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!
Visit Plume for this month’s Featured Selection: On Queer Poetics, Writing Courageously, and Becoming Otherwise: An Interview with Nomi Stone by Amanda Newell. In nonfiction, Peter Johnson provides “The Edson Letters.” Mark Wagenaar reviews Eric Pankey’s Alias.
This issue’s featured interview is with Doralee Brooks, whose poetry is also included. Also in this issue: creative nonfiction by Frederick W. Bassett; fiction by Nathan V. Baker, Mari Carlson, Linda Griffin, Alan Nelson, and Eudora Watson; and poetry by Joan Barasovska, Rachel Barton, Ranney Campbell, Maria Ceferatti, Sally Dunn, Caroline Goodwin, Cleo Griffith, Dorinda Hale, Dennis Herrell, Zebulon Huset, Craig Kittner, Mike Jurkovic, and more.
Deadline: November 2021
PYAA looks for original works that show cultivated proficiency, artistry, technical skill, and art that expresses students’ individualistic, creative voices and visions. 2021 submissions open January 1st! Visit our website to learn more about categories and how to submit.
The Gettysburg Review is out and features paintings by Tollef Runquist, fiction by Julialicia Case, Martha Shaffer, Kirsten Vail Aguilar, and Andrea Marcusa; essays by Elizabeth Kaye Cook, Kathy Flann, Don Lago, Christine Schott, Rebecca McClanahan, and Melissa Haley; poetry by Christopher (c3) Crew, Peter Grandbois, Despy Boutris, Douglas Smith & George Looney, John Hazard, Brian Swann, Maura Stanton, Cindy King, John Brehm, and more.
Chestnut Review (“for stubborn artists”) invites submissions year round of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, and photography. We offer free submissions for poetry (3 poems), flash fiction (<1000 words), and art/photography (20 images); $5 submissions for fiction/nonfiction (<5k words), or 4-6 poems. Published artists receive $100 and a copy of the annual anthology of four issues (released each summer). Notification in <30 days or submission fee refunded. We appreciate stories in every genre we publish. All issues free online which illustrates what we have liked, but we are always ready to be surprised by the new! chestnutreview.com
In the new issue of Anomaly: comics by Tamara Jong, Jennifer Murvin, Chloe Martinez, Andie Frein, Amelia L. Williams, and Alina Viknyanskiy; poetry by Tian-Ai, Stephanie Jean, Shay Alexi, Saddiq Dzukogi, Noor Ibn Najam, Noʻu Revilla, Michal Jones, KL Lyons, Irteqa Khan, Ima Odong, Heather Simon, Eunice Kim, Chavonn Williams Shen, Bailey Cohen-Vera, Asmaa Jama, and Amanda Holiday, fiction by Laurence Klavan, LaToya Jordan, and Carson Faust; and nonfiction by Tasha Raella, Jody Chan, and Anjoli Roy.
Deadline: After 80 submissions received
The Headlight Review’s Annual Chapbook Prize in Prose is open for submissions! Send us your very best literary fiction, 6k-10k words, and you will be considered by our expert panel of judges for a $500 cash prize and publication of your manuscript. Submissions are $20 each, and all finalists will also be considered for publication. Publication in THR’s regular genres (Poetry, Nonfiction, Fiction, Book Reviews, & Interviews) is also year-round, and it is free to submit. Submission Guidelines for The Chapbook Prize, and for our year-round submissions, can be found on our website. We look forward to reading your work!
Earlier this week, Driftwood Press announced the winners of their third annual Adrift Chapbook Contest.
Winner
Lily-livered by Wren Hanks
Runner-up
Dead Uncles by Ben Kline
Guest Judge Sandra Beasley chose each of these chapbooks which will be available in 2021.
In fiction, T. Geronimo Johnson selected “Myopic” by Mason Boyles as this year’s Adrift Contest winner. This story will appear in the January 2021 issue of Driftwood Press.
If you’re disappointed you missed your chance to submit this year, no worries! The Driftwood Press Poem Contest and the Driftwood Press Short Story Contest are both currently open for submissions until January 15.
