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NewPages Blog

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!

Program :: University of North Carolina Greensboro MFA

UNCG MFA Winter 2020 LitPak FlierApplication Deadline: January 1 (annually)
One of the oldest creative writing programs in the country, UNC Greensboro’s MFA Writing Program offers fully funded graduate assistantships with stipends, tuition remission, and subsidized health insurance. The MFA is a two-year residency program with an emphasis on studio time for the writing of poetry or fiction. Students work closely with acclaimed faculty in one-on-one tutorials and small classes, including courses in contemporary publishing and creative nonfiction. Our campus features a Distinguished Visiting Writers Series of authors and editors; other professionalization opportunities include college teaching and hands-on editorial work for The Greensboro Review. More at mfagreensboro.org and greensbororeview.org.

Event :: Elk River Writers Workshop 2020

2020 Elk River Writers Workshop FlierDeadline: Rolling (July 1 final deadline)
Elk River Arts and Lectures is now accepting applications to our summer writers workshop, August 16–21, at historic Chico Hot Springs Resort, 30 miles from Yellowstone National Park. We host some of the most celebrated nature writers in the United States to work with students in an area of Montana that has inspired the work of conservationists and writers for decades. Workshop classes are limited to 10 students in each genre. This year, Rick Bass, Linda Hogan, and J. Drew Lanham, William Pitt Root, and Pamela Uschuk will serve as our core faculty. Apply via Submittable or visit: elkriverwriters.org.

Contest :: EVENT Non-Fiction Contest 2020

EVENT Winter 2020 LitPak FlierDeadline: October 15, 2020
EVENT: A home for writers. A destination for readers. Now in its 49th year of publication, EVENT is an award-winning, internationally recognized literary magazine that inspires and nurtures writers, showcasing the best contemporary fiction, poetry, nonfiction, notes on writing, and book reviews three times a year, with stunning cover art and illustration. We are now accepting submissions of 5,000 words or less to the annual EVENT Non-Fiction Contest. $3,000 in prizes, plus publication. Entries must be postmarked or submitted online by October 15, 2020. Visit www.eventmagazine.ca for exclusive online content, and to learn more about our unique Reading Service for Writers.

Program :: Jackson Center for Creative Writing

Hollins University MFA flierApplication Deadline: January 6
For well over sixty years, this highly regarded Hollins MFA has supported lively and determined writers who want to concentrate on craft. Our intensive two-year graduate program helps students find their way in an atmosphere of cooperation and encouragement. Our students work successfully in poetry, short fiction, novels, and creative nonfiction—and in between genres. Our faculty writers take time to work with students in this vibrant, supportive community. Our alums have a remarkably high record of publication. Program provides graduate assistantships, teaching fellowships, travel funding, and generous scholarships. Most of all, a vibrant, supportive community. For information, www.hollins.edu/creative-writing-MFA.

’50 Miles’ by Sheryl St. Germain

50 Miles by Sheryl St. GermainBook Review by Karen J. Weyant

Sheryl St. Germain opens her newest book, 50 Miles, with a simple statement: “My son was born into a family cursed with substance abuse.”

It’s this curse St. Germain explores in her collection of intertwining essays that examine the life, the struggles, and the eventual death of her son, Gray. Along the way, she also looks at her own clashes with addiction, struggles that mirror the demons that haunted many of her family members including her father and her brother. Continue reading “’50 Miles’ by Sheryl St. Germain”

Call :: Fictional Cafe

The Fictional Cafe logoFictional Café is a highly regarded online ‘zine, seven years old with 800 Coffee Club members in 47 countries. Fiction only, please, that titillates the readers’ senses and provokes their minds. Your short story or novel excerpt should be extremely well written with engaging characters and a unique, avant-garde, or unconventional plot. Visit our site and read some recent works on the pictorial slider. Join our Coffee Club, then review our submissions guidelines. If you’re exploring fiction’s boundaries, we’re interested in reading your work. www.fictionalcafe.com

NewPages Book Stand – February 2020

Book Stand - Feb 2020The February 2020 Book Stand is now up at NewPages! Visit for new and forthcoming titles in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, anthologies, and children’s/YA. Our New & Noteworthy section features work from six different presses month.

