes from inherited wealth, which she has chosen to turn her back on. Nayan wants Unify to be color-blind, to focus on all working people’s needs, regardless of race, while Megha believes that race and racism matter as much as class, if not more, leading the reader to explore the land-mined terrain of identity politics in a diverse Britain in the twenty-first century.
Further complicating Nayan’s life is the return of a writer he knew when they were children, Sajjan Dhanoa. They didn’t know each other well, and Sajjan left the area to go to college, rarely returning. In looking for an idea for a new book, Sajjan begins telling Nayan’s story, not only the campaign, but the death of Nayan’s mother and son in a purposeful fire at his parents’ store nearly twenty years before.
Nayan begins dating Helen and helping her son Brandon, though the reader ultimately discovers Helen, as well as Sajjan’s family, know more about Nayan’s losses than they’re saying. Because Sajjan narrates much of the story, relying on various people’s accounts, Sahota is also calling into question the validity of narrative, an idea reinforced through one of Megha and Nayan’s main confrontations. While the reader may understand exactly what happened, they won’t know exactly why, as even the characters are unsure of their motives, much like people in real life.
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
The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools edited by Royel M. Johnson and Shaun R. Harper addresses the ways that the U.S. right-wing has distorted and manipulated facts about how history and culture are taught.
This thirteen-essay collection harkens back to 2019 when scholar Nikole Hannah Jones launched the 1619 Project, a multimedia effort highlighting enslaved people’s vital contributions to U.S. economic and social development.
Not everyone was pleased with this message and white conservatives and Christian nationalists wasted no time in attempting to mute its impact as an educational tool: Since January 2021, eighteen states have passed limits on public school teaching – pre-K to university level – about race and racism. Gender, gender identity, and ways to fight oppression have also captured attention – and have been similarly banned. In addition to legislative attacks, the backlash has spawned “parents’ rights” groups to oppose student exposure to Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their classrooms.
But why all this momentum?
As The Big Lie makes clear, few educators teach this material. Moreover, the anthology challenges the idea that lessons about race or gender are “divisive” and contests the notion that such topics cause white (and male) students to experience “reverse discrimination.” This anti-racist and pro-democracy perspective makes the book essential reading for activists, teachers, researchers, and students.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Salamander (58) features fiction by Laton Carter, Jules Fitz Gerald, Amber Silverman, Casey Wiley, Lindsey Godfrey Eccles; creative nonfiction by Marin Sardy, Jannie Edwards, Kristin Ginger; an art portfolio by Stephanie Juanillo; and poetry by CD Eskilson, Amy Smith, Andrew Hemmert, Sonja Vitow, Michael Quattrone, Michael Beard, D. Dina Friedman, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Bernadette Geyer, Cathlin Noonan, Sean Cho A., Caroline Kanner, Stephanie Yue Duhem, José A. Alcántara, Maria Surricchio, Nancy Lynée Woo, Aliyah Cotton, Sara Backer, Jennifer Stewart Miller, Veronica Kornberg, Sheree La Puma, Caylee Gardner, Ella Flores, Kathleen Winter, Ruth Hoberman, Lizzy Beck, Ann Keniston, Rob Macaisa Colgate, Christa Fairbrother, and Vera Kroms.
32 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Severe thunderstorms, power outages, oh my! It’s been a week. Strong storms blew in and took out power lines, trees, lawn furniture, signs, flags, and who knows what else? When you have nothing to do, what better way to while away the hours than writing and editing? With September and Labor Day around the corner don’t miss out on the end-of-August opportunities!
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Ponce’s debut Blood Red is a rush of a novel that charts a 38-year-old unnamed woman’s unravelling. She skates through a city full of drugs, sex, and friendship, desperate to avoid looming life-changing decisions and a skin-picking compulsion that has haunted her since childhood.
In the midst of a rocky divorce, the narrator flits between casual lovers. Her regular hook-up lives in a cave-like apartment, where the walls appear as muddied vines pulsing under peeling pink paint. As her inner conflict spirals, Ponce uses color to demonstrate the fracturing between the body’s boundaries, with the ‘softness’ of her character’s inner self (white) that threatens to spill over and against the world’s forceful, hardened outer shell (red). Pain and pleasure are a hair’s width apart, creating a discomforting middle ground when these opposites converge in sexual encounters, memories, and vivid hallucinations.
