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!
Carve offers critiques for prose on a per-word and for poetry on a per-page basis. Get a candid assessment of what’s working, what isn’t, and push your writing one step closer to publication. We also offer in-depth editorial services via Limpede Ink. Visit website to learn more.
View the full May 2022 eLitPak newsletter.
Winning Writers will award a grand prize of $8,000 in its eighth annual North Street competition, and $16,750 in all. The top eight winners will enjoy additional benefits from our co-sponsors BookBaby and Carolyn Howard-Johnson. Gifts for everyone who enters. Submit books published in any year and on any self-publishing platform. $70 entry fee. Enter online or by mail by June 30. Learn more at our website.
View the full May 2022 eLitPak newsletter.
Antipodes: Stories
Fiction by Holly Goddard Jones
University of Iowa Press, May 2022
In this collection of eleven stories, a harried and depressed mother of three young children serves on a committee that watches over the bottomless sinkhole that has appeared in her Kentucky town. During COVID lockdown, a thirty-four-year-old gamer moves back home with his parents and is revisited by his long-forgotten childhood imaginary friend. A politician running for a state congressional seat and a young mother, who share the same set of fears about the future, cross paths but don’t fully understand one another. A woman attends a party at the home of a fellow church parishioner and discovers she is on the receiving end of a sales pitch for a doomsday prepper. These stories and more contemplate our current reality with both frankness and hard-earned hopefulness, realism and fabulism, tackling parenthood, environment, and the absurd-but-unavoidable daily toil of worrying about mundane matters when we’ve entered “an era of unknowability, of persistent strangeness.” Holly Goddard Jones is associate professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is author of Girl Trouble, The Next Time You See Me, and The Salt Line.
The annual BLR Prizes award outstanding writing related to themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. Winners are published in the spring issue of BLR. For each genre, first prize is $1000 and honorable mention is $250. Submit your best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction through July 1. Visit website.
View the full May 2022 eLitPak newsletter.
It is the mission of Months to Years to “cultivate a beautifully designed online space to share compelling and original nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography that explores mortality and terminal illness.” As Editor Renata K. Louwers writes in this issue’s introduction, “We think things are going along a certain way with certain predictable events. And they are. Until suddenly, they’re not. What can we do besides surrender to the moment, maybe use the Calm app, and hope for the best? Some of us pray, some of us meditate or exercise, and some of us write. Others take photos or create visual art. Art – via the written word or visually – has served as a crucial coping mechanism for humans through the centuries.” We are no different than our ancestors.
Continue reading “Magazine Stand :: Months to Years – Spring 2022”
Rotura
Poetry by José Angel Araguz
Black Lawrence Press, March 2022
Selected out of the Black Lawrence Press open reading period, the shifting speakers and landscapes of Rotura allow the poet to explore the themes of the Latinx experience and life itself; truth, family, longing are searched through language both direct and lyrical. It’s a long journey, but Araguz’s poems travel borders and boundaries creating an essential collection. José Angel Araguz’s most recent collection is An Empty Pot’s Darkness (Airlie Press). He blogs at The Friday Influence. José is an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander and is also a faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program.
Happy Friday! Mother nature is still not able to make up her mind if it’s supposed to be winter, spring, or summer. If you’re sick of the weather whiplash, it’s a great excuse to stay inside a bit longer and keep your submitting and writing goals strong.
Take a gander at the NewPages weekly round-up of where to submit your writing to. Don’t forget newsletter subscribers get first access to writing contests and calls for submissions every Monday morning, so subscribe today!
Continue reading “Where to Submit Round-up: May 20, 2022”
Inside Outrage
Poetry by Gary Glauber
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, September 2022
Inside Outrage by Gary Glauber captures wild wisdom and abject love, the amity and misguided memories keeping us whole in this precarious viral existence. These points of refuge and resilience both unmask and protect us, using frustrations to confront rooted fears. In the end, we must own identities, forgive mistakes, and grow older through the salvation of words. In daring to learn the steps and missteps of this odd dance called life, we maneuver through to find where our ‘inside outrage’ happily resides.
The newest issue of The Dillydoun Review online monthly literary journal features short stories by Haley Glickman, Phoebe Baker Hyde, Byron Spooner; flash fiction by Michael Edwards, Kyle Glover, Kevin Joseph Reigle; poetry by Dale Cottingham, Darren C. Demaree, Jeffrey Dreiblatt, Philip Jason, Jess Levens, Anthony Salandy; prose poetry by John Chambers, Kate Sullivan; nonfiction by Patricia Feinman, Linda Springhorn Gunther; and flash nonfiction by Kyle Ingrid Johnson, Victoria Lewis, Ashley McCurry, Yelizaveta P. Renfro, Sue William Silverman.
The editors also announced that The Dillydoun Review is now a paying market, offering $20 per acceptance to be paid on publication day via PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle, and they “will continue to work on ways to increase the pay rate as soon as possible.”
The Spring 2022 issue of Superstition Review is available for readers to access online, with fiction by Abbie Barker, Bradley Sides, Nadine Rodriguez, Ryan Habermeyer, Sahalie Angell Martin, and William J. Cobb; nonfiction by Cindy Lee, Haolun Xu, Laurie Blauner, Marcia Aldrich, and Wendy Gan; poetry by Taylor Byas, Sophia Liu, R.J. Lambert, Nathaniel Rosenthalis, Michael Chang, Meghan McClure, Joshua Gottlieb-Miller, Ja’net Danielo, Hannah Smith, Dorsía Smith Silva, Dorothy Chan, Donte Collins, Donna Vorreyer, Christen Noel Kauffman, Carolyn Oliver, Brett Hanley, and Brandel France de Bravo; interviews with Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Gillian Sze, Kathryn Davis, Melissa Chadburn, Paul Tran, and Yanyi; and art by Delta N.A., Elaine Parks, Emily Rankin, Jenny Day, Michelle McElory, and Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad.
She Has Dreamt Again of Water
Poetry by Stephanie Niu
Diode Editions, March 2022
In her debut chapbook She Has Dreamt Again of Water, Stephanie Niu imagines the deep sea as sanctuary. Her poems seek solace from generational guilt and a fractured family by diving into dreamscapes where gills grow as easily as wings. Here, the world shimmers with small, stunning miracles: a fish that looks like light, a river delta seen from the moon, a single coyote in the road. In the search for sanctuary, “There is no split, a real self and a dream self / to divide neatly. There are just dreams.” Even upon waking, “she does not weep. She has dreamt again / of water, that place where the river / meets the sea, where long-legged birds / tiptoe through the cordgrass, dipping / their heads to feed.” In these poems, the surreal and unseen suggest the shapes of shared longing. Stephanie Niu is a poet from Marietta, GA. She earned her degrees in symbolic systems and computer science from Stanford University. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award for work on decolonizing historical narratives of overseas Chinese laborers through digital techniques. She lives in New York City.
Conduit Books & Ephemera has announced their 5th annual Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize is accepting entries through July 7, 2022. This prize is open to poets writing in English who have not yet published a full-length collection and is dedicated to championing poets who dance to their own tune not to be different, but to be true. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Spring has sprung a new issue of The Baltimore Review with online fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry by Melissa Faustine Chang, Emily Chase, M. Cynthia Cheung, Justin Hunt, David Kim, Kent Kosack, Andrew Kozma, Lara Longo, Cole Meyer, Devon Miller-Duggan, Yehoshua November, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Nicole Rollender, and Zoe Yohn. The Baltimore Review‘s current submission period ends May 31, as does their Summer 2022 Micro Lit Contest for works under 400 words. For more information, check out their submission guidelines.
Beyond the Time of Words/Más allá del tiempo de las palabras
Poetry by Marjorie Agosín
Sixteen Rivers Press, April 2022
Marjorie Agosín’s bilingual book of poetry, Beyond the Time of Words/Más allá del tiempo de las palabras, was composed during the time of isolation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and in it, she embraces that darkness with profound compassion and humanity. Born in Chile, Agosín came to the United States as a political exile, and her prolific career has been inspired by both political activism and the pursuit of social justice. While bearing witness to our collective grief, these poems also offer reminders of bravery and ultimately hope: They are meant, the poet says, “to cleanse and mend the world.” Marjorie Agosín is a Chilean American poet who writes in Spanish, her native language. She is also a human rights activist and the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her work has been inspired by the causes of social justice and human rights. In addition to her numerous collections of poetry, Agosín has written young-adult novels, memoirs, and anthologies promoting international women writers.