Diode Editions announces five forthcoming titles this spring: The Last Human Heart by Allison Joseph; Good Timing & Gertrude Stein: Inside Snoopy’s snout maggots feats upon my blood by Julia Cohen; Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry: Interviews from the Documentary Film A Late Style of Fire edited by Gregory Donovan and Michele Poulos; Wider Than the Sky from Nancy Chen Long; and The Minister of Disturbances from Zeeshan Khan Pathan. Visit our LitPak for more information.

The People’s Field by Haesong Kwon (Southeast Missouri University Press, October 2019), winner of the Cowles Poetry Prize, reflects on the sounds, ideas and histories of the Korean peninsula with attention to the Japanese occupation and the Korean War and its aftermath.

Juan Herrera invites readers to touch Connie Post’s Prime Meridian (Glass Lyre Press, January 2020) “in order to traverse the present age.”

River Teeth celebrates twenty years of publishing nonfiction with an anthology edited by founding editors Joe Mackall and Daniel W. Lehman (University of New Mexico Press, February 2020).

In Shining Man (Livingston Press, December 2019), Todd Dills “explodes themes of economic opportunity, identity and the individual’s place post-Great Recession in a politically polarized, culturally isolated, and class-stratified America.”

Debut collection A Small Thing to Want by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood (Press 53, May 2020) “chronicles the choices people make about whom to love and whom to let go, their yearnings that either bind them or set them free, and the surprising ways love shows up, without reason or restraint.”

You can learn more about each of these featured titles at our website, and find out how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

NewPages Bookstore & Library Mailing Lists

NewPages mailing listsPlanning on marketing your book to indie bookstores and libraries this spring? Let us help you get started. NewPages offers digital and physical mailing lists to bookstores, libraries, and newspapers within the United States. With a new, lower rate on our digital lists and guaranteed delivery to postal addresses, our lists are a great value and a big help getting your book into the hands of booksellers and readers across the country. Visit our website to learn more.

14th Mudfish Poetry Prize Winner & Honorable Mentions

Mudfish - January 2020The newest issue of Mudfish features the winner and honorable mentions of the 14th Mudfish Poetry Prize. The 2019 judge was John Yau.

Winner
“Fluencies” by Mark Wagenaar

Honorable Mentions
“Not Yet Across” by G. Hanlon
“Crossing Lake Pontchartrain” by Stokes Howell

The 15th Mudfish Poetry Prize is currently open until March 15 and will be judged by poet and novelist Erica Jong.

Blink-Ink – True Crime Issue

Blink Ink - Issue 38

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

True crime seems to be all the rage lately, from books on famous cold cases to Netflix documentaries to hit podcasts. Blink-Ink tries its hand at covering this theme in Issue 38 wherein 16 writers use micro-fiction to explore true crime.

JR Walsh writes about a B&E at an ex’s house where the criminals’ “fingerprints never moved out.” Katie Yates writes of a husband who steals a puppy for his wife. In Craig Fishbane’s “Weapon of Choice,” one weapon is social media, the other is a gun. Leah Rogin-Roper provides four related pieces on a juvenile detention center. The stories in this issue cover a wide array of crimes in creative ways, and it’s fun to see a fictional take on truth.

Blink-Ink publishes stories that are 50 words or less. This makes for short, snappy stories that toss readers headfirst into the drama. In this issue, we never have to wait long to find out who did it in these whodunnits.

Mudfish – No. 21

Mudfish - January 2020

The newest issue of Mudfish features the winner of the 14th Mudfish Poetry Prize, judged by John Yau: Mark Wagenaar with “Fluencies.” Honorