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!
Literary magazine Whitefish Review is accepting entries of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for its Montana Prize for Humor. This year’s final judge is legendary funnyman and writer Garrison Keillor. Deadline to enter is September 30. The winner in each genre receives $500 and publication. There is an entry fee. View their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Creature Features
Poetry by Noel Sloboda
Main Street Rag Publishing, June 2022
While the poems in Creature Features draw inspiration from several sources, many center on classic monsters author Noel Sloboda first encountered as a boy while watching the Creature Double Feature television show. In the 1970s and 1980s, this show introduced him to the Mummy, the Wolfman, the Blob — and more. What largely interested Sloboda and what he explores in this collection is how these monsters show us ourselves (or reflect our “features”). Readers may appreciate that there’s also a good deal of Shakespeare in the chapbook, since Sloboda teaches Shakespeare and has spent some time in theatre as a dramaturg. But the author also wanted to lend some of our popular culture nightmares — too often dismissed as disposable or as kitsch — the kind of pedigree they merit. Hence too — in part — the “borrowed authority” with the inclusion of cameos by eminent philosophers. Originally from New England, Noel Sloboda earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein became a book. He sat on the board of directors for the Gamut Theatre Group for a decade, while serving as dramaturg for its nationally recognized Shakespeare company. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State York.
Based out of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, the newest issue of Zone 3 offers readers an eclectic mix of writing with the common denominator of stunning opening lines that won’t let go. Eneida P. Alcalde’s poem, “Memory Quilt,” begins: “My baby’s napping when what’s left / of you arrives…” Eddie Vona’s story, “Paragon of Animals,” begins: “It was Christmas Eve, so my mother was killing lobsters in our kitchen sink.” Sarah Carey’s poem, “Space Invaders,” begins: “My body homes itinerant ghosts—” Katie Darby Mullins’ story, “Game Theory,” begins: “The baby should mean something to me.” Delving in rewards the reader with more great lines, like “The world is more than pipelines.” from “Transatlantic Flight” by Megan M. Garr, and “He used to step into the phone box, if it was empty, to talk to her ghost.” from “Chess Wednesday” by Andrew Peters. All this to say, check out the newest issue of Zone 3, which also features works by Morgan Hamill, Shannon Hardwick, Rebecca Lehmann, Angie Macri, Nathan Manley, Sandra Marchetti, Ted McCarthy, L.S. McKee, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Bo Schwabacher, Carrie Shipers, Audrey Spina, Simone Muench and Jackie K. White, Julia Kooi Talen, Vanessa Tamm, Greg Tebbano, John Walser, Gregory Wolff, Danae Younge, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Alyse Bensel, Lisa Compo, Aran Donovan, Jordan Escobar, and Seth Garcia. Cover art by Marc Escalona Gaba.
Guest Post by Cindy Dale
Take heart would be novelists who are not twenty-something! One of the best debut novels I’ve read this year is Bonnie Garmin’s Lessons in Chemistry. Garmin is 64 and proof positive that it’s never too late! Set in the early 1960s, back when women were still expected to marry, stay home, and raise the kids, the novel follows heroine chemist Elizabeth Zott as she faces prejudice and discrimination head-on. This is not a rah-rah sisterhood woman’s rights novel, however. It’s a nuanced, very witty, thought-provoking novel on life and all its ups and downs. Elizabeth encounters plenty of both. She meets her soul mate, Nobel-nominated fellow chemist Calvin Evans, at a second-tier lab. When he dies suddenly, Elizabeth is left, (unbeknownst to her at the time) pregnant with their daughter, Mad. Calvin’s death results in Elizabeth’s ungracious firing at the lab after which she serendipitously falls into hosting a TV show called Supper at Six. Stubborn and unwilling to play the happy homemaker, Elizabeth turns the show into a chemistry lesson of sorts, infusing the show with lots of lessons on life. Oh, and perhaps the best character of all: Six-thirty, the family’s very smart and loyal rescue dog!
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmin. Penguin Random House, April 2022.
Reviewer bio: Cindy Dale has published over twenty short stories in literary journals and anthologies. She lives on a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island.
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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” tag under “Popular Topics.” Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Bennington Review, 10
Carve, Summer 2022
Colorado Review, Summer 2022
Conduit, Summer 2022
Crazyhorse, Spring 2022
Cutleaf, 2.17
ecotone, Spring/Summer 2022
Feminist Studies, 48.1 2022
Free Inquiry, August/September 2022
The Georgia Review, Summer 2022
The Gettysburg Review, 34.1
Literary journals continue to expand the boundaries of style and content, responding to the changing world around us and venturing into new territories. oranges journal does both with its focus on fiction, mental health and culture writing. Publishing on a rolling basis in an open online format, founder and editor of oranges journal Jade Green [picutred] says, “I wanted to create a strong brand that would stick in people’s minds, and build a beautiful website on which I would be proud to feature my own work. The name ‘oranges’ pretty much creates its own branding; it’s a bold, outspoken, unique color which definitely aligns with our feminist mission and the kind of writing we want to publish. As soon as I came up with the name, everything else just fell into place – a very organic process!”
Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: oranges journal”
Salem Revisited
Poetry by Charles K. Carter
WordTech Editions, November 2021
In Salem Revisited, Charles K. Carter examines homophobic and transphobic violence in the United States. Many of the pieces look as if they have been pulled directly from yesterday’s headlines. Carter brings an awareness to these injustices by shining a harsh spotlight on what haunts many LGBTQ+ community members and their allies. The collection experiments with a wide range of poetic forms including blank verse, free verse, ghazal, and haiku as well as unconventional structures. Charles K. Carter (he/him) is a queer poet from Iowa. He is a volunteer video curator for Button Poetry, and his poems have been featured in several literary journals. Carter is the author of four chapbooks, including Salem Revisited (WordTech Editions). His first full-length collection, Read My Lips (David Robert Books), will be released in fall 2022. Sample poems can be read here.
With Volume 48.1, Feminist Studies scholarly journal celebrates fifty years of publication and commemorates forty years of “two anthologies that heralded major innovations in feminist theory: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Persephone Press, 1981; Kitchen Table Press, 1983) and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (The Feminist Press, 1983). The writing in this issue,” continue Judith Gardiner and Matt Richardson in the preface, “reflects the deeply personal impact these books have had on scholars’ intellectual, political, and emotional development since the time of their publication.”
Contributors include Nicole Charles, Paulina Jones-Torregrosa, Analouise Keating, Emek Ergun, Nida Sajid, Keisha-Khan Perry, Sirisha Naidu, Sangeeta Kamat, Richa Nagar, Tala Khanmalek, Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, Sidra Lawrence, Kelsey Leonard, Chrystos, Max Wolf Valerio, And Jo Carrillo, Reanae Mcneal, Nathalie Lozano Niera, Shoniqua Roach, Kristie Soares, Tamara Lea Spira, Anna Storti, Saraellen Strongman. A full table of contents can be found on the Feminist Studies website.
The Todos Santos Writers Workshop is thrilled to announce our 10th anniversary session, JANUARY 28 – FEBRUARY 5. Join us for a week of workshops, craft talks, fiestas, and camaraderie in our pueblo magico by the sea. Faculty: Christopher Merrill, Leigh Newman, Jeanne McCulloch, Karen Karbo, and Rex Weiner. Open to writers in all genres and at all levels. For more information and to register, please go to our website. Register with early bird discount before October 15.
View the full August 2022 eLitPak Newsletter. Don’t forget to subscribe today to receive the September 2022 eLitPak Newsletter straight to your inbox.
Unlettered Longings
Poetry by Abin Chakraborty
ukiyoto, June 2022
Our hearts are not designed to beat to beaten tracks – they have rhythms and quests and seasons of their own which often veer away from established norms and the set motions of everyday existence. Naturally, therefore, we are always entangled in longings — conscious or unconscious which punctuate our days, nights, dreams, writings and much more. The poems in this collection are reflective of such longings, at times foolish, at times desperate, at times mundane, but always authentic. These longings stem from human beings — eternal quests for love, for beauty, for understanding, for solidarity, for recognition. Such quests, of course, are not always fulfilled and the failed and thwarted pursuits bring about their own notes of disillusionment, frustration, anger, self-loathing, and self-deception as well. These poems take all such affects into account while negotiating with the shadows that fall between dreams and reality, between desire and experience, between aspirations and limitations. It is hoped that the reader will find among these lines various echoes of their own myriad experiences which will better illuminate the labyrinthine mazes of our own hearts and souls while securing solace, pleasure, strength, and most importantly, a realm of communion beyond the sutures of the self.
Deadline: October 15, 2022
The fight for social justice, reproductive rights, and the environment has been ongoing and yet the moment calls for an urgent and sharp response. The artist is to illuminate darkness and make the world better. We need submissions of poetry, prose, and visual art that expresses resistance and collective democratic worldbuilding, worlds with justice as a reality. View flier or visit website to learn more.
View the full August 2022 eLitPak Newsletter. Don’t forget to subscribe today to receive the September 2022 eLitPak Newsletter straight to your inbox.