Challenging Pregnancy: A Journey Through the Politics and Science of Healthcare in America
Nonfiction by Genevieve Grabman
University of Iowa Press, March 2022
In Challenging Pregnancy, Genevieve Grabman recounts being pregnant with identical twins whose circulatory systems were connected in a rare condition called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. Doctors couldn’t “unfuse” the fetuses because one twin also had several other confounding problems: selective intrauterine growth restriction, a two-vessel umbilical cord, a marginal cord insertion, and, possibly, a parasitic triplet. Ultimately, national anti-abortion politics — not medicine or her own choices — determined the outcome of Grabman’s pregnancy. At every juncture, anti-abortion politics limited the care available to her, the doctors and hospitals willing to treat her, the tools doctors could use, and the words her doctors could say. Although she asked for aggressive treatment to save at least one baby, hospital ethics boards blocked all able doctors from helping her. Challenging Pregnancy is about Grabman’s harrowing pregnancy and the science and politics of maternal healthcare in the United States, where every person must self-advocate for the desired outcome of their own pregnancy.
Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife
Poetry by Ingrid Andersson
Holy Cow! Press, April 2022
Jordemoder is an age-old Swedish word for midwife. It means earth/land/world mother and reflects Ingrid Andersson’s poetry and practice as a midwife, as well as her background as an immigrant farmer’s daughter. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in Scandinavian Studies, German literature and anthropology, she worked in countries where access to equitable health care, education, safe and humane environments and food felt more prioritized than in America. Returning to America, she began working as a health care activist and promoting midwifery models of care. As a licensed board-certified nurse midwife, she has caught more than 1000 babies at home. This is Ingrid Andersson’s debut collection of poetry.
Literary magazine Philadelphia Stories is open to submissions from writers across the U.S. for its 2022 Marguerite McGlinn Fiction Contest through June 15. Top prize is $2,500, publication, and invitation to an awards dinner. Learn more about this year’s contest by stopping by the NewPages Classifieds.
The Winter 2021 Issue of Spoon River Poetry Review (46.2) is filled with so much wonderful content, including the SRPR Illinois Poet Feature with poetry by Daniel Borzutzky, and an interview of the poet by Carlos Soto-Román; Editors’ Prize winning poem “diary of a dead eel boy” by Dean Gessie, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, as well as runners-up poems by Shannon Pulusan and donia salem harhoor, honorable mention poems by Matthew Brailas, Patricia Gao, and Ani Tuzman, Allie Hoback, and Gabriel Jesiolowski; New poetry by Isaac Willis, Emma DePanise, Nathan Manley, Frank Jameson, Kristin Fogdall, Ann E. Michael, Frank Jamison, Antonia Pozzit translated by Amy Newman, and more; the SRPR Review Essay “Seriousness, Humorously” by Andrew Dorkin, who reviews books by Joan Retallack (BOSCH’D), Morgan Parker (Magical Negro), and Fred Moten (all that beauty); and poignantly beautiful cover art by Jessi Reid-Swiech.
Literary magazine Nimrod is open to submissions for their 2022 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. This contest is open to writers with no more than two previous publication credits in their genre. Winners in poetry and fiction will receive $500 and publication. Deadline to enter is July 15, 2022. Learn more by stopping by the NewPages Classifieds.
Guest Post by Stephanie Katz
Nina Shope’s Asylum is an entrancing, fictionized story of French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his patient Augustine. In the novel — as in real life — Charcot puts Augustine’s “hysteria” on display in public demonstrations. Through his touch, Augustine’s body convulses and contorts in sexual poses in front of a crowd. The novel vacillates between both characters’ perspectives in a twisted dichotomy of torture and desire. Charcot resists his attraction to Augustine and obtrusively attempts to quantify her illness through hundreds of photographs and measurements: “My body broken down into strange sets of numbers until I barely recognize myself. Everything measured—the time it takes me to raise my arm, the angle of my eye, the number of steps until I find myself at your side.” Shope deftly uses second person POV to show Augustine’s conflicting feelings for Charcot: “I remember years when I could not tell you from me, when you sat inside me as surely as my bones, wearing me from the inside out…There was no part of me not filled by you. Infiltrated as a body is by disease.” Asylum will compel readers to discover Augustine’s fate and learn more about the people who inspired this darkly compelling novel.
Asylum by Nina Shope. Dzanc Books, 2022.
Reviewer bio: Stephanie Katz is a librarian, writer, and editor. She runs 805 Lit + Art and is the author of Libraries Publish: How to Start a Magazine, Small Press, Blog, and More (Libraries Unlimited, ABC-CLIO, 2021). She writes about creative library publishing at literarylibraries.org and lives on an island in Florida.