Booker delivers a seamless translation that sweeps us along in this vortex, effortlessly layering the narrator’s deceptive cynical tone with the fragile stream-of-consciousness underpinning it. Ponce pushes her character to the brink of a visceral internal void, leaving the reader akin to the narrator in ‘trying to embrace the untouchable or unnamable’ experience of this mercurial text.
Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce; Translated by Sarah Booker. Dead Ink, January 2024 (Restless Books, 2022).
Reviewer bio: Jennifer Brough is a slow writer and workshop facilitator. Her work has appeared in Ache Magazine, Eunoia Review, SICK Magazine, Artsy, Barren Magazine, among others. Jennifer is writing her first poetry pamphlet, Occult Pain and was shortlisted for the Disabled Poets Prize’s Best Single Poem 2023.
In the symbolic language of flowers, the zinnia represents friendship, remembrance, and lasting affection, which is what inspired the name of a new online annual, The Zinnia Anthology. Here, readers can find short stories, poems, memoirs, and art focusing on human connections and relationships with each other outside of the romantic lens. “Specifically,” the editors note, “friendships and familial relationships that we often take for granted or easily overlook.” Indeed, the first issue, themed “Platonic Relationships” sets the tone of bringing marginalized issues to light and offers inspiration for readers to see their platonic relationships in a different light.
World Literature Today September/October 2024 features Japanese Women Writers in the 21st Century. Such writers as Mieko Kawakami, Hitomi Kanehara, Hiroko Oyamada, and Coreco Hibino are profiled in the cover feature guest-edited by Rea Amit. Additional highlights include numerous interviews, including a Q&A with Turkish writer Elif Shafak; poetry from China, Ukraine, and the US; fiction from Kenya; and Alejandro Puyana on six “classic” and “upstart” literary debuts. Be sure to check out the latest must-read titles in WLT’s book review section—including new releases by Conceição Lima, Yoko Ogawa, and Salman Rushdie—and much more!
I don’t always read front matter, but with Ben Terry’s Near Where the Blood Pools: A Novel in Verse, I’m glad I did. There’s a character list organized around Cephas, older brother to Hope, a young girl who disappears. The cast includes Memphis, a Seer; Church ladies; and a can of ashes. I was intrigued.
In the author’s note, Terry illustrates a span of roughly twelve years before and after Hope’s disappearance: Hope Exists — Losing Hope — Hope Gone — What Remains
Calling attention to the timeframe of each poem requires readers to mind where each speaker is along this path. In addition to Hope’s family, treasure hunters trawl old pig farms. Bones sing. Menfolk go to jail.
Terry is currently incarcerated; his poems about prison are pithy and authentic. The reader frequently stumbles over exquisite lines, such as: “Memphis parted his lips to speak / and from them poured coal / and ash and water and time.” And from Marl Mae: “Everything good gets taken. / That’s history straightening up / before the future arrives.”
In a novel in verse, the few words on each page must develop character, place, and plot. It’s a tall challenge. Ben Terry succeeds.
Elizabeth S. Wolf has published five books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a 2018 Rattle prizewinner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.
The Summer 2024 issue of Allium is available for readers to enjoy online, opening with works by Featured Artist Jeanne Marie Beaumont, who works ‘principally in collage and assembly. Readers can take these final days of summer to savor fiction by De’Andre Holmes, Lily Swanson, Hayden Casey, Daniel Steinmetz, Tom Roth, Elise Swanson Ochoa, Odin Weller, Lori Cidylo, Alex Rawitz, Brad Dress, Louise Wilford, Steve Ives, J. D. Strunk, George Tyler, Maura Stanton, Eve Rayve, Amelia Dellos; nonfiction by Scott Hurd, Gail Tyson, Deja A. Smith, Chelsey Clammer, David Tippetts; and poetry by Grant Chemidlin, Amy Miller, William Orem, Arden Stockdell Geisler, Riane Bayne, Eric Ellis, Yana Kane, Aurora Bones, Banah Ghadbian, Alexandra Riseman, Justine Mercado, Sarah Brockhaus, Alex Schmidt, Jeremy Radin, Caroline Patterson, Monet Lewis, Kelly DuMar, Rosanne Singer, Frances Klein, Brendan Bense, Vanessa Ogle, Nathan Santiago, Jane Costain, and Alanna Shaikh.