I Dreamed I Was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend
Poetry by Ron Koertge
Red Hen Press, October 2022
I Dreamed I Was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend easily solidifies Ron Koertge’s reputation as a poet who is very funny and also very serious. In these surprising and delightful poems, a mannequin joins the Me Too movement, a summer job turns into a lesson in class distinctions, and Jane Austen makes a surprise appearance at a mall. Ron Koertge’s uniquely playful imagination is on display in poem after poem. Visit Koretge’s website to learn more about his numerous books of poetry, young adult titles, Academy Award-nominated short film, Negative Space, based on one of his poems, and learn about his famous home – Halloween and Jamie Lee Curtis fans, you’ll want to check that out!
Sans. PRESS, a new indie publisher from Ireland, is looking for short stories for their newest anthology, INTO CHAOS. Open to all genres and writers, we want unexpected stories that show us new layers to reality! Free to submit and selected writers will be offered €150 for stories. View flier or Visit website to learn more.
View the full August 2022 eLitPak Newsletter. Don’t forget to subscribe today to receive the September 2022 eLitPak Newsletter straight to your inbox.
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 flier or visit website to learn more.
View the full August 2022 eLitPak Newsletter. Don’t forget to subscribe today to receive the September 2022 eLitPak Newsletter straight to your inbox.
Deadline: September 30
Submit published or unpublished poems to the 20th annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers and co-sponsored by Duotrope. We will award $3,000 for the best poem in any style and $3,000 for the best poem that rhymes or has a traditional style. The top 12 poems will be published online. Final judge: S. Mei Sheng Frazier. Fee: $20 for 1-3 poems.
View the full August 2022 eLitPak Newsletter. Don’t forget to subscribe today to receive the September 2022 eLitPak Newsletter straight to your inbox.
While the back to school scramble makes it hard to find the time to devote yourself to writing, editing, and submitting, NewPages has you covered. Check out out weekly Where to Submit Round-up for third week in August to help you out in finding the perfect home for your work.
Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every week? NewPages weekly newsletter subscribers get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! You’ll also get our monthly eLitPak (view August’s here) along with the occasional promotional emails from advertisers.
Continue reading “Where to Submit Round-up: August 19, 2022”
A Woman Somehow Dead
Poetry by Amy Locklin
David Robert Books, March 2022
In this first full collection by Amy Locklin, the whirl of life and death, the rhythm of rot and rebirth, permeates these striking poems. Locklin has previously edited two print fiction anthologies, Altered States and Law and Disorder. She was a managing editor for the cross-genre anthology A Year in Ink, and her poetry chapbook, The Secondary Burial, was a finalist for the San Diego Book Awards. She earned her MFA in Poetry Writing and MA in 20th Century Literature from Indiana University Bloomington and currently teaches writing across the disciplines in online accelerated terms at Southern New Hampshire University. Sample poems are available to read here.
To Sleep With Bears
Poetry by Steve Nickman
Word Poetry, April 2022
Steve Nickman’s poems in his newest collection, To Sleep With Bears, are about praise and amazement, as well as connection and the loss of it. They are about food, childhood, hiding, loneliness, small and large animals, and despair. They are about losing courage and regaining it, our capacity for good and evil, and finally about knowing that we won’t live forever. Steve Nickman is an almost-retired child psychiatrist in Brookline, Massachusetts. In 2006 he joined Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s workshop and learned that much of what his patients had to say was poetry. Working with adopted children has given him insight into the feeling of lost connection. Sample poems are available to read here.
Flutter, Kick
Poetry by Ann V.Q. Ross
Red Hen Press, November 2022
In Flutter, Kick, poet Anna V. Q. Ross plumbs motherhood, migration, childhood, and the cycles of violence and renewal that recur in each. These are poems of math homework and police sirens, where a fox pops out of a fairy tale to dig up the backyard, NPR News spirals the evening carpool into memories of girlhood and trauma, and a city gas leak conjures xenophobic backlash against refugees. In poems of reclamation and warning, Flutter, Kick brings readers to the center of this world—a place where “in those days, we were fast and best, but didn’t know it”—with a compassion learned of anger, memory, and joy.
Fantasy Kit
Fiction by Adam McOmber
Black Lawrence Press, June 2022
The strange and sometimes horrific stories in Adam McOmber’s Fantasy Kit could easily draw a comparison to the work of Angela Carter or even the master of lyrical horror, Edgar Allen Poe, but they are also entirely unique. Made up of fairy tales, myths, and traveling through mazes of space and time; each of these stories creeps through the mind long after the last page. Adam McOmber is the author of three novels as well as two collections of short fiction. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and journals. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts where he is also the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.