If I Go Missing
Poetry by Carol Lynne Knight
Fernwood Press, April 2022
What happens when the ex-wife of an ex-cop, with a penchant for TV detectives, speculates about her own disappearance? In this poetic journey, fictional detectives examine her house, her belongings, her lovers, and her longings. Poem by poem, Carol Lynne Knight mixes imaginary investigations with the intimate, often stark, realities of life as the wife of a street cop in South Florida. If I Go Missing mixes the sensual with procedural detail in a surprising, original new trope, with an introduction by Diane Wakoski.
Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust
Nonfiction by Jerry Stahl
Akashic Books, July 2022
In September 2016, Jerry Stahl was feeling nervous on the eve of a two-week trip across Poland and Germany. But it was not just the stops at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau that gave him anxiety. It was the fact that he would be traveling with two dozen strangers, by bus. In a tour group. And he was not a tour-group kind of guy. The decision to visit Holocaust-world did not come easy. Stahl’s lifelong depression at an all-time high, his career and personal life at an all-time low, he had the idea to go on a trip where the despair he was feeling—out-of-control sadness, regret, and fear, not just for himself, but for the entire United States—would be appropriate. And where was despair more appropriate than the land of the Six Million?
Let No One Sleep
A Novel by Juan José Millás
Bellevue Literary Press, August 2022
After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor. Translated by Thomas Bunstead. Juan José Millás is the recipient of Spain’s most prestigious literary prizes: the Premio Nadal, Premio Planeta, and Premio Nacional de Narrativa. He is the author of several short story collections and works of nonfiction as well as over a dozen novels.
Consequence Forum is a nonprofit organization addressing the human consequences and realities of war and geopolitical violence through literature, art, and community events. Their newest print edition of Consequence (14.1) features poetry by Aaron Brown, Lorelei Bacht, Sam Cheuk, Ryan Harper, Leo Fernandez Almero, Elisabeth Murawski, Gail Peck, Claudia Serea, John Thampi, Maša Torbica, Angela Voras-Hills, Lynn White, Vidhu Aggarwal, Joseph Cermatori, Chloe Martinez, Rajiv Mohabir, Sam Reichman, Priya Sarukkai Chabria; fiction by D.J. Cockburn, Brecht De Poortere, Joshua Nagle, J.B. Polk; translations by Alexander Dumas, J Kates, Marta Lopez Luaces, Charlotte Gartenberg, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Andrew Wachtel; nonfiction by Dianna Cannizzo, Elaine Little, Pamela Hart, Gerald McCarthy, Michael Riordan; and visual art by Ko Z.
Night Swim
Poetry by Joan Kwon Glass
Diode Editions, March 2022
In Night Swim, Joan Kwon Glass navigates the dark sea of mourning after losing her sister and her 11-year-old nephew to suicide within a two-month span of time. Night Swim does not turn away from the ugly, unreconciled side of grief: the recurring nightmares, life with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, questions that will never have answers, the desire to hold someone responsible for the deaths when there is no one left to blame. The collection begins with a solitary, titular poem which asks the reader to consider what grief feels like when “the landscape doesn’t change // but everything else does.” Joan Kwon Glass’ first full-length poetry collection, Night Swim, won the 2021 Diode Poetry Prize. She is the author of several chapbooks and has spent the past 20 years as an educator in the Connecticut public schools. She tweets @joanpglass and is online at www.joankwonglass.com.
The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat
Poetry by Melody S. Gee
Driftwood Press, June 2022
Melody S. Gee’s The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat meets at the intersection of cultural and spiritual identity, culminating in a set of harrowing poems that investigates how belief defines us. Melody S. Gee is the author of The Dead in Daylight (Cooper Dillon Books, 2016) and Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), winner of the Perugia Press Prize. She is the recipient of Kundiman poetry and fiction fellowships, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Robert Watson Literary Prize. Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in Commonweal Magazine, Blood Orange Review, Lantern Review, and The Rappahannock Review. She is a freelance writer and editor living in St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and daughters. An excerpt from the collection:
THE CONVERT DESIRES HER WAY INTO A FIRST PRAYER
Her mother’s first lesson
was chew your wants and spit
the pulp, grow skinny feeding everyone else your flesh.
A heart’s cargo is sometimes oil, sometimes crude. A spill can undo
the waterproof of any surface.
And still the diving birds must feed,
must point their beaks past the slick that seals the cornea to eternal blur.