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, Shechtman’s lengthy title and subtitle might make readers think they know what they’re getting when they open her book, but they would be mistaken. While the crossword puzzle is certainly one of Shechtman’s interests, there is much more going on here, for good and ill, depending on what readers are looking for.
If one wants the focus to remain on crossword puzzles, she has an interesting perspective, given that she published her first New York Times crossword puzzle when she was nineteen, and given that she is female. Despite the male-dominated landscape of the CrossWorld today, Shechtman points out several important women who helped shape the development of the puzzle. Similarly, she points out the continued sexism of that CrossWorld, not merely in the fact that most puzzle creators are male, but in the clues and solutions one would see.
If the reader is only looking for a book on crossword puzzles, though, they’ll be disappointed to find that Shechtman spends only about half the book, at best, on that area. Instead, she has written what she refers to near the end of the book as a “memoir wrapped in a cultural history.” The memoir aspect of this book centers around her struggles with anorexia, connecting that to her fascination with crossword puzzles. This part of the book also pulls heavily from feminist theoreticians and Freudian analysis, as Shechtman uses both of those approaches to understand who and how she is. Those sections might push a reader looking for a history of crossword puzzles.
That said, the combination largely works. Shechtman clearly lays out the connections between gender and crosswords and anorexia, helping readers to see how she puzzled her way through her life, in more ways than one.
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
31 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
It’s been an exhausting week, hasn’t it? Let NewPages help you take away some of the work in finding a place to submit to with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the week of August 23, 2024.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
The folk music scene of the 1960s through 1990s is as much a character in The Singer Sisters as the many members of the large family whose struggles and conflicts it chronicles. They’re a diverse lot and include once-popular singer Judie Zingerman, her daughter Emma, son Leon, ex-husband Dave Cantor, and sister Sylvia, the other half of the renowned Singer Sisters.
As the story unfolds, generational conflicts emerge and long-held family secrets begin the rise to the surface. The result is a rich and complicated multi-tiered family story, in which bonds are repeatedly tested but never completely unravel. This makes the novel an intergenerational love story, with wholly believable characters whose flaws and insecurities are writ large.
Issues of reproductive justice are skillfully woven into the story, and the political milieu of the times becomes an important, but subtle, backdrop for what is revealed. This is a story about the big stuff – life, death, career aspirations, sexual agency, parenting – but all are handled with a light enough touch to make this a debut to savor.
In addition, insight into what it takes to be a successful musician, the constant travel, the frayed relationships, and the pressure to keep audiences engaged and entertained add heft to the book. Highly recommended.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The epigraph of Bear comes from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about Snow-white and Rose-red, setting up Phillips’ modern-day fairy tale about two sisters, so readers should expect a bit of the fantastic. Given the echoes of fairy tales that run throughout the novel, the reader might expect the bear of the title to serve as a symbol or metaphor, perhaps even turning the story into an allegory. However, Phillips avoids that trap, focusing instead on the relationship between Sam and Elena, two sisters roughly a year and a half apart in age. Or, at least, she focuses on Sam’s view of that relationship, as readers get her thoughts on life, but not Elena’s.
They live on an island off the coast of Washington that relies on tourism, and they are struggling to survive. Their mother is sick after years of working in a nail salon, so they have accumulated serious debt. They both have service industry jobs—Elena at the country club and Sam selling concessions on the ferry—leaving them with only the house as an asset, the house where their grandmother lived, then their mother, and now them. Sam is waiting until their mother dies, so they can sell the house and leave the island forever.
In the midst of their day-to-day lives, a bear arrives—an oddity on their island—and they react in opposite ways to its appearance. Their reactions drive the plot, revealing more about them than the reader and they, perhaps, know. Some fairy tales end with a “happily ever after,” leading readers to wonder whether the sisters’ relationship will ever be the same again.