Reflections Through the Convex Mirror of Time
Poems in Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War
By E.A. Mares
University of New Mexico Press, August 2022
In this poignant bilingual collection, preeminent New Mexican poet E. A. “Tony” Mares posthumously shares his passionate journey into the broken heart and glimmering shadows of the Spanish Civil War, whose shock waves still resonate with the political upheavals of our own times. Mares engages in dialogue with heroes and demons, anarchists and cardinals, and beggars and poets. He takes us through the convex mirror of history to the blood-stained streets of Madrid, Guernica, and Barcelona. He interrogates the assassins of Federico García Lorca for their crimes against poetry and humanity. Throughout the collection, the narrator is participant and commentator, and his language is both lyrical and direct. In addition to Mares’s parallel Spanish and English poems, the book includes a prologue by Enrique Lamadrid, an introduction by Fernando Martín Pescador, and an epilogue by Susana Rivera.
I enjoy Plume‘s clean and easy-to-navigate online format, with a manageable selection of works that can be fully enjoyed by the time the next monthly issue arrives. There are even a few selections that include audio for a different experience. The August issue (#132) includes poems by Tania Langlais, R.T. Smith, Rebecca Lehmann, Scott Withiam, Sophie Cabot, Tom Sleigh, Martha Collins, Marianne Boruch, James Pollock, Ellen June Wright, Bruce Beasley, Alice Friman; a section called The Poets and Translators Speak in which each contributor offers notes on their work; a Book Review of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking by C.T. Salazar; the Featured Selection, “On Muse Found in a Colonized Body, lovemaking, and activism”: Interview with Yesenia Montilla by Mihaela Moscaliuc; and Essays and Comment: “So I Would Move Among These Things: Maya Deren and The Witch’s Cradle” by Fox Henry Frazier.
Creativity: Where Poems Begin
Nonfiction/Poetry by Mary Mackey
Marsh Hawk Press, September 2022
Mary Mackey’s Creativity: Where Poems Begin is a meditation on how the sources of creativity emerged from a vast, wordless reality and became available to a poet. As such, it is not only a memoir; it is an exploration of the power and process of becoming a poet. What is creativity? Where do creative ideas come from? What happens at the exact moment a creative impulse is suddenly transformed into something that can be expressed in words? To describe creativity is extraordinarily difficult because the moment of creation comes from a place where language does not exist and where the categories that determine what we see, hear, taste, and feel are not immediately present. In our daily lives, we tend to live on the surface, unaware of the complexity and richness of what lies below. Poetry creates itself, bubbling up from the depths until it reaches that part of our brains that transforms consciousness into words. Poetry chooses the poet. The poet did not choose it. This book is a journey to that place where all poems begin.
It seems like August just started and it’s already half over with next week. Don’t forget to check out all the August opportunities below on where to submit your work so you don’t miss out.
Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every week? NewPages weekly newsletter subscribers get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! You’ll also get our monthly eLitPak (August’s will be released next Wednesday!) along with the occasional promotional emails from advertisers.
Continue reading “Where to Submit Round-up: August 12, 2022”
Celebrating 40 years of publishing with Issue 50, Paterson Literary Review was founded by Maria Mazzoitti Gillan in 1979 as a mimeographed publication, now one of the most well-respected resources for poetry in the country. The journal has published many poets, including Allen Ginsberg, William Stafford, Ruth Stone, Sonia Sanchez, Jan Beatty, Laura Boss, Marge Piercy, Martín Espada, David Ray, and Diane di Prima. Holding the post of editor, Gillan invites readers to this newest issue: “PLR is dedicated to writing that is accessible and powerful, takes emotional risks, and illuminates what it means to be human.” The nearly 400-page tome features over 200 contributors – enough to last you a full year of enjoyment! Among these great works are the winners of their 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards: First Place Co-winners Adele Kenny and Marion Paganello, Second Place Winner Arthur Russell, Third Place Winner Charlie W. Brice, and all the honorable mentions and editor’s choice awards. What a phenomenal publication! And you can be a part of it – submissions are open through September 30 and the Ginsberg Award closes February 1, 2023.
Fandom, the Next Generation
Essays edited by Bridget Kies and Megan Connor
University of Iowa Press, August 2022
Fandom, the Next Generation is the first collection of essays to offer a close study of fan generations, which are defined not only by fans’ ages but by their entry point into a canon or via their personal politics. Editors Bridget Kies and Megan Connor selected contributors to further the conversation about how generational fandom is influenced by and, in turn, influences technologies, industry practices, and social and political changes. As reboot culture continues, as franchises continue expanding over time, and as new technologies enable easier access to older media, Fandom, the Next Generation offers a necessary investigation into transgenerational fandoms and intergenerational fan relationships.