Guest Post by Elizabeth Genovise
If you’re hunting for some fresh fiction from a small press, check out Gilbert Allen’s newest book, The Beasts of Belladonna. This book features fifteen linked tales of quirky characters in a South Carolina foothills community. Expect the unexpected in these unsettling yet often hilarious stories, in which characters rub up against their own failures, yearnings, and secrets.
A minister nails a bird to a couple’s front door; a woman accidentally kills her cat and finds an unconventional way to grieve its loss; a man’s foxy neighbor goes to outrageous lengths to destroy his marriage. Domestic animals have a hefty influence on these people’s lives, sometimes comical and sometimes tragic; the same could be said about church as we’re introduced to the Mosquito Ministry, the Faster Pastor Challenge, and couples who pass witty notes during sermons. We meet “treenappers,” a Grandfather Against Garbage, and a character known as the Jesus of Malibu, and in these encounters are powerful flashes of raw humanity in all its complexity.
The Beasts of Belladonna by Gilbert Allen. Slant Books, October 2020.
Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of three short story collections, the most recent being Posing Nude for the Saints from the Texas Review Press. https://www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/
Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson
Into The Lucky Dark by Carol Morris, who is part of the Diane Wakoski circle, is much like being invited to coffee at a friend’s house where every time you go there you can be yourself and when you leave you feel like more yourself than ever before. Morris believes that life is a struggle but to read her poems and look at her utterly delightful artwork in this book, it would seem that life is also a place that we seem to haunt long before getting to the ghostly stage of things. This takes a bit of getting used to. It takes a while to read Morris’s poems because to languish in their harsh settings of bars and other meetings/gatherings is to feel the freeze, feel the edges of being an outsider even to oneself and then find the self in the touchstones of such leaving: “Houses in which my talents were useless” (from “A June Divorce”) to finding art and abstractions which make concrete sense. Continue reading “At Home In The Dark With Carol Morris’s ‘Into The Lucky Dark’”
Deadline: December 7, 2020
Print & online journal Into the Void is open to submissions of fiction, flash, creative nonfiction, poetry, & visual art to Issue #18 through December 7. Payment is $10 per poem/flash/art or $20 per long-from prose piece, a contributor copy, & a one-year online subscription. No theme, & no reading fees until Submittable monthly limits reached. Send us something that makes us feel alive. Details at our website.
Deadline: November 15
Carve Magazine‘s Prose & Poetry Contest deadline is November 15. Accepting submissions from all over the world, but work must be in English. Max 10,000 words for fiction and nonfiction; 2,000 words for poetry. Prizes: $1,000 each for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. All 3 winners published online in Spring 2021. Entry fee $17 online only. Guest judges are Shruti Swamy for fiction; Kendra Allen for nonfiction; and Roy G. Guzmán for poetry. www.carvezine.com/prose-poetry-contest/
Deadline: December 31, 2020
The Acacia Fiction Prize winner is awarded $1,200, 20 author copies, plus publication and promotion by Kallisto Gaia Press for a collection of short stories, flash fiction, novellas, or any combination of fiction totaling between 40K and 75K words. Richard Z. Santos (Trust Me, 2020) will judge. Runner up receives $100. Entry fee is $25. All entrants receive a copy of the winning collection! Deadline: December 31, 2020. Sponsored by Duotrope. More info at kallistogaiapress.submittable.com/submit.
Southern Humanities Review has nonfiction by Allison LaSorda and Alexandria Peary; fiction by Marlene Lee, Dennis McFadden, Sean Rose, and Gregory Wolos; and poetry by Ashia Ajani, Jubi Arriola-Headley, Ariana Benson, Nate Duke, Matt Donovan, Bethany Schultz Hurst, Rasaq Malik, Leslie Mcintosh, Mary Morris, Julia Thacker, Marisa Tirado, and Annie Woodford.
This issue’s featured artist is Janice Joy Little. Fiction by Peter D. Gorman, Trina Askin, James Hartman, Melissa Reddish, and Katherine Conner. Poetry by Melissa Kwasny, Nan Becker, Dionissios Kollias, Colin Bailes, Rob Shapiro, Kabel Mishka Ligot, Hussain Ahmed, Johnny Lorenz, Darius Simpson, Camerin McGill, Jai Hamid Bashir, Melanie Tafejian, Maxine Patroni, Alaina Bainbridge, and Gabriella R. Tallmadge. Check it out at the Raleigh Review website.