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
The Meadow is the annual literary journal of Truckee Meadows Community College. In this 2024 issue, readers will discover fiction, nonfiction, and poetry selected from the best student work alongside national contributors such as Meghan Sterling, Mark Sanders, Katheryn Levy, George Perrault, Kathy Nelson, Richard Robbins, Janelle Cordero, Daniel Edward Moore, Max Stone, January Santoso, Lenny DellaRocca, Natalie Solmer, Deidre Sullivan, as well as many others wrapped in the mesmerizing, mythical cover art, Icarus, by Kateryna Bortsova.
In violet. Inviolate. In her chapbook In Violet, Margo LaPierre brings her attention to homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings. From that fine line between sound and definition, the poet inquires: How does a person who has been violated refrain from perpetrating violation? In other words, how does a person committed to nonviolence conduct herself in a violent world?
In Violet’s ten poems are offered to the reader at a conceptual and analytic vantage from the speaker’s traumatic past. The speaker seems to have acknowledged the “system of stress” and has passed into the rage phase. The rage may be rightful and only natural, but it is what is “gripping the body.” The speaker is comfortable enough taking revenge against “all [her] rapists” in her dreams, but fantasizing about it during waking hours causes discomfort. As a result, she seems to switch focus to the “ones [she’s] hurt.” Such is the despairing struggle between “snuffed” and “saved” in the aftermath of trauma. Yet, each phase of recovery is necessary, all of it together a “healing spell.”
On the pages of In Violet, Margo LaPierre brings to color what “lays years upon [a] body” and the lagging “effects of / the stressor.” In the process, the poems of In Violet take some steps away from “villainy.”
In Violet by Margo LaPierre. Anstruther Press, 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis is an inspirational text, reminding us that we can do something about gentrification, sky-high rents, and deteriorated living conditions. Although it is short on practical details, the book offers readers an upbeat look at how tenants can amass power by organizing their buildings and then branching out to organize city blocks, as well as whole neighborhoods and even cities. The goal? Better code enforcement, investment in neighborhoods, and controls on rent increases.
Both authors are involved in the Los Angeles Tenants Union and draw on examples of successful organizing to forestall evictions, lower rents, and improve living conditions. But while the book doesn’t address the cost of housing maintenance—that is, if housing was not privately owned and a source of profit, would the government be responsible for providing upkeep and other services? Would the tenants form co-ops and each pay their share of the total?
Despite these deficits, Abolish Rent offers a keenly-drawn alternative to housing for personal gain, with landlords literally operating as Lords of the Land and profiting from their investments. Yes, rent is too damned high, and Abolish Rent reminds us that we can win affordable and accessible housing if we organize to demand it.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
This novel is the second (and possibly last) book in a series Shah began with While She Sleeps. It’s not necessary to have read the first novel to understand this one, though doing so would provide more depth and background on the world Shah has created. While She Sleeps focuses on life in The Green City (a fictional city in what seems to be Southwest Asia). Here, women have multiple husbands due to a nuclear war outside their country, which led to the Virus, which has led to women’s being unable to produce many children who survive. That novel focused on survival, especially for a small group of women who live in the Panah (sanctuary) underground. They serve as companions for the powerful men, not providing sex, but merely lying with the men until they fall asleep, offering an intimacy that has become absent from society.
In The Monsoon War, Shah focuses on resistance, as she moves the action to the mountains outside The Green City. This novel follows three different women—Alia, a wife to three husbands; Katy, a fighter in the Hamiyat (an all-female freedom fighter group); and Fatima Kara, a Commander of one of the Hamiyat units. Instead of merely surviving, these women find ways to try overthrowing the government, risking their lives in open rebellion (unlike the women of the Panah, who risked their lives in more subtle means of rebellion). In fact, all of the villages of the mountain have been quietly rebelling, as they raised their female daughters as male to avoid their being taken by the government and forced to be wives.
Shah points out in her acknowledgements that she drew on female fighters from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Columbia for much of the inspiration for this work, but she also acknowledges that women throughout the world resist patriarchal domination in a variety of ways. Through this novel, she celebrates that diversity, while reminding readers the work of rebellion is far from done.
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
The Wilson College MFA program is designed for working professionals with a low-residency schedule tailored to meet the needs of artists allowing them to reach the next level in their field. View our flyer for more information and a link to our website.
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Deadline: December 15, 2024 Apple in the Dark is reading for the Winter 2024 issue. Free submissions; tip jar donations accepted. We publish works of short fiction and creative nonfiction up to 1,500 words per piece. Multiple and simultaneous submissions are OK. Up to 3 pieces per submission. See flyer for more information and link to submit.
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Submissions now open for the Futurist Debut Book Award for debut books in any genre ($1,000 prize), the Spark Translation Prize for translated books ($1,000 prize), several anthologies, book-length nonfiction manuscripts, and more! See what’s closing at the end of August, and plan ahead for what’s opening in September. View our flyer and learn more at our website.
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Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to Black Fox Literary Magazine’s Portraits of Failure Writing Contest! Deadline: August 31, 2024! We are also accepting free submissions for our Winter 2025 print issue. Free subs close on November 30, 2024! See flyer for more information and link to our website.
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Deadline: October 1, 2024 We seek nonfiction & fiction work for publication in Spring 2025 on the theme Habitat: Planet Earth. Chosen authors will receive $1,000 and 50% of net sales. Each year we will publish two books, one fiction (speculative, utopian, historical, etc.) and one nonfiction (creative nonfiction, memoir, scientific, historical, etc.). A new theme will be chosen each year. Submissions now open. View our flyer for more information.
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21 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
August is officially half over with. This means that our monthly eLitPak newsletter was officially released this week! There you can enjoy even more submission opportunities along with the ones below.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy’s most recent novel, is clear-eyed in its portrayal of motherhood, especially during the challenging first few years. The mother in this work—known only as Soldier—addresses her son—the Sailor of the title—throughout, explaining to him why she behaved the way she did when he was younger. She tells him that she used to be a different person, and she will be a different person again, but the sleep deprivation and constant demands of raising a young child have changed her, especially in her inability to think clearly.
She could be different if her husband helped with any aspect of her life, whether that’s directly taking care of their son or cooking dinner or doing absolutely anything to make her days easier. Not only does he not help her, he seems oblivious to her feelings and her state of being, and he definitely doesn’t notice the change their marriage has undergone.
Kilroy provides a contrast to Soldier’s husband in a friend she runs into at the playground, somebody who knew her before she had a son, a man who’s taking care of his three children, while his wife works as a doctor. Through that juxtaposition, the reader can clearly see that Kilroy isn’t critiquing men, in general, but the vast majority of them who do little to nothing to participate in the care of their children.
Her main focus, though, is simply on the realities of being a mother, one day after another, with all of the constant demands and the lack of appreciation. That focus is more than enough and more than needed.
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
The Lake poetry journal August 2024 issue is now online featuring works byJude Brigley, Douglas Cole, Bhaswati Ghosh, Jenny Hockey, Norton Hodges, Rustin Larson, Al Maginnes, Beth McDonough, Estill Pollock, Joshua St. Claire. This issue also includes reviews of Niki Herd’s The Stuff of Hollywood, Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems, Kathleen Strafford’s Girl in the Woods, and Martin Figura’s The Remaining Men. “One Poem Reviews” is a unique feature that invites writers to share a poem from a recently published collection. This month spotlights Mike Dillon and Scott Elder.
The Main Street Rag Summer 2024 issue opens with an interview with Dave Essinger, whose novel, This World and the Next, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in October 2024 (discounted pre-order available here). Readers can also enjoy “Stories & Such” by Steve Putnam, Carlos Ramet, E. G. Silverman, Jessi Waugh, and Michael Woodruff, as well as lots of great new poetry from Joan Barasovska, Jacqueline Berger, Robert Cooperman, Mary Alice Dixon, R. E. Ericson, Greg Friedman, Bill Griffin, Alan Harawitz, PMF Johnson, Dianne Mason, John Minczeski, G.H. Mosson, Cal Nordt, Robert Perchan, Laura Ann Reed, John J. Ronan, Richard Allen Taylor, Miles Waggener, and Ronald Zack among many more.
