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!
The June 2024 issue of The Lake online journal of poetry and poetics is now online featuring new works by Stephen Boyce, Theresa Heine, Angi Holden, Sarah James, Hannah Linden, Olivia Oster, Abigail Ottley, Cliff Saunders, Finola Scott, J. R. Solonche, Sue Spiers, and Kerry Trautman. Readers can also enjoy book reviews of AE Hines’ Adam in the Garden and J. R. Solonche’s God. The Lake’s One Poem Review features on poem from a new collection of published poems; this month spotlights poet Linda McCauley Freeman.
8000 Mile Roll: A Motorcycle Memoir by M. Scott Douglass Paycock Press, April 2024
In 2021, in the fading days of the pandemic, M. Scott Douglass took a motorcycle ride across America. The ride itself took 24 days and covered 8001 miles through 24 states with extended stops in the Grand Canyon area and his native state of Pennsylvania. This book is a journal of that adventure, the places where he went, and the people he met along the way. North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti says, “It’s impossible to read and not conjure Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild,’ the revving, reverberating anthem to the iconic film Easy Rider.” And check out Charlotte Readers Podcast Episode 385 which features Douglass in conversation with Landis Wade.
42 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy first week of June! We got some lovely weather in before the rains came and decided to flatten the corn in the garden down. If you have some rainy weather, we have plenty of submission opportunities to brighten your day. If you are able to go out and enjoy the beautiful weather in your neck of the woods, take your laptop or tablet and you can work on the submission opportunities below as well.
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.
Volume 38, Issue 2 of Zone 3 is now available for free and easy access online and features nonfiction by Rose McLarney and Robert Eric Shoemaker; poetry by Carolyn Oliver, Melanie Manuel, Zea Pippi Lotte van der Elsken, Hailey Gross, Bohan Gao, Carrie Shipers, Ellen June Wright, Abigail Cloud, Melanie Manuel, Christopher Citro, Abriana Jetté, Nora Gupta, Chuck Carlise; and fiction by Desmond Everest Fuller, Francesca Leader, Jyotsna Sreenivasan, and Kyle Impin. Artist, curator and educator based out of Nashville, Tennessee, Paul Collins is the featured artist.
Likening creative expression to a common artist’s tool, Spray Paint Magazine was launched with the mission to give artists a voice through publishing prose, poetry, scripts, and visual art pieces in two to three issues a year. Currently, back issues can be read online for free with future issues available for digital download.
Managing Editor Angel-Clare Linton says she started Spray Paint Magazine while pursuing an undergraduate degree in creative writing. “While I was studying,” she explains, “I started working on my school’s magazine as a poetry editor, which was my first experience behind the scenes in the literary world. It was then I realized how much I enjoyed working on a literary magazine and that I wanted to work for my own publishing company. I have always wanted to be a full-time writer, so it wasn’t far-fetched that I wanted my own publishing company and literary magazine. That said, while I was starting my spring semester, I launched Spray Paint Magazine.”
The 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology curates another year of delightful and insightful poetry that happens to be written by young people. As always, this is not a book of poems for children, but the other way around—these are poems written by children for us all, revealing the startling insights that are possible when looking at the world through fresh eyes.
This 36-page chapbook is mailed to all Rattle subscribers along with the Summer 2024 issue of Rattle poetry magazine. Eighteen poets age 15 or younger contributed to the 2024 volume, offering their perspectives on life in an impressive variety of poetic forms, including an abecedarian, a ghazal, a contrapuntal poem, and a haiku series.
Cover art: “Rainbow Cake” by Amy DiGi (2022, Oil on panel)
Garcia-Gonzalez’s work forays into numerous aspects of our existence to probe into the constraints of the human experience. What is reality? What incites the disparity between one individual’s observation of reality and another’s? As the author dives deeper into his immense understanding of what is, he provides a series of intriguing, thought-provoking insights that cut right to the core of one’s belief system, yet he does so with grace and knowledge that impels readers to at least consider what is being proposed.
The Arts & Letters 25th Anniversary Issue (#47) was published as a special double issue in January, featuring the journal’s annual prizewinners in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and ‘unclassifiable’ genre. The issue includes “Willowbrook,” Kristin W. Davis’s multi-voiced essay on grief and loss in the shadow of the now-defunct State School on Staten Island, and Sophia Khan’s “Cells,” a striking flash piece focused on the body’s mysteries. Plus new poems from Todd Davis, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and Georgia Poet Laureate Chelsea Rathburn; and new prose from Laura Cruser and Gila Green.