The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds
Poetry by Orlando Ricardo Menes
University of New Mexico Press, August 2022
The poems in The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds expand the sacred within a baroque, magical-realist poetics that immerses itself in the flora and fauna of the Caribbean and the region’s complex interplay of African, Judeo-Christian, and Taíno (Arawak) cultures. Menes engages with the Catholic sacraments, saints’ lives, and the artistic heritage of this universal faith as well as Cuban art through the use of a variety of poetic styles across the collection. An established poet, he pays homage to those writers who have made him the Caribbean poet that he is, specifically Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and even Hart Crane. Readers will want to join Menes on this journey as he travels the globe to explore the fantastic and the marvelous while searching for faith and divine grace.
Rain Taxi Review of Books is holding its first event of the 2022-2023 season on Wednesday, September 14, 3pm Central. Their first Fall event is a virtual “coffee break” visit to celebrate the new novel W. with Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg in conversation with the book’s English-language translator, Saskia Vogel. This event is free to attend, but registration is required.
W. (The Overlook Press) is a literary reimagining of one of modern literature’s touchstone texts, the play Woyzeck. Considered the first modern drama, Woyzeck tells the story of a poor soldier who kills the woman he loves. In 1836 this true story inspired Georg Büchner to write the play, unfinished at his death at just twenty-three years old.
Terrain.org is an award-winning, international online journal searching for that interface—the integration—among the built and natural environments, that might be called the soul of place. Over the past 13 weeks, Terrain.org has published the Lookout: Writing + Art About Wildfire series in partnership with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. The series includes works by Carly Lettero, Emily Sheperd, Amy Miller, Elizabeth Spencer Spragins, Suze Woolf, Anne Haven McDonnell, Craig Santos Perez, Bradley David, Claire Thompson, Mary Kwart, Tracy Daugherty, Amiko Matsuo + Brad Monsma, Ben Rutherfurd, and Rachel Richardson.
Terrain.org’s submissions will open again on December 15, but ARTerrain submissions are accepted year-round, and there are currently two contests, including the Sowell Emerging Writers Prize, offering a $1,000 prize and publication by Texas Tech University Press for a nonfiction book. Visit their website for more details.
Guest Post by Jami Macarty
In Katherine Factor’s 2020 Interim Test Site Poetry Prize-winning A Sybil Society, ancient Greek meets textspeak to “tread the treat / trending” and “deliberates its digital” while invoking Ariadne, Pythia, Sybil, Joan d’Arc, and various other goddesses, saints, sisters, and witches. Factor’s is a matriarchal society, celebrating dissidents, “Assembled from the shattered” in order to “find the way back to daylight” (The Sybil to Aeneas, Virgil, Aeneid). There’s delicious revenge in the revisionist retelling of Greek myths of rape and dominance. In another way, the poems act as an erasure of the male point of view and bring to the foreground the female point of view—“we nippled thousands”—allowing those formerly relegated to the lower worlds to rise to the upper and speak. The poems are feminist, but not man-hating; there’s an “Elegy for a Satyr” to prove it! Factor’s is a poetry that strikes with the speed and charge of lightning. Ping, sting, and tingle. Afterward, a “flush and flow.” Yo, goddesses, witches, and sisters—behold, Katherine Factor’s poetic effort to rematriate!
A Sybil Society by Katherine Factor. University of Nevada Press, January 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 are forthcoming.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
The CHILLFILTER Review is an online publication of stories, essays, poems, and music with the mission to spotlight independent artists from around the world. Editor Krister Axel has an eclectic and discerning taste for sharing what’s new with readers and listeners alike. “One of my favorite things in life is curating for CHILLFILTR Radio,” Axel shares. “so I hope our listeners can appreciate the time that is spent continuing to add new and exciting music. Since April, the list of new adds is absolutely monstrous.” Indeed, full playlists can be found here. And while artists are encouraged to submit their works, Axel is clear that this is not a “pay-to-play” venue: “I think buying your way onto a playlist, and on the flipside, charging for features on a playlist under your control, completely undermines the fragile ecosystem that we have in place with regard to personal curation.” Check out CHILLFILTR Radio for yourself – there’s still plenty of summer left for enjoying these jammin’ playlists!
Eating Up Route 66: Foodways on America’s Mother Road
U.S. History / Cookbook by T. Lindsay Baker
The University of Oklahoma Press, October 2022
From its designation in 1926 to the rise of the interstates nearly sixty years later, Route 66 was, in John Steinbeck’s words, America’s Mother Road, carrying countless travelers the 2,400 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. Whoever they were—adventurous motorists or Dustbowl migrants, troops on military transports or passengers on buses, vacationing families or a new breed of tourists—these travelers had to eat. The story of where they stopped and what they found, and of how these roadside offerings changed over time, reveals twentieth-century America on the move, transforming the nation’s cuisine, culture, and landscape along the way. Describing options for the wealthy and the not-so-well-heeled, from hotel dining rooms to ice cream stands, Baker also notes the particular travails African Americans faced at every turn, traveling Route 66 across the decades of segregation, legal and illegal. T. Lindsay Baker, who holds the W. K. Gordon Chair in Industrial History at Tarleton State University, Stephenville, Texas, is Director of the W. K. Gordon Center for Industrial History, Thurber, Texas, and editor of the Windmiller’s Gazette.
Button Poetry’s 2022 Video Contest is open to submissions of brave poetry that crosses borders or effaces them completely through August 31. This year’s finalist judge is Sabrina Benaim, author of Depression & Other Magic Tricks. There is a fee to submit. Please see their full ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Woodcrest, the literary journal of Cabrini University, announces their reading period is now open through November 1 (or until their limit is reached). They aim to publish work that surprises and challenges the human experience and encourage writers to reach their past issues before submitting. There is no fee. See their full ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Steeple at Sunrise
Poetry by Burt Kimmelman
Marsh Hawk Press, November 2022
Burt Kimmelman’s new poems continue his exploration of syllabic forms. The book’s first section contains individual poems written in recent years, each standing on its own as a unique experience. “Plague Calendar,” which follows, consists of especially brief and understated poems presented in the order of their inception. They subtly chronicle an individual’s psychological endurance over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, person and landscape reveal a transformation in recent time, an individual’s experience of daily life. Steeple at Sunrise is Kimmelman’s eleventh collection of poems. His work is often anthologized and has been featured on National Public Radio. He has also published eleven books of criticism, most recently Visible at Dusk: Selected Essays and Zero Point Poiesis (a gathering of writings on George Quasha).
Prize for the Fire
Fiction by Rilla Askew
The University of Oklahoma Press, June 2022
Lincolnshire, 1537. Amid England’s religious turmoil, fifteen-year-old Anne Askew is forced to take her dead sister’s place in an arranged marriage. The witty, well-educated gentleman’s daughter is determined to free herself from her abusive husband, harsh in-laws, and the cruel strictures of her married life. But this is the England of Henry VIII, where religion and politics are dangerously entangled. A young woman of Anne’s fierce independence, Reformist faith, uncanny command of plainspoken scripture, and—not least—connections to Queen Katheryn Parr’s court cannot long escape official notice, or censure. In a blend of history and imagination, award-winning novelist Rilla Askew brings to life a young woman who defied the conventions of her time, ultimately braving torture and the fire of martyrdom for her convictions. An evocation of Reformation England, from the fenlands of Lincolnshire to the teeming religious underground of London to the court of Henry VIII, this tale of defiance is as pertinent today as it was in the sixteenth century.
Guest Post by Kevin Brown
In his collection of essays, What Cannot Be Undone: True Stories of a Life in Medicine, Walter M. Robinson warns readers in his introduction that this book is not full of success stories or happy endings. His book is not for those who want to see people perform miraculous (or even ordinary) recoveries. Instead, he writes honestly about those patients who suffer and, quite often, die. Robinson is a pediatrician who specializes in lung transplants (many related to cystic fibrosis), so a number of the patients he writes about are children or young adults, making the book an especially challenging read for some. However, the book explores important ideas about healthcare, ethics, life, and death, no matter how harrowing the stories he relates. He also includes moments of grace and humor, as those continue to occur even in the midst of death and everything that leads to it. Robinson is willing to share his doubts and fears openly and honestly, which makes him not only a narrator readers can trust, but a doctor one would wish to have by their bedside during those times of loss. He is a doctor who gives the bad news straight, which should only serve as a reminder to celebrate the better moments while they last.
What Cannot Be Undone: True Stories of a Life in Medicine by Walter M. Robinson. University of New Mexico Press, February 2022.
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/.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
If you’ve ever wondered about what goes on behind the scenes at NewPages, now might be your only chance to find out. The Main Street Rag Summer 2022 Featured Interview is Casey Hill, Founder and Publisher of NewPages in conversation with TMSR‘s editor M. Scott Douglass as he digs into NewPages history and speculates about the future. Also featured in this issue: Essay by Gail Hosking; Fiction by Melissa Benton Barker, Judith T. Lessler, Anthony Mohr, Elaine Fowler Palencia, Timothy Reilly; Poetry by Alan Berecka, Joan Barasovska, Bonnie Bishop, Brenton Booth, Joanne Fay Brown, Deborrah Corr, Stephen Cramer, Mirana Comstock, Douglas K Currier, David Dragone, Matthew Duffus, Brenda Edgar, Frederick Foote, Jane Ann Fuller, Elton Glaser, E. J. Evans, Carol Hamilton, W. Luther Jett, Robert Lee Kendrick, Ulf Kirchdorfer, George Longenecker, Vikram Masson, Richard L. Matta, Jim McGarrah, Jeff McRae, Cecil Morris, Norman Unrau, Robert Parham, Elizabeth R. McCarthy, David E. Poston, Harriet Shenkman, Kevin Ridgeway, Laura Sobbott Ross, Victoria Royster, Andrew Taylor-Troutman, Rodney Torreson, Richard Weaver, John Walser.