The November issue of The Lake features Jean Atkin, Joe Balaz, Carol Casey, Robert G. Cowser, Sarah L. Dixon, Edilson A. Ferreira, Nels Hanson, Dierdre Hines, Beth McDonough, Roger Mitchell, Ronald Moran, Angela Readman, Maggie Reed, David Spicer. Reviews of Natalie Scott’s Rare Birds: Voices of Holloway Prison, Ric Cheyney’s In Praise of Nahum Tate, Terry Tierney’s The Poet’s Garage.
Guest Post by Robert Lamb
It was Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman who said, “War is hell.” If you have any doubt that the general was dead right, run and get a copy of The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. You’ll see war up close and personal in his excellent account of the Armenian genocide by the Turks in the early 1900s.
Hamilton, a Richmond, VA writer and former Peace Corps volunteer, shows us through the eyes of a young Christian girl in Armenia how war unleashes unspeakable human savagery in the name of ethnic cleansing.
It is April 1915 and the Turks’ Ottoman Empire, which has lasted for centuries, is on the verge of defeat by the allied forces of Great Britain and the Arabs. In the novel’s first few pages, the heroine, Valia, a teenager, sees her parents, siblings, and neighbors, all Christians, murdered by Turkish “police soldiers,” and flees for her life.
Thus begins an odyssey the reader won’t soon forget. The author’s account of Valia’s struggle to stay alive and hopeful is a hymn to the human spirit, and the story is nothing short of realistic and gripping.
Adding a nice touch of realism, even Lawrence of Arabia and Arab Prince Faisal make cameo appearances near the story’s end.
OK, film producers; you can’t say I didn’t give you a heads up on this novel.
The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. Winter Goose Publishing, September 2020.
Reviewer bio: Robert Lamb is the author of four novels and a book of short stories; he review books for the New York Review of Books; and he has a website at www.robertlamb.net.
Welcome to a great issue full of vivid, haunting, charming and thought-provoking pieces with a stunning cover image by Jeff Corwin. Fiction by George Choundas, Kathie Giorgio, Rosalind Goldsmith, Alice Ting Liu, Chris Neilan, and Alexander Woods; nonfiction by Audrey Burges, Marie Kilroy, and Ellis Scott; and poetry by Dianna Vagianos Armentrout, Swapnil Dhruv Bose, James Butler, and more.
Issue 4 of Hole in the Head Review celebrates our first year. Featuring works by K. Johnson Bowles, Anna Birch, Bob Herz, Christopher Volpe, Ann Pedone, Richard Foerster, Hannah Tarkinson, James Crenner, Zoo Cain, Brendan Constantine, Norma Greenwood, Douglas Cole, and Stuart Kestenbaum. Special Prose Poem Mini Chapbook edited by Peter Johnson, including annotated correspondence of Russell Edson and works by Cassandra Atherton, Nin Andrews, Denise Duhamel, Gerald Fleming, Jeff Friedman, Holly Iglesias, and Anna McDonald.
Our 54th year of continuous publication! Cover art and portfolio by William Linmark. Poems by Sherman Alexie, Indran Amirthanayagam, Jack Anderson, Martine Bellen, Polly Buckingham, Liuyu Ivy Chen, Jiwon Choi, Robert Clinton, John Corley, Sam Cornish, Harley Elliott, Gerald Fleming, Justin Jamail, Daniel Johnson, Faye Kicknosway, David Lehman, Michael Miller, Frank Murphy, and more. Read more at the Hanging Loose website.