For a quarter-century, from its graduate student- and creative writing faculty-staffed quarters at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Arts & Letters has sought to print, in handsome, holdable issues, a diversity of work that is timely and that offers nothing less than the writer’s soul on the page. For further information, visit https://artsandletters.gcsu.edu
The 2024 Poetry Marathon is now open for applications! No running shoes required for this marathon, but you will definitely need stamina and perseverance!
This annual event invites writers to join in a half or full day of poetry writing, responding to prompts posted on the hour starting a 9:00am EST on Saturday, June 15, and running (pun intended) through 9:00am EST Sunday, June 16.
If you’re not up for the full 24-hour marathon, there are two 12-hour half-marathons (my speed). The first is for day folk and goes from 9:00am-9:00pm on June 15, and the second is for night owls, from 9:00pm on June 15 to 9:00am on June 16.
The platform software is new this year, and organizers promise it is designed to be more community-centric, allowing for more seamless engagement in posting, providing feedback, and staying connected.
Participants who successfully complete their event will receive a certificate of achievement and have up to a chapbook’s worth of poems! Over its history, the marathon has had as many as 500+ participants each year, though not all finished. That’s the challenge!
Registration is open through 9:00 PM EST on June 10. Hope to see some of you there!
Tune into your reading with the May 2024 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!
42 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
How is May over with already? It just does not seem possible that the year is about to be half over with. We hope your submission goals have been going well. Afraid of a summer lull? NewPages has your back with the final weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the final week of May. There are lots of deadlines for May 31 and June 1, so don’t miss out!
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.
Check out these great titles received in the month of May 2024, just in time to transition us into summer reading. 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. You can view the full list here.
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.
Mary Ann Redmond’s Boopable! is a beautifully illustrated and fanciful book for toddlers and pre-schoolers that is meant to introduce kids to the joyous bonds that can develop between animals and humans. By zeroing in on the irrepressible urge to snuggle and boop the nose of a cherished furry family member or four-legged friend – or even a creature seen only in the zoo, in stories or poems, or on TV – Boopable! makes clear that even when love is wordless, it is deeply felt.
“Would you be shocked if you booped a fox?” it asks. “Would you laugh if you booped a giraffe?…Would you be smitten if you booped a kitten?… Would you swoon if you booped a raccoon?”
Forget logic or the practical implications of such encounters; neither is on display here. Instead, Boopable! utilizes humorous rhymes to evoke affection for nine distinct members of the animal kingdom. And while most of the critters are unlikely to be within booping range of the book’s audience, this does not matter. Thanks to Kathy Moore Wilson’s exceptionally soulful watercolors, the book is a sweet tribute to love, whimsy, and imagination. It is sure to win cheers from both kids and adults.
Boopable! by Mary Ann Redmond with illustrations by Kathy Moore Wilson. Author Published, January 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.
If you thought you weren’t interested in horror, it’s time you read Bloodletter. Founded by filmmaker and writer Ariel McCleese, the mission of Bloodletter is “to reimagine the horror genre in feminist terms.” McCleese explains, “The delineation ‘feminist horror’ invites themes which marginalized groups are often compelled (or demanded) to repress—including rage, violence, psychological fear, and generational trauma. Our publication empowers women, trans, and non-binary writers to reframe their own historical victimization through the singular power of language and redefine the horror genre collectively.”
Even the name offers readers a new view of the genre, as McCleese shares, “I was trying to find a word that connected horror and literature. I wanted the name to be evocative, to stir something in people. When I finally came to Bloodletter, it felt like the perfect meeting point of the horrific and the literary. I also loved the connection to the history of bloodletting, the idea of bleeding to let go of something. It feels connected to writing and artmaking; these forms of expression allow us to release and transform horror into healing.”
Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds by Adam Rosenblatt Stanford University Press, April 2024
Across the United States, groups of grassroots volunteers gather in overgrown, systemically neglected cemeteries. As they rake, clean headstones, and research silenced histories, they offer care to individuals who were denied basic rights and forms of belonging in life and in death. Cemetery Citizens is the first book-length study of this emerging form of social justice work. It focuses on how racial disparities shape the fates of the dead, and asks what kinds of repair are still possible. Drawing on interviews, activist anthropology, poems, and drawings, Adam Rosenblatt takes readers to gravesite reclamation efforts in three prominent American cities.