What Follows
Poetry by H.R. Webster
Black Lawrence Press, June 2022
In What Follows, the poet writes: “It’s the end of the world and we can’t stop saying the word tender.” Tenderness runs through the book, even as Webster demonstrates brutality and strength in the face of life’s experiences. These poems explore the vastness of the human experience, from sexual powerplays and the crimes commited against fellows to the mundanity and beauty of factory work. There is very little that escapes H.R.‘s glance and raw lyricism. H.R. Webster has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, 32Poems, Muzzle, and Ecotone. You can read more poems at hrwebster.com
Happy August. Hopefully you were able to get some fun squeezed in before the end of summer and back to school rushes. To help you keep your submissions goals strong, don’t forget to check out our Where to Submit Round-up for the first full week of August 2022.
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Continue reading “Where to Submit Round-up: August 5, 2022”
Qua Literary and Fine Arts Magazine, a student-run publication from the University of Michigan-Flint, is accepting submissions for its Fall 2022 issue. Writers need to reside in the state of Michigan to submit. Send work by October 2, 2022.
See their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Editor Stephanie G’Schwind welcomes readers to the Summer 2022 issue of Colorado Review with a tribute to summer, “Whether your summer is spent in the company of others or in solitude, sorting your things or tending your garden, in the cloud or on the ground, I hope you discover in these pages something to hang on to, something to keep.” As Poetry Editor Camille T. Dungy expresses what she found, “Something drew me to these poems. . . Something in them called out and slowed me, in the way recognized language perks the ear and makes me stop. What did she say? . . .These poems are points of connection in a divided world. It’s so nice to hear someone else thinks this way too.” Contributors to the collection include Fiction by Angela Sue Winsor, Da-Lin, Joy Guo, Alyson Mosquera Dutemple; Nonfiction by Geoff Wyss, Carolyn Kuebler, Georgia Cloepfil; Poetry by Mirri Glasson-Darling, Chris Ketchum, Laura Donnelly, Martha Silano, Molly Sutton Kiefer, Mary Helen Callier, Emily Koehn, Nicole Callihan, Jennifer Peterson, Emily Adams-Aucoin, Virginia Ottley Craighill, Jodie Hollander, Sage Ravenwood, Meghan Sterling, John Sibley Williams, Luisa Muradyan, Ashley Colley, Landa Wo, Jeffrey Bean, Tyler Kline, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, C. Henry Smith, Jessica Hincapie, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, Andrew Hemmert.
Session II of Daphne Review‘s Mentorship Program for Rising Seniors will take place virtually from September 5-26, 2022. This session will focus on entries to YoungArts and Scholastic Competitions. Learn more by stopping by the NewPages Classifieds.
The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins and his Struggle for Redemption
American History / True Crime by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf
University of Iowa Press, July 2022
On a moonlit night in 1889, Iowa farmer John Elkins and his young wife, Hattie, were brutally murdered in their bed. Eight days later, their son, eleven-year-old Wesley Elkins, was arrested and charged with murder. The community reeled with shock by both the gruesome details of the homicides and the knowledge of the accused perpetrator—a small, quiet boy weighing just seventy-five pounds. Accessible and fast-moving, The Plea delivers a complete, complex, and nuanced narrative of this horrific crime, while shedding light on the legal, social, and political environment of Iowa and the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Bryan and Wolf also coauthored of Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland (Iowa, 2007). Both reside in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Guest Post by Kevin Brown
Readers should know something going into Ozeki’s novel: inanimate objects talk to the main character, Benny Oh. One of those items is the book the reader is reading and that Benny is writing, more or less. If you can’t get past that technique, this book isn’t for you, as it’s central to the novel. Benny might be crazy, but he might also simply be seeing more of the world than other people; Ozeki leaves that up to the reader, as it’s a question she believes is worth exploring. Benny struggles with it himself, as does everybody around him, and there is a colorful cast of characters he interacts with. Ozeki tangentially explores a number of relevant social issues, ranging from climate change to consumerism, but she mainly seems interested in how we relate to the universe and those around us. Thus, she uses a variety of characters to explore the things (the actual stuff) that make up our world and our relationships with it, whether we horde them or seek to order them. As a Buddhist, Ozeki believes the world is more alive than most of us would admit and that we are one with it, whether we want to be or not. Most of us just aren’t listening closely enough.
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. Viking, September 2021; Penguin, June 2022.
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/.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
The Georgia Review’s Summer 2022 issue is now available and opens with commentary from Editor Gerald Maa, who writes, “I see a literary journal as a means by which to make public, momentary space for collectives to continue, start, or transform work they have been or want to be doing. Mourning, and celebrating, a life just passed is collective work, when done at its best.” Maa’s comments come after discussing the untimely passing of April Freely whose work is honored in the feature, “Correspondent Life: April Freely (1982-2021) Poems and Annotations” and includes works by Jennifer S. Cheng and Spring Ulmer.
Included in this issue is new writing from Samuel R. Delany, Alejandro Varela, Pamela Mordecai, Marylyn Tan, Bennett Sims, and many more, as well as a new translation of a poem by Bertolt Brecht, a reconsideration of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and a portfolio of experimental photography by Daisuke Yokota. Maa also shares that the magazine’s online component, GR2, now features “Questions for Contributors” in which writers offer responses to five questions to “give readers a glimpse of what editorial exchange with our editors can look like.” Melanie P. Moore, Lio Rios, Nishanth Injam, and Aryn Kyle take the first plunge.
Taxonomies
Poetry by Erin Murphy
Word Poetry, April 2022
The demi-sonnets in Erin Murphy’s Taxonomies categorize elements of the human experience that defy simple classification. In this form of her own invention, Murphy holds a magnifying glass to issues of gender, aging, relationships, and social justice. Erin Murphy is the author or editor of thirteen books and has received numerous awards. In April 2022, she was named Poet Laureate of Blair County, Pennsylvania. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is Professor of English and creative writing at the Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College. Read sample poems here.
My Aunt’s Abortion
Poetry / Narrative Memoir by Jane Rosenberg LaForge
BlazeVOX, February 2023
My Aunt’s Abortion is a series of poems and two essays that detail the effects of an illegal abortion the author’s aunt underwent in 1960’s California. Part cautionary tale and part retrospective, the essays recall family life before and after the abortion; the poems provide the perspective of the young girl who witnessed her aunt’s recovery from a mysterious disease and the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. Together, the poems and essays evoke a period of loss and shame that will likely return with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Sample pages can be read on the publisher’s website. Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of three previous collections of poetry; four chapbooks; a memoir; and two novels. Her 2018 novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War (Amberjack Publishing), was a finalist in two categories in the Eric Hoffer awards. Her 2021 novel, Sisterhood of the Infamous (New Meridian Arts Press), was a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards in regional fiction (west). A reviewer for American Book Review, she reads poetry for COUNTERCLOCK literary magazine and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net.
The Climate Issue of the Kenyon Review includes a folio called “Angry Mamas,” guest edited by Emily Raboteau, featuring essays, stories, and poems by mothers discussing the climate crisis and environmental justice. The folio contains contributions from writers around the world, including Humera Afridi, Aliyeh Ataei, Camille T. Dungy, Patricia Engel, Genevieve Guenther, Anya Kamenetz, Debora Kuan, Cleyvis Natera, Deborah Paredez, and Sadia Quraeshi Shepard. In the rest of the issue, readers will find climate-themed work by Samuel Amadon, Mary Kuryla, Diane Mehta, Michael Metivier, Genta Nishku, Jane Wong, and many others.
Guest Post by Cindy Dale
It gets expensive entering contests. So, I love it when a journal includes a copy of the contest issue with the entrance fee. Case in point: Crazyhorse. No, I didn’t win, but the College of Charleston’s Crazyhorse includes a year’s subscription with your entry fee. From the very first story, Marian Crotty’s “Near Strangers,” I was hooked. Crotty masterfully interweaves the story of Betsy’s evening as a hospital volunteer assisting a rape victim with the story of her own fractured relationship with her gay son. Pair this story with Daniel Garcia’s unsettling poem about abuse, “What I’m Trying to Say Is.” Kris Willcox’s “In May” considers the long arc of a woman’s life concluding with, “It’s not the things that matter to me. It’s the choices over what to keep, and what to throw away.” The story closes with the narrator quietly feeding a handful of old sequestered photos into the fire pit. I found myself thinking about old photos again with Gregory Dunne’s poem “Quiet Blizzard.” The Crazyhorse Spring 2022 issue is 165 beautiful pages of an astounding range of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. This is an issue to be slowly savored by readers all summer long, and for writers, the Crazyhorse Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry open to submissions January 1-31 each year.
Reviewer bio: Cindy Dale has published over twenty short stories in literary journals and anthologies. She lives on a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island.
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