The National Indie Excellence® Awards (NIEA) are open to all English language printed books available for sale, including small presses, mid-size independent publishers, university presses, and self-published authors. NIEA is proud to be a champion of self-publishing and small independent presses going the extra mile to produce books of excellence in every aspect. All entries for the 15th Annual NIEA contest must be postmarked by March 31, 2021. www.indieexcellence.com
John Updike once said, “Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.” At Driftwood Press, we are actively searching for artists who care about doing it right, or better. We are excited to receive your submissions and will diligently work to bring you the best in full poetry collections, novellas, graphic novels, short fiction, poetry, graphic narrative, photography, art, interviews, and contests. We also offer our submitters a premium option to receive an acceptance or rejection letter within one week of submission; many authors are offered editorships and interviews. To polish your fiction, note our editing services and seminars, too. www.driftwoodpress.net
Deadline: December 1, 2020
The 4th annual Jane Underwood Poetry Prize is accepting submissions! Open to all poets, the prize is awarded for a single poem. For a fee of $15, submit one entry of up to three poems. The prizewinner will receive an award of $250, online publication of the winning poem, and an invitation to do a featured reading. This year’s final judge is David Hernandez. Full guidelines can be found at www.writingsalons.com/awards-resources/jane-underwood-poetry-prize/.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
During the first few months of the pandemic, I couldn’t read anything. My attention span was gone and anything I did manage to read left my mind immediately. But that ended when I sat in the park and read Dorothy Chan’s Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019) from cover to cover. My locked-away ability to read had found its key. Already a fan of Chan’s work, this just helped solidify my love for her poetry even more, and I’m always more than happy to check out any of her newly published poems. The October 2020 issue of Poetry gives the gift of her poem, “Ode to Chinese Superstitions, Haircuts, and Being a Girl.”
The poem flows in a rush, like a held breath finally exhaled. Chan begins with the Chinese superstition “it’s bad luck / to get a haircut when I’m sick” and leads into the role the speaker fulfills as a daughter, as a girl, as someone who “always bring[s] / the party, cause[s] the trouble . . . .” While there are specifics tied to her own self, culture, and family—her brother’s fate, her mother’s thoughts on her future, her father’s opinion on how “good Chinese girls” wear their hair—Chan leaves the reader plenty of room to relate to her words. If we don’t feel like her, we can still root for her and her “short skirt,” her “forehead forever exposed.”
At the beginning of the month, literary magazine Into the Void released it’s We Are Antifa: Expressions Against Fascism, Racism and Police Violence in the United States and Beyond. The anthology features creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from diverse writers all over the world, i.e. the US, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Greece, Nigeria, and more.
Into the Void will be donating 100% of proceeds from the anthology’s sales to Black Lives Matter Canada. In order to maximize profits, the book will only be available via Amazon in ebook and paperback formats.
We Are Antifa was edited by Heath Brougher, Jay C. Mims, Amanda Gaines, Andrew Rihn, and Philip Elliot. It features “breathtaking writing condemning fascism, racism and state-sanctioned brutality through powerful expressions of grief, rage, hope and love.”
The title is a response to Donald Trump’s declaration that the US will be designating Antifa as a terrorist organization. The editors encourage readers to check out “A Brief History of Anti-Fascism” in Smithsonian Magazine to better understand why they published this anthology and “how anti-fascism and anti-racism are inextricably linked in the fight against oppression and supremacy.”
Guest Post by Shamae Budd
Patrick Madden’s third collection of essays is a playful conglomeration of experiments (in form, in collaboration, in thought). Interspersed among more traditional personal essays, you will find a menagerie of borrowed forms. The collection opens with an essay masquerading as an eBay listing for “Writer Michael Martone’s Leftover Water.” (Or is it an eBay listing masquerading as an essay? We can’t be sure, which is half the fun.) You will find blackout poetry (“Insomnia”), an essay written with the help of predictive text algorithms (“Unpredictable Essays”), mixed up proverbs (“The Proverbial ____” ), and a series of “Pangram Haiku.” Continue reading “A Playful Conglomeration of Experiments”
Deadline: December 31, 2020
Girls Right the World is a literary journal inviting young, female-identified writers and artists, ages 14–21, to submit work for consideration for the fifth annual issue. We believe girls’ voices transform the world for the better. We accept poetry, prose, and visual art of any style or theme. We ask to be the first to publish your work in North America; after publication, the rights return to you. Send your best work, in English or English translation, to [email protected] by December 31, 2020. Please include a note mentioning your age, where you’re from, and a bit about your submission. Please read our first four issues for an idea of work we like.
Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen
Inside Out and Back Again is a novel in verse by Thanhhà Lai. This book won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2011 and a Newbery Honor in 2012.
Through a series of poems, 10-year-old Hà takes the readers through one year of her life in 1975. It was a life-changing year, beginning with her life in Saigon, then fleeing South Vietnam on a ship as Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Hà and her family were in a refugee camp before resettling in Alabama, and the family struggled to start a new life there. Hà struggled with the language and fitting in at school.
Many details of this book were inspired by Thanhhà Lai’s own life. She also fled Vietnam at the age of 10 at the end of the Vietnam War, and moved to Alabama. The poems in this book will make you laugh and they will also make you cry. They will make you want to read this book all in one sitting, and when you get to the end, immediately want to read it again, but slowly this time to savor all the words. This book is powerful, poignant, and moving, worthy of all its awards.
Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhhà Lai. HarperCollins, 2011.
Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/.
Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.
Deadline: November 15, 2020
The Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry is an annual national poetry prize featuring a $1,000 cash award for first place. Three runners up will each receive a $250 cash award. The winning and runner up poems are published in the Spring issue with these poems and honorable mentions also appearing online. The Crimmins Prize celebrates risk, innovation, and emotional engagement. We especially encourage poets from underrepresented groups and backgrounds to send their work. philadelphiastories.org
Deadline: November 20, 2020
Waymark Literary Magazine is an online and physical literary magazine dedicated to publishing the works of an individual’s waymark; their footpath in life. Anyone can submit as long as they have a story to tell. We are looking for nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and art submissions to be published in our biannual publication. Check out our Summer 2020 issue for an idea of what we seek.
Deadline: January 15, 2021
Heron Tree Volume 8 will be dedicated to found poems composed from public domain sources. We are accepting submissions in the following categories: found poems crafted from any source material(s) in the public domain in the United States; found poems created from How to Keep Bees (1905), a handbook by Anna Botsford Comstock; found poems fashioned from public domain sonnets other than Shakespeare’s. We are interested in any and all approaches to found poetry construction and erased or remixed texts. For details visit us at herontree.com/how/.
Deadline: November 30, 2020
No theme for our winter contest. Subject matter is entirely up to you. Surprise us! But keep it short. Two categories: flash fiction and flash creative nonfiction. We want to be amazed at how you abracadabra 1,000 or less into magic. And maybe be a little jealous of how you do that. One writer in each category will be awarded a $300 prize and published in the winter issue. All entries considered for publication and payment. Final judge: Diana Spechler. See www.baltimorereview.org for complete details. Deadline: November 30, 2020. Fee: $5.
Deadline: Year-round
Launched in 2019, Auroras & Blossoms is dedicated to promoting positive, uplifting, and inspirational art; and giving artists of all levels a platform where they can showcase their work and build their publishing credits. We publish short stories, six-word stories, paintings, and drawings. We are also looking for work that tells beautiful stories and articles that are helpful to photographers at every level of their career for publication in our sister journal FPoint Collective Photography Magazine. We are interested in photography, along with articles, tips, stories, and essays relating to photography. International submissions welcome. Submission Guidelines and apply here. Check out past issues for a taste of what we like.
Application Deadline: November 15, 2020
At IvyZen, our greatest joy is helping realize the potential of top students looking to get into Ivy League Schools. The scholarship program provides the following services and totals more than $8,000 worth of our premium mentoring services: How to craft a unique and compelling theme to make your application stand out; Overall application strategy and plan; How to write Ivy League admissions essays; Brainstorming Essays; College List Consultation; Free access to our project management platform to keep all your essays and materials organized; and 24/7 online access to the IvyZen Mentorship Team.
Guest Post by Elizabeth Basok
Hildr Fragments, written by Dani L Smith, is a collection of poems covering relationships, notably a lengthy relationship that was both co-dependent and abusive.