Cemetery Citizens dives into the ethical quandaries and practical complexities of cemetery reclamation, showing how volunteers build community across social boundaries, craft new ideas about citizenship and ancestry, and expose injustices that would otherwise be suppressed. Ultimately, Rosenblatt argues that an ethic of reclamation must honor the presence of the dead—treating them as fellow cemetery citizens who share our histories, landscapes, and need for care.
Adam Rosenblatt is Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (2015).
Mudfish 24 is “an amazing, surprising issue” with the winners of the 17th Mudfish Poetry Prize judged by Deborah Landau: Tim Nolan, Doug Smith, and Francis Klein. Also featuring poetry, fiction, and art by Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Paul Wuensche, Alexander Iskin, Dell Lemmon, Amy Carr, Paul Schaeffer, debut writer Joyce (Chunyu) Wang, and many others. Visit the Mudfish website to read Tim Nolan’s award-winning “Memoir” and pre-order a copy of this newest issue.
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
The Spring 2024 issue of Pleiades (44.1) features “On Disability,” a special folio edited by Kennedy Horton and Olivia Ellisor, beginning with the cover art by Lacey Lynn Tink: “Organic transitions of her body, coming to terms with disabling chronic illnesses, and other lived experiences are cataloged and processed through the images that she makes.”
The newest issue of Rattle poetry magazine offers a perfect tribute to summer with Edward Fielding’s cover art, “Blueberry Baskets” (2014).
It’s clear from Adelle Waldman’s second novel, Help Wanted, that she has worked in retail before, specifically in the warehouse section. Her story follows a small group of workers who arrive before the big-box store, Town Square, opens, so they can unload the truck, break down the boxes, and stock the shelves. While the plot focuses on the question of who will become the new general manager and, thus, which of the main cast of characters would take over as the manager of Movement—the business-speak title for the warehouse team—the real heart of the novel are the characters and their struggles.
They struggled in school, whether because they were uninterested, had undiagnosed learning disabilities, or encountered financial or family hardships, leading their lives to end up in the warehouse. Some of them are divorced and juggle childcare obligations; some are single and trying to figure out how to create a life; all of them have dreams, even if that’s nothing more than to move up one rung in the Town Square corporate ladder.
The backdrop for the novel heightens their concerns even more, as Potterstown, where the store is located, has never recovered from the 2008 financial crash and companies’ decisions to move to other countries, where labor costs are cheaper. And, of course, there’s the competition with the online retailer, whom the characters never name.
The team does find moments of joy and companionship, especially when they are all working toward a common goal that they, not management, define, but the book is not ultimately hopeful. Instead, Waldman creates real characters with real struggles that will persist for most, if not all, of their lives. She bears witness to the realities of those who work in the warehouse of the world, where most of us never think to look.
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman. W.W. Norton, March 2024.
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
Xochitl Gonzalez’s second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, tells two parallel stories about women in the art world. The titular Anita de Monte is a Latina artist on the rise in the middle of the 1980s, but she’s married to Jack Martin, a well-established, minimalist artist known as much for his affairs as his art. Raquel Toro is a college student at Brown University in the late 1990s, just beginning work on her undergraduate thesis, which will focus on Jack Martin. Her experience as a Latina in a white-dominated university and department has led to her alienation, both from those around her and from her culture and background.
Anita disappears from art history after her death until Raquel, with guidance from Belinda—the director of the Rhode Island School of Design’s gallery, as well as another woman of color—rediscovers Anita’s work, as well as more details about her death. Raquel’s life had already begun to mirror Anita’s, as she begins dating Nick, a graduating senior with a promising art career before him, though it’s driven more by connections than talent. Though Nick is not a mirror for Jack, he is an echo, a reminder of the men who have tried to control female artists and the narrative of art history.
Raquel’s discovery of Anita de Monte not only resurrects Anita’s reputation, but also helps Raquel begin to discover who she is and who she can be. Through her two main characters, Gonzalez crafts realistic portrayals of the challenges women have and continue to face, along with the importance of role models as one means of pushing through those struggles.
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
39 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Memorial Day weekend is upon us. We at NewPages hope that you have a fun and safe holiday weekend. If you do not have any traveling and gathering plans, but are utilizing time off for writing, editing, and submitting, NewPages is here for you with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities. Since next week does end May, don’t forget to check out all the May 31 and June 1 deadlines before it is too late.
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.
Willow Books has announced the release of Black Fire This Time, Volume 2 (2024) edited by Derrick Harriell with Assistant Editor Kofi Antwi with an introduction by Mona Lisa Saloy. The second in a series celebrating the history and legacy of the Black Arts movement, Volume 2 continues to showcase the works of multiple generations, from the founders of the movement to contemporary writers in the tradition. Hailed as the “New Golden Age of Black Writing,” the Black Fire This Time series is an unprecedented collection of the best in writing by black writers. Featured writers in the series include Sonia Sanchez, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, 2023 American Book Award winner Everett Hoagland and 75 new poets, dramatists and fiction writers from across the country. Black Fire This Time Volume 2 will be distributed by the University of Mississippi Press.
Mark Cox pulls no punches in these poems about family, relationships, loss, regret, growing older and our human condition, generally. Sometimes wry, sometimes tender, always thought provoking, Knowing is the seventh volume of poetry from a lauded veteran poet who has been publishing prominently for almost 40 years.
Previous Praise for Mark Cox:
On Readiness
Thrilling prose poems from a cherished writer . . . . Cox gives lie to the common notion that prose poetry is too formless to count as real verse . . . . [He] is as careful with diction, rhythm, and even rhyme as one might be if they were writing strict alexandrines-and yet, his poems are as fluid and readable as Jack Kerouac’s novels.
Kirkus Reviews
On Sorrow Bread
Tony Hoagland has said Mark Cox is “a veteran of the deep water; there’s no one like him,” and Thomas Lux identified him as “one of the finest poets of his generation.” No one speaks more effectively of the vital and enduring syntaxes of common, even communal, life.
Newly launched biannual online Magazine1 operates out of Bookstore1 in Sarasota, Florida (hence the name) and publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, and hybrid works. “We’re really open to anything if you have something you don’t think fits nicely into the above categories,” says Editor-in-Chief Ben Kerns. Connections are what matter to Kerns, who hopes readers of Magazine1 are able to connect with something they didn’t think they’d connect with at first glance. “I hope that when we feature stranger pieces or pieces that make the reader reach a little further, that someone out there who encounters them for the first time can find their world widened a little bit by them.”
Hole in the Head re:View continues to celebrate their 5th year with a blooming May issue that announces Dana Levin as judge of the 2nd annual Charles Simic Prize for Poetry and Richard Foerster as guest editor of their August 2024 issue. Readers stopping by will also find art, photography, and poetry contributions that include Walt Whitman, a film by Lior Locher, small animals, a polyphony of oak and owl, a weird scream, a wobbly loose tooth, moth tea time, lost skirts and shoes, Aroostook County, lungs, a basketball court, pancakes, Frankenstein’s bride, earth science, salsa dancing, flipping fish, a rooster, handmaids everywhere, the downside of choosing a Frank Sinatra song to play at a funeral, Leningrad 1983, other favorite covers, Michael Hettich interviews Eric Nelson…and so much more!
The newest issue of AGNI (99) focuses on the places that remain. Contributors struggle with displacement and “home,” belonging and having to establish, resisting and being able to simply be. Partly devoted to a major new portfolio of writing from the Central American and Mexican diasporas, AGNI 99 unites around bewilderment and the force of clarity—discovering how we landed here and acknowledging where we stand. Geography extends beyond the folio, in poems by Mosab Abu Toha and Mercè Rodoreda (trans. Rebecca Simpson); fiction by Steven Archer and Urvi Kumbhat; essays by Lia Purpura and Marion Winik; and more. Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Guatemala’s “accident painter,” sets the vivacity and tumble right in front of us, on the cover.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride’s latest novel, centers around a small community in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the early and middle twentieth century. The neighborhood of Chicken Hill is changing, first from a largely Jewish area to a primarily African American one, but then even that dichotomy breaks down with a significant influx of Eastern European Jews who don’t always see the world the same way the older immigrant community does.
Moshe bridges the original divide, as he owns a theatre that once hosted vaudeville acts, but then transitioned to Black bands as demand grew. His primary employee is Nate, a Black man, who helps Moshe work across the racial divide. However, the main impetus for Moshe’s doing so is his wife, Chona, who runs the titular grocery store. She encourages (forces, really) Moshe to leave the grocery store in the neighborhood even as its demographics change, and she becomes the face of welcome to anyone who walks in.