Does the Lord ask her what she wants when he already knows its name?
Billed as their first “annual” issue, Coastal Shelf #6 (Winter 2022) features “more long prose than ever (over 3k words, with a few even over 5k) which includes a mix of non-fiction and fiction, as well as a novel excerpt, and a really strong selection of poetry.” In addition to its “standard” contributions, Coastal Shelf offers two unique features: “Waterlogged Paper” are reprints of works that appeared in print, not online; “Ones That Got Away” are for pieces Coastal Shelf turned down that got accepted elsewhere with links to those publications. Contributors to this issue include poetry by Esther Ra, Alex Aldred, J.B. Hill, Savannah Williams, Cecil Morris, Justin Lacour, Francine Rubin, Andrew Najberg; flash prose by Sofia Spencer, Véronique Béquin, Thomas Kearnes; long prose, by Adrienne Pine, Rachel Carlson, Mac MacDaniel, Sherri H. Hoffman; “Waterlogged Paper” by Marisa P. Clark, Marisa P. Clark, Danny McLaren.
The Land and the Days: A Memoir of Family, Friendship, and Grief
Memoir by Tracy Daugherty
The University of Oklahoma Press, January 2022
In “Cotton County,” the first of the dual memoirs in The Land and the Days, Tracy Daugherty describes the forces that shape us: the “rituals of our regions” and the family and friends who animate our lives and memories. Combining reminiscence, history, and meditation, Daugherty retraces his childhood in Texas and Oklahoma, where he first encountered the realities of politics, race, and class. The “Unearthly Archives,” the second of Daugherty’s memoirs, expands the realistic accounts of the first narrative, providing a meditation on the meaning of grief. Daugherty demonstrates his curiosity and indefatigable quest for understanding and closure by examining his life-long store of literary readings, as well as the music he loves, to discover the true value of a life dedicated to art.
Guest Post by Kevin Brown
Tajja Isen’s collection Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service draws from her background as a Canadian woman of color. However, her writing doesn’t try to explain her pain or oppression, as she asserts in “This Time It’s Personal,” an exploration of the personal essay focusing on who tells their stories (and are allowed to tell their stories) in ways that reinforce that pain. Instead, she examines the systems she’s most familiar with — voice actors in animation, the literary canon and publishing, law, affirmative action, protest, nationality — and points out the ways they cause the pain and oppression individuals endure. She integrates her experiences, and she then critiques the hierarchies and structures that have led to those experiences. Her work reminds readers of the reality behind personal essays, pointing out that lives and essays don’t occur in a vacuum. Instead, people in power (mainly white males) design systems to reinforce their power and to keep other people (primarily people of color, especially women) from obtaining any power of their own. If, like me, you think you already know that to be true, Isen’s essays will help you see it in places you don’t expect and in ways you often overlook.
Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service by Tajja Isen. Atria, April 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/.
Spirit Matters: White Clay, Red Exits, Distant Others
Poetry by Gordon Henry
Holy Cow! Press, June 2022
Spirit Matters by Gordon Henry offers readers a view into shadow spheres, of creative memory, reinvention of storied characters and place. These serve as reminders of how poetry might turn longing back to the very sound that memory makes as a means to honor the imaginative lives of people and place. Spirit Matters is a collection of poetry informed by irretrievable letters of loss, love, and trauma, forged by musing on imagined relatives – living, dead, yet to be – shaped by the spirit of places we can never return to without understanding the living power of memory, story, and song. Gordon Henry is an enrolled member/citizen of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota. He is also a Professor in the English Department at Michigan State University, where he teaches American Indian Literature and Creative Writing. He serves as Senior Editor of the American Indian Studies Series at Michigan State University Press.
Drowning in Light
Poetry by Taylor Steele
Platypus Press, March 2022
The poems in Taylor Steele’s Drowning in Light traverse the daily—the sickness, the loneliness, and the hope that yawns from within. There are continuous trails of light peeking through, hands grasping, fingers trailing—a notion of persistence, always. Taylor Steele is a queer, Black, NYC-born-and-based writer, performer, and photographer. Her poetry has been featured on Huffington Post, Brooklyn Poets, Button Poetry, and is a 2016 Pushcart Nominee. A triple-Taurus, she believes in the power of art to change, shape, and heal.