Smith is a British expat living in South Korea; she meets a fellow expat, an older Canadian, who proves to be problematic from the start of their relationship. The author is forced to pull herself from the relationship after years of gaslighting (“even when I caught you in a lie you somehow succeeded in making me second-guess myself and making me feel crazy”), cheating, and even physical abuse. The author covers all the heavy aspects of leaving an abusive relationship from losing your household belongings, “11 drunken, psychotic messages within one hour,” and the time that she will never get back.
The word “Hildr” means “battle” in Old Norse, and we see the author battle with the desire to stay in an abusive relationship, her attempts to break from her abuser’s hold over her, her recovering from a miscarriage, and ultimately freeing herself from abuse and looking onward to the future.
Hildr Fragments by Dani L Smith. Independently published, October 2020.
Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Basok is a lecturer at The Ohio State University. Her Instagram is @lizbasok.
Event Dates: January 18-23, 2021 Location: Virtual
Extended Application Deadline: December 1, 2020
The 17th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival in Delray Beach, Florida, January 18-23, 2021 will be virtual. Focus on your work with America’s most engaging and award-winning poets. Workshops with David Baker, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Traci Brimhall, Vievee Francis, Kevin Prufer, Martha Rhodes, and Tim Seibles. Six days of workshops, readings, craft talks, panel discussion, social events, and so much more. One-on-one conference Faculty: Lorna Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso-Torres. Special Guest: Gregory Orr and the Parkington Sisters. Poet At Large: Brian Turner. To find out more, visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org. Apply to attend a workshop!
Submissions accepted year-round.
The CHILLFILTR Review strives to bring the best new art to a worldwide audience by leveraging best-in-class technology to create a seamless and immersive web experience. We welcome submissions from all walks of life, and all perspectives. We are committed to inclusivity and kindly welcome work from marginalized voices. All featured works will receive an honorarium of $20 per 1000 words and will be published online at The CHILLFILTR Review as well as on our Apple News Channel. Readers can vote for their favorites, and year-end “Best Of” winners will receive an additional $100 cash prize.
Submissions accepted year-round.
The Blue Mountain Review launched from Athens, Georgia in 2015 with the mantra, “We’re all south of somewhere.” As a journal of culture the BMR strives to represent life through its stories. Stories are vital to our survival. Songs save the soul. Our goal is to preserve and promote lives told well through prose, poetry, music, and the visual arts. Our editors read year-round with an eye out for work with homespun and international appeal. We’ve published work by and interviews with Jericho Brown, Kelli Russell Agodon, Robert Pinsky, Rising Appalachia, Nahko, Michel Stone, Genesis Greykid, Cassandra King, Melissa Studdard, and A.E. Stallings. Check out recent issues for a taste of what we like.
New on Terrain.org this month: poetry by Jane Lovell, Zach Eddy, Ted Kooser, Mary Fitzpatrick, Emily Tuszynska, and Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman; nonfiction and photos by Tyra A. Olstad; fiction by Jessica Bryant Klagmann; and an interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil by Melissa L. Sevigny.
Deadline: December 15, 2020
Submit your manuscript to Interim’s 3rd annual Test Site Poetry Contest! As our series title suggests, we’re looking for manuscripts that engage the perilous conditions of life in the 21st century, as they pertain to issues of social justice and the earth. The winning book will demonstrate an ethos that considers the human condition in inclusive love and sympathy, while offering the same in consideration of the earth. Because we believe the truth is always experimental, we’ll especially appreciate books with innovative approaches. The winner will receive $1,000 and their book will be published by University of Nevada Press in 2021.
Work by Erik Wilbur, winner of the Chestnut Review 2020 Poetry Chapbook Contest, opens the Autumn 2020 issue, followed by an interview with the poet. See what else can be found in this issue at the Chestnut Review website.
Deadline: December 1, 2020 for poetry & prose; January 15, 2021 for video essays
This fall, TriQuarterly is open to free submissions from October 1 to December 1, 2020 (and January 15, 2021 for video essays), for our 160th issue. We will be working with guest editors to select and curate work exclusively by Black poets, prose writers, and video artists for June 2021.
The Autumn 2020 issue of The Bitter Oleander features an interview with the Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen, including a selection of his prose poetry translated by David Keplinger. Also in this issue: fiction by Michael Pearce, Kelly Talbot, and more; essays by Will Stone; and poetry by Dolores Etchecopar, Stephen Tuttle, Madronna Holden, David Cholrton, Matei Vişniec, Silvia Scheibli, Patty Dickson Pieczka, and others.
Deadline: November 30, 2020
We seek previously unpublished personal essays up to 2,000 words about the creative endeavor that you paused. Yes, we want to hear about the dreaded creative block. Tell us a story about your circumstances and what was going through your head as you put down your work. Was it a relief to put aside your art? A regret? Is it still an idea that you kept coming back to, unable to shake? The winner will receive $650, and the submission fee is $10. The contest is open to writers worldwide until November 30. For more details see criticalread.submittable.com/submit.
Adroit 34 features Diane Seuss, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jos Charles, David Naimon, Dorianne Laux, Yalie Kamara, Alicia Ostriker, Mary Biddinger, Kevin Prufer, the winners of our 2020 Adroit Prizes, Jennifer Tseng, Elle Nash, Hazem Fahmy, Jenny Molberg, Darius Simpson, Zain Murdock, and many more.
Deadline: January 1, 2021
MudRoom is open for submissions until January 1st! We are seeking poetry and prose in all their forms. Submissions are free, and we aim to respond to work quickly. MudRoom is somewhere between where you’ve come from and where you’re going. We believe in the liminal, the dirty, the messy, and the mundane. We publish four issues of prose and poetry a year, and we also work to put out content devoted to developing a practice—we feature short essays on craft and interviews with writers. Send us your work, we’d love to read it!
The final issue of the Aurorean made it to NewPages last week, and we’re sad to see it go. Encircle Publications will continue operation, however, publishing full-length poetry and fiction titles, and curating their annual chapbook contest.
Editor Cynthia Brackett-Vincent opens the issue:
Here we are: the final issue of the Aurorean. It has been my honor to steward this journal for twenty-five years. I have said from day one that without the poets who submitted (entrusted) their work to me, the Aurorean would be nothing but a dream of mine and a bunch of blank pages. It has been a labor of love, and it has become a community of poets worldwide.
Stop by the Aurorean’s website for the full editor’s note, and grab a copy of the final issue at their shop.
Guest Post by Nora Aronson
There is little between the word and the flesh in Thomas Cook’s daunting and terrifying Light Through a Pane of Glass. “There is perfection in the early dark / the smell of moist figs,” he writes in “Three Meditations,” yet life and death lurks beneath this observation, as it does beneath so many others in this debut collection.
Cook has been the editor and publisher of the longstanding journal Tammy and their chapbook press. His poems have appeared widely, and in several chapbooks, but until this collection there has not been a full understanding of his poetic project, which comes, anachronistically, on the heels of pastoral philosophers such as Lorine Niedecker and James Wright—this book features its own “Journey Westward,” has its own “deep water”—while it also pursues an existential agenda in poems such as “Two Figures”:
Afraid to accept a purer perception,
they busy themselves
with the intelligible world,
leaving much lost;
a thought, persistsAre we dearer in absence, you and I?”
Light Through a Pane of Glass will leave you thirsty in the Mojave Desert and abandon you to the Midwest. It is unflinching in the face of inheritance, addiction, and death. In it, you will smell figs, taste dates, and be grateful for afternoon onions. It will make you real.
Light Through a Pane of Glass by Thomas Cook. Big Table, 2020.
Reviewer bio: Nora Aronson is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Her first book, Instances of Calamity, was a finalist in the Uninterrupted First Book Contest. Her work has appeared in Bat City Review, Exhume Magazine, and Terra Firma.
Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.
Deadline: November 30, 2020
Gateway Literary Press, a new small press, seeks submissions for its catalogue. We seek short story collections that fall somewhere in the surrealist/fabulist/magic realist tradition. Prospective writers should submit a 2 story sample with cover letter describing the rest of the collection, including a list of previous publications, particularly for stories included in the collection. No complete manuscripts at this time, please; these will be rejected unread. We read from November 1-30 and do not charge a fee. A sample authorial contract and more information can be found on our website: gatewayliterarypress.wordpress.com.