She even makes Moshe hide Dodo, Nate and Addie’s deaf nephew, when the state comes to take him away, a decision that will lead to much of the conflict in the novel. However, Chona stands for the heaven and earth of the store, as she attempts to live out the love of God, the will of God, on earth, as it is in heaven, a message of inclusivity needed now as much as ever.
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
Deadlines: May 31, 2024; June 2, 2024 Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to Black Fox Literary Magazine’s Montage of Misfortunes Fox Tales Prize! Deadline: June 2, 2024! We are also accepting free submissions for our summer 2024 print issue. Free subs close on May 31, 2024! View our flyer for more information and links to our submission guidelines.
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Deadline: July 1, 2024 It is our responsibility to give marginalized groups the opportunity to establish literary legacies that feel rich and vast. Why? To sustain hope for the world to become a more loving, tolerable, and open space. It always begins with art. That is why we invite you to enter the 2025 International Voices in Creative Nonfiction Competition. Visit our website and view our flyer for more information.
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Deadline: July 31, 2024 We are pleased to announce that Dana Levin will judge the second annual Charles Simic Prize for Poetry. Dana is the author of five books of poetry and teaches for the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington College, and serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. Dana recently published a recollection of Charlie as friend, teacher, and mentor in The Yale Review. View our website and our flyer for more information.
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Join Writing Coach & Author Lynne Golodner for five glorious days October 20-24, 2024, in the Redwood forests of northern California for a writers retreat that will change your life! Includes daily craft lessons, guided hikes and yoga in an intimate setting plus daily breakfast, two lunches and a celebratory final night dinner. NewPages readers are eligible for EARLY BIRD PRICING. View flyer to learn more and apply here. ONLY TWO SPOTS LEFT!
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Now in its 7th year, the Catamaran Poetry Prize is open to previously unpublished poetry manuscripts across a range of styles, themes, and forms. The prize is only open to West Coast poets living in California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Hawaii. See our website and flyer for full details.
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We are now accepting poetry manuscripts of 48-80 pages for our May-June Reading Period at The Word Works! Four to six books are selected for publication in the next two years. Single-author collections, collaborations, prose poetry, hybrid works, etc. are welcome. View our flyer for more information and a link to our submissions manager.
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Deadline: May 25, 2024 Livingston Press is accepting submissions of unpublished manuscripts for its annual Changing Light Prize for a Novel-in-Verse. There is no entry fee. Winner receives $500, publication, twenty copies, and a standard royalty contract. View our flyer and visit our website for guidelines.
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Winning Writers will award a grand prize of $10,000 in its tenth annual North Street competition, and $20,400 in all. The top nine winners will enjoy additional benefits from co-sponsors BookBaby, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Book Award Pro, Self-Publishing Made Simple, and Laura Duffy Design. New this year: Everyone who enters online will receive a brief commentary from one of the judges. Submit books published in any year and on any self-publishing or hybrid-publishing platform. $79 entry fee. Enter online or by mail by July 1. Learn more at our website and share our flyer.
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A Nice Safe Place: A Cutler Series Book 1 by Andrew Madigan Next Chapter, August 2024
One day, Amy Snyder disappears. Her father Wayne starts looking for her because the sheriff can’t be bothered. Who took her? There are a few sketchy people around: Jason, Amy’s boyfriend; Lupo, the middle-aged drug dealer who dates teenage girls; the creepy minister, Pastor Stone. Wayne searches all over the county but doesn’t find answers. As Wayne slowly discovers, Belvue isn’t the nice, safe place he thought it was.
Amy suddenly returns, but that’s just the beginning of her story. She’s quiet, thin, traumatized. She says a man kept her locked in a basement along with several other girls. Wayne takes her to the sheriff to make a statement, and she sees her captor’s face in a book of mug shots. Ray Loris, a cutler. Loris is arrested, but a few days later he’s released. There’s no material evidence at his home, no girls, not even a basement. And one more thing: Amy’s pregnant. She swears Loris isn’t the father, and neither is Jason, but she won’t say who is.
A Nice Safe Place follows Wayne as he searches for his daughter while other sections of the novel shift from the point of view of Amy to Loris to Pastor Stone. It is a story about a girl, her family, and a town that’s struggling through hard times. It’s also a story of family secrets and the terrible things people can do to one another, and a story of what it takes to heal.
39 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Well, May is half over with and we are starting to see more stable, warmer weather in the Midwest. And rain. I think the April showers carried over into May. It’s been a bit gloomy and chilly. Something to brighten your day? Enjoy more new books, upcoming events, and submission opportunities with the NewPages May 2024 eLitPak Newsletter. As always, we are here for you with our weekly roundup of submission 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.
Goyhood, Reuven Fenton’s debut novel, mixes a road trip with a twist on a coming-of-age story to develop Mayer (née Marty) Belkin’s existential crisis. Mayer grew up with his twin brother David in Georgia until one day when they were both twelve, and a rabbi came to town. When they discover they’re Jewish, Mayer goes to New York to study, marrying the daughter of a famous rabbi, while David explores a more hedonistic life. They reunite when their mother dies, leaving them with information that will change their lives, especially Mayer’s. David takes Mayer on a road trip during the week he’s away from his wife, exposing him to ideas and experiences that broaden his view of the world and himself.
Fenton slips into some writerly tics that can sometimes crop up in first novels: his narrator often comments that characters see something at their one o’clock (or some different time/location marker); he feels compelled to tell every city or town where they stop, even when nothing happens there, as if proving he knows the area; Mayer’s wife seems more like a plot point than an actual person; and he sometimes overwrites—“masticated” for “chewed” for one example.
However, the relationship between David and Mayer in Goyhood rings true, as does what Mayer needs to learn on his spiritual and emotional journey, as well as the physical one. One could do worse than spend time in a car with them and the people they meet along the way.
Goyhood by Reuven Fenton. Central Avenue Publishing, May 2024.
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 Missouri Review Spring 2024 issue is themed “Animal Kingdom” and features the 2023 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Winners, plus new fiction from Louise Marburg and Jessie Lee Brooks, new poetry by Fleda Brown and John Okrent, and new essays from Debra Dean, Maureen Stanton, and Kathryn Wilder. Also: an arts feature on anti-portraiture in contemporary art, a review of three biographies of three artistic power couples, and an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips.
South Dakota Review is published quarterly at the University of South Dakota through the Department of English, and the newest issue (58.2) continues their commitment to cultural and aesthetic diversity with contributions from S.M. Badawi, Shlagha Borah , Rebecca Bornstein, Ronda Piszk Broatch, Jacob Butlett, Joseph J. Capista, Benjamin D. Carson, Richard Cecil, John Compton, William Erickson, Sarah A. Etlinger, Monica Joy Fara, Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, Gary Fincke, Christopher Heffernan, Andrew Hemmert Justin Hunt, Genevieve Kaplan, Jen Karetnik, Charity Ketz, Anu Kumar Justin Lacour, Hillary Leftwich, Angie Macri, Kristine Langley Mahler, Matt Mason, Terri McCord, Mary B. Moore Marry Morris, Reuben Gelley Newman, John A. Nieves, Marlene Olin, Carolyn Oliver, Rachel Marie Patterson, Jessie Raymundo, Jennifer Richter, Dara-Lyn Shrager, and Anthony J. Viola. Cover art by Editor-in-Chief Lee Ann Roripaugh.
Twice a year online, Lodestar Lit publishes anything literary in style, including short stories, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and one-act plays available as a downloadable PDF. Their mission is nothing less than grand transformations – both in literature and within the individual creators, both present and into the future.
The editors explain, “The initial inspiration for our magazine’s name came from Carl Sagan’s 1980 documentary, Cosmos, in which he says that we are all ‘starstuff,’ or, in other words, stardust. Based on ideas of cosmology, we are living, breathing stardust endowed with consciousness, and we create reasons to live through art, science, philosophy, etc. Thus, we transcend ourselves through art like how a mathematician discovers a formula and transcends themself in their discovery. As authors, our writing is a guiding star – a lodestar – that leads us to new ways of living and being.”
Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, a stunning collection of 47 essays and poems by award-winning Brisbane, Australia, based Aboriginal-Dutch writer Ellen van Neerven, straddles the line between personal reflection and political polemic. The nonbinary author’s reach is broad and the diverse pieces in the anthology touch on the importance of athletics in the social and physical development of girls; the sexual harassment and abuse that often derail the participation of female players; the massive fires, brutal storms, and dislocation that have been caused by ever-worsening climate change; and the persistence of racism against indigenous and other people of color.
The anthology also includes a searing indictment of anti-trans bigotry and zeroes in on the sidelining of Native knowledge about plants, animals, and land management by so-called scientific “experts.” In addition, colonialism is effectively denounced. Lastly, the book offers a moving analysis of illness and addresses the ways disability impacts their ability to write, participate in social justice movements, and socialize with family, friends, and colleagues.
By turns angry, mournful, moving, and persuasive, Personal Score reminds us of a foundational First Nation belief: “Only two relationships matter in the world, relationship with land and relationship with people.” van Neerven beautifully honors both.
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.
Amherst’s Whiting Award-winning magazine, The Common joins the arrival of flowers and birds with its new issue (27). For the past eight years, the magazine, whose mission is to deepen our individual and collective sense of place, has published a portfolio of fiction translated from Arabic, transporting English-language readers to places from Morocco to Palestine. This year’s fiction comes from Chad, South Sudan, and Eritrea, and it explores non-linear time, the resilience and failure of love, and the corrosive effects of political instability. Also featured is a new story from Chlorine author Jade Song, an essay from ANGI co-editor Sven Birkerts, and three Hawaiian Pidgin poems excerpted from a forthcoming Kaya Press anthology.
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
This gorgeous cover on the Spring-Summer 2024 issue of Third Coast is a digital collage by Ashley Miller.
The cover of Conjunctions print issue 82, themed “Works & Days,” features the artwork of Jacob Lawrence, Watchmaker (1946) with cover design by Jerry Kelly, New York.
As a fan of Jaws, I couldn’t resist this Spring 2024 cover image on Fence, and this great story to go along with it: “Reports of series of shark attacks in July 1918 along the New Jersey Shore went viral in that era’s media, gripping the public’s attention. On July 12, the shark found its way into the freshwater Matawan Creek, attacking bathers and self-appointed rescuers at this exact location in Matawan, NJ, where, painted on a train bridge spanning the water, one can enter The Matawan Man-Eater Mural” (Tattoo Bob 2020).
“Eugene Stevenson’s Heart’s Code is a work of true wonder. Ever since my introduction to his poetry, I have awaited his first collection and it is nothing short of magnificent. With deft precision and a keen eye, Stevenson captures ‘the places of great joy [and] the places of great pain’ with a tender grace and moving beauty that will leave readers’ hearts aching for more.”—Michelle Champagne, Susurrus, A Literary Arts Magazine of the American South
“Filled with snapshots of compassion, the poems in Heart’s Code explore both the grand and pocket-sized experiences that drive us apart and bring us back together again, transformed into something greater than before.”—Maxwell Bauman, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine Editor-In-Chief
“Expansive and stirring, Heart’s Code carries us through complex landscapes of generational love and loss. A study in impermanence, anchored to nature’s juxtaposed cycles of rebirth, Stevenson’s verse offers redemption through the very journey itself. A poetic atlas of life’s gutting transience, not to be missed.”—Kelly Easton, Editor, Compass Rose Literary Journal
“Eugene Stevenson’s debut collection of poetry ruminates on points of origin and journeys in sharply observed language. Simultaneously plain and artful, poem after poem draws us into dislocated people finding their way, following their own path, as a sensuous realism that conducts its own exploration, both familiar and unfamiliar, without constraining, as the ‘world / recede[s] in the distance.’ Heart’s Code is a meditation on a world balancing at the edge of its own disappearance.” —Geoffrey Gatza, author of Disappointment Apples
If Good River Review had an aesthetic, it’s that they don’t embrace one aesthetic. Rather the editors, both on the masthead and among their graduate students, only look for writing that excites, writing that avoids sameness. Within this issue, readers will find an essay by Davis McCombs, arguably best known for his award-winning collections of poetry; “Lizard Dreams,” flash fiction by Norie Suzuki; Danni Quintos’s poetry for young adults; and a review of Paisley Redkal’s West: A Translation, which collects poetry and essays in one book-length work. The subjects in Issue 7 are as various as the approaches. Readers will find writing that launches with the Electric Slide to that which describes a good deal of twerking.