The Black Fire—This Time (BFTT) Virtual Summer Fellowship from Aquarius Press and Willow Books fosters the careers of poets and writers at all stages of development through independent study, readings, Q&A sessions with prominent authors and sponsored prizes. Fellows are provided exclusive access to the Black Fire — This Time Digital Collection, which contains cultural gems from the Black Arts Movement along with an extended set of hard-to-find and out-of-print works not found in the print edition.
From June to August, BFTT Summer Fellows will work remotely on the project of their choice. Projects are self-paced at any stage of development, from literature reviews to works-in-progress to full manuscripts. The fellowship is open to poets, writers, playwrights, teaching artists and healing arts practitioners addressing the myriad aspects of the Black Arts Movement (past, present and future).
Requirements: Fellows work independently but attend weekly check-ins (approx. 60 minutes), where they receive announcements, network, enjoy readings and Q&A sessions with guest speakers and schedule critique sessions. Fellows will submit a portfolio sample of work completed during the fellowship. Select projects will be eligible for sponsored prizes (TBA).
For more information visit the BFTT Submittable page. May 31, 2022 application deadline.
In the Editor’s Note to this double issue (VOL. 88 NOs. 1&2) of New Letters, Christie Hodgen explores a passage from Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” and concludes, “As writers, we are able to put words to what is hidden; as readers, we experience the often humbling privilege of gaining access to others’ hidden lives – a privilege we almost never experience in the real world.” In this issue, readers have the privilege to enjoy the New Letters Award Series of winning works by R.J. Lambert, Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry; Rachel Coonce, Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction; Richard Hermes, Robert Day Award for Fiction; Erin McReynolds, Editor’s Choice Award; and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Editor’s Choice Award. In addition, the issue features fiction by Nicole Hazan, Bradley Bazzle, Andrew Peters, Essay, Jillian Barnet, Chelsea B. DesAutels, P.L. Watts; poetry by Christopher Howell, Gaskin, Alicia Ostriker, Wyatt Townley, Maurya Simon, Jeremy Pulmano, John Blair, Vanesha Pravin; reviews and commentaries by Daniel A Rabuzzi, David Newkirk, Natalie Johansen, Robert Stewart; and a full-color portfolio of painting and collages by Harold Smith, whose work is featured on the cover.
Happy Friday the 13! Don’t press your luck and stay inside writing and editing. Check out these great opportunities of where to submit your work. Remember, our newsletter subscribers get early access to new opportunities before they are featured on our website. Plus, if you subscribe you’ll also get access to our monthly eLitPak newsletter first.
Speaking of the eLitPak, May’s eLitPak newsletter will be hitting inboxes Wednesday, May 18. Don’t miss out.
Continue reading “Where to Submit Round-up: May 13, 2022”
Real Rhyming Poems
Poetry by J. M. Allen
Kelsay Books, April 2022
Rhymers unite! Real Rhyming Poems by J. M. Allen is a chapbook of exclusively rhyming poems, which is quite uncommon, so the reader is in for a rare treat with this book. Twenty of the thirty poems in this collection had been accepted individually in thirteen different publications. The poem “Genes” won first place in a 2021 contest, and the poem “Ten Hours of Sleep” was picked up by Associated Press (immediately after it was published in a Minnesota newspaper). The author is a parent and included some poems regarding teenagers in this collection of humorous and serious poems. If you haven’t read good rhyming poems in a while, here is your chance! J. M. Allen is an electrical engineer and parent, who enjoys writing rhyming poems. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has been a longtime resident of Rochester, Minnesota.
BABE
Poetry by Dorothy Chan
Diode Editions, December 2021
BABE is about owning the room. It’s about physical touch. It’s about dancing (actually, grinding) on a heart-shaped bed and starring as the leading lady of the film (no matter how risqué it gets). At the core of this collection, the Chinese American speaker questions the conventions around her, dating back to her origin story as a Hong Kongnese child who would get up to stretch in the middle of Cantonese class. As an adult, she questions her fate since the family fortune teller screwed her over with a lazy fortune, yet got her brother’s completely spot-on. She triple sonnets her way through confrontations of queerphobia in her family, the trauma from a past relationship with a significantly older man, and the constant male gaze. She pays homage to the first girls who ever loved her in this analysis of sexuality, queerness, popular culture, and resilience. She’s baby forever. Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Editor Emeritus of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com
Guest Post by Deborah Nedelman
Iris Graville, author of the award-winning memoir Hiking Naked, lives on an island in the Salish Sea and writes as a citizen of the planet. Writer in a Life Vest as a collection of essays is a journey of discovery and an education about a delicate ecosystem which supports some of the world’s most iconic creatures. The first Writer in Residence on the Washington State Ferries, Iris spent a year riding the interisland ferry through the San Juan Islands of the Salish Sea. Readers cycle with her as the ferry glides and rocks through the home of the endangered resident orcas (killer whales) and meet scientific experts who are devoting their knowledge and energies to saving these rare creatures. As we learn about riding this ferry — including witnessing a moveable ukulele jam, where players board the ferry at various ports, play together for a while and move on — Graville teaches us about the current state of the sea’s health and our connection to it. The multiple essay forms Graville employs keep readers off-kilter, as if standing on the deck of a rocking ship, yet they invite us to hang on and to look deeper. Like Graville, I live on an island in the Salish Sea, though not in the San Juans, and I swim in the sea year-round. It is my concern for the fragile state of this body of water, of the resident orcas, and of our planet that has led me to write this review. Graville’s collection belongs in the genre of books alerting us to the precarious state of our planet, but it stands out by pointing our gaze toward hopefulness and action.
Writer in a Life Vest by Iris Graville. Homebound Publications, March 2022.
Reviewer Bio: Deborah Nedelman, PhD, MFA is co-author of two non-fiction books: A Guide for Beginning Psychotherapists (Cambridge Press) and Still Sexy After All These Years (Perigee/Penguin). Her novel, What We Take for Truth (Adelaide Press, 2019) won the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction. Deborah is a manuscript coach and leads writing and watercolor painting workshops.
Bath
Poetry by Jen Silverman
Driftwood Press, May 2022
Winner of the Driftwood Press 2021 Adrift Chapbook Contest, Silverman’s work was selected for its geographical and lyrical style, with poems that “communicate harrowing insights into the landscape of relationships.” Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. She is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Jen also writes for TV and film.
Brotherhood (2018) is a 25-minute documentary written and directed by Meryam Joobeur that documents the story of a Tunisian shepherd’s family whose son left home to join the Islamic State at war as a consequence of the Arab Spring Uprising (2010-2013) and is now returning home to Syria. The film “dispels the stereotypical notions of what it means to be Muslim as it deepens our understanding of the Arab world.” A feature-length version is currently in development.
The Spring/Summer 2022 issue of Concho Review Review features fiction by Marco Etheridge, David Harris, Paul Juhasz, Judy Stanigar, Gemini Wahhaj; poetry by Jonathan Bracker, Matthew Brennan, Nick Conrad, William Virgil Davis, Holly Day, David Denny, Lynn Domina, George Drew, Shawna Ervin, William Heath, Ann Howells, Ken Meisel, Gary Mesick, Elizabeth Rees, John Rutherford, Claire Scott, Matthew J. Spireng, Chuck Taylor, Larry D. Thomas, Barbara Tyler, Matthew Ulland, David Vancil, Maryfrances Wagner, Harold Whit Williams, Neal Zirn; and nonfiction by Janice Airhart, Michael Howarth, Kay Long, Gabriel Carlos Lopez. Cover photograph: UntamedPhotography by Tim L. Vasquez.
Now entering its tenth year, The Fictional Cafe is open for submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Rolling submissions deadline, there is no fee to submit. You do, however, have to become a member of their Coffee Club. It’s free to join.
View their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Voices in the Dead House
Novel by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press, July 2022
Inspired by Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series centers on the aftermath of the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862 where Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.
Named after Court Green, the property in Devon, England, where Sylvia Plath lived and wrote the Ariel poems, Court Green, the magazine editors say, is like that property in England: “a space where all kinds of poems are welcome, especially those you can’t always find elsewhere: long poems, fun poems, pop poems, poems from archives and unpublished notebooks, playful poems, taboo poems, and artifacts we call ‘poems’ even when they defy all our efforts to label them.” Issue #20 is testament, featuring multiple works by each Jack Skelley, Harryette Mullen, Amy Gerstler, James Shea, Patrick Culliton, Sandra Simonds, Sean Cho A., Kelly R. Samuels, Christopher Citro, Yvonne Amey, Grant Quackenbush, Megan Kaminski, Nick Rossi, CM Burroughs, Ron Koertge, Kathleen Rooney, Brandon Menke, Dan Alter, rob mclennan, Catherine Pierce, August Green, Cameron Martin, John Muellner, Vicki Iorio, and Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade, as well as an interview with rob mclennan by Lisa Fishman, and an interview with Tim Dlugos by journalist Terry Gross for her radio program Fresh Air, produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, on March 29, 1985. All works are available to read online at the Court Green website.