The editors also include a reprint work that has been previously published or produced in the hope of giving that writing the extra attention it deserves. This issue features an excerpt from Terry Kennedy’s beautiful book-length elegy, What the Light Leaves Hidden, which dares to suggest grief can be seductive. An excerpt from “Animal Kingdom” is also included, a short story by Kristin Gentry from her debut collection Mama Said. Set in Louisville, the story presents Derby rituals familiar to the locals’ hometown but lesser known outside our city limits.
The May 2024 issue of The Lakeis now online featuring new poems from Melanie Branton, Kirsty Crawford, Sandy Feinstein, Paul McDonald, Bruce McRae, Gordon Meade, Sandra Noel, Miguel Rodríguez Otero, Beate Sigriddaughter, and Sharon Whitehill. Readers also review published poetry collections, including Jean Atkin’s High Nowhere, Anne Caldwell’s Neither Here Nor There, and Marsha de la O’s Creature. “One Poem Reviews” share a single poem from recent book publications, this month spotlighting Rhian Elizabeth Marian Kaplun Shapiro.
Arkana: A Literary Journal of Mysteries and Marginalized Voices Issue 16 just launched and features an interview with poet Brody Parrish Craig, poetry by Angelina Leanos, Kai Coggin, Elizabeth Rose Bruce, Mary Simmons, Hollie Dugas, and Amanda Dettman, creative non fiction by Glenn Shaheen, Huina Zheng, and Ginevra Maria Marcosanti, fiction by Cathy Adams, Theo Wolf, and Sarah Liedtke Packer, and a script by Judy Klass. Run by the graduate students of the University of Central Arkansas, this online literary magazine publishes two issues a year, striving to bring together diverse voices that champion their mission. It’s free to submit, and all work is considered for $50 Editors’ Choice Awards in each genre.
The Other Side of Nothing, Anastasia Zadeik’s second novel, is an emotionally resonant exploration of what it means to love someone with a life-threatening mental illness. The story centers around Julia, a suicidal soon-to-be-18-year-old who believes that she hastened her father’s death from cancer. After signing herself into a psychiatric hospital, she begins to stabilize. That is, until she meets 23-year-old Sam in group therapy. Sam, an up-and-coming artist, is everything Julia admires and they immediately become a couple. But things unravel almost as quickly as they began.
As Sam’s release date approaches, he convinces Julia to bolt the facility and join him on a cross-country road trip to Yosemite National Park. Once there, he intends to replicate Ansel Adams’ photo of Half Dome. From the start troubles lurk: Sam discards his medication, takes Julia’s cell phone, and becomes increasingly manic and controlling. Julia is terrified.
The hospital, meanwhile, has no clue about Julia’s whereabouts, and although staff have suspicions, they also know that they have to do something–and fast. Despite hesitation, they notify Sam and Julia’s mothers about the disappearance, prompting the pair to take a harrowing road trip of their own.
The Other Side of Nothing addresses heavy themes–bipolar disorder, depression, suicide–with sensitivity and grace, making the book both illuminating and unforgettable.
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.
39 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy May! It’s a month for gardens to be planted and flowers to bloom. It’s also a great month to try to find a home for your work. We’re back again with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the first week of May 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.
Superpresent is an art and literature magazine that puts equal emphasis on visual art and the written word. The theme for Spring 2024 is “survival.” Survival has been a central theme in literature — and life — since the beginning. Odysseus, Moses, Job, Ishmael, Jane Eyre all found ways to survive physical, spiritual, and emotional challenges of the first order. The ways in which survival is marked, however, may have changed. In addition to heroes and their journeys (see, for instance, in this issue of Superpresent, Sharon Kopriva’s paintings of iconic women and Crawdad Nelson’s “Walking Home in the Rain”), received divinations are presented (see Duncan Forbes’ “Cappella de Ossos,” Charter Weeks’ “Preacher Man,” and Mouse Mikala’s “Moaning on Christian Radio”) and encounters with beasts, lots of beasts (see Sharon Whitehill for spiders; Al Salwin for rats; Chelsie Kreitzmn for snakes; Diane Raptosh for roosters; Luis Angel Abad for chimps, piglets and tigers; Laura McCullough for koi; and Majid Bazei for dogs). Surviving relationships with oneself is explored in Cori Matusow’s “Tomboy,” while Elisa Manzini’s “Teeth” vividly describes surviving one’s abusers. Science strives to serve as a survival mechanism in Erica Miriam Fabri’s “Quantum Entanglement is the Scientific Explanation of Love.”