Green Regalia
Poetry by Adam Tavel
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, April 2022
Written against the harrowing backdrop of climate change, Green Regalia explores our precarious ecological moment and increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world. In this collection, Adam Tavel chronicles the objectification of landscapes and the species within them, the cultural denial of the body’s transient nature, and the aftermath of an estranged father’s death. These poems of rot and renewal seek a wisdom free of domination, where both wonder and surrender may remind us of our place in the greater tapestry of life. Adam Tavel is the author of five books of poetry, including this collection and Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2022).
That’s right! The deadline to enter Swan Scythe Press’ 2022 Poetry Chapbook Contest is only about a month away on June 15. This is a postmark deadline. The winner of the 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest was Rae Gouirand for her manuscript Little Hour. The winner of this year’s contest will receive $200, publication, and 25 perfect-bound copies. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds for full details.
Coastal Shelf online literary magazine has offered two Online Generative Poetry Workshop this spring/summer that offer participants “generative exercises and prompts” as well as taking “a deep-dive” into several literary magazines to better understand possible markets. The next workshop is 6 weekly 90-minute meetings: July 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, August 7. Participation is capped to “ensure good interaction and value,” and participants can also request one-on-one sessions. The money generated from these workshops goes towards paying Coastal Shelf authors. For more information, visit the Coastal Shelf website here.
Lunch Ticket Literary and Art Journal Winter/Spring 2022 is online for all to read published by the Antioch MFA in Creative Writing Program and features fiction by J. T. Townley, Poetry, Joanne Durham, Maya Lewis, Abhijit Sarmah, Ellen June Wright; Writing for Young People featuring Dana Blatte; flash prose by Brett Biebel, Jorge Torrente Cabrera, Minna Dubin, Eliot Li, Linda McMullen, Amber Wozniak; interviews with Robin Davidson, Crystal Hana Kim, Locascio Nighthawk, Paisley Rekdal, Sally Wen Mao; creative nonfiction by Julia F. Green, H’Abigail Mlo; the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction selections by Diane Forman, JoeAnn Hart, Kristin Marie, Dana Kroos; art by Guilherme Bergamini, Henry Hu, Dana Kroos; and the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts selections.
Heartwood Literary Magazine is an alumni-run semi-annual online literary publication in association with the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. The newest issue (#13) features poetry by Oisín Breen, Mary Lucille DeBerry, Pamela Hill Epps, Connie Jordan Green, Gabriel Green, David M. Harris, Peter Leight, Megan Wildhood, and Sara Dovre Wudali; creative nonfiction by Celesté Cosme, Molly Katt, Brina Patel, Amber Pierson, Laura Jackson Roberts, and Michelle Spencer; and fiction by Carl Boon, Melissa Feinman, Matt Gillick, Emily Krauser, and Martin Toman. Heartwood is free to read online here. Heartwood also hosts the annual Heartwood Poetry Prize Contest, open this year from May 15 – June 15, and judged by Bill King, the 2021 Heartwood Poetry Prize Winner.
Guest Post by MG Noles
Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Someone with whom you could confide anything? A soulmate who loved you no matter what you said or did? Celia Paul’s extraordinary new book, Letters to Gwen John, adopts Gwen as just such an “imaginary” friend/soulmate and listener as she writes all her thoughts and feelings to the long-dead post-impressionist painter who lived in the latter 18th and early 19th centuries. Using a series of letters, Paul reveals her inner thoughts about life, art, men, freedom, and beauty. The book is part memoir and part art history, and it makes a beautiful read. Filled with imagination and insight, Paul examines the meaning of art and life. She shares her vision and makes you believe that communication is possible across space and time. As she puts it, “time is a strange substance.” And somehow, as you read this amazing book, you see Gwen John seated in a cozy room somewhere, like the one she paints in Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, reading Celia Paul’s letters with a faint smile.
Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul. New York Review Books, April 2022.
Reviewer bio: MG Noles is a sometime essayist, reviewer, history buff.
Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons
Essays by Jerry Dennis
University of Michigan Press, September 2021
Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain. Up North in Michigan has been selected as a 2022 finalist and is up for gold in the Non-Fiction – Nature Category of the Midwest Book Awards.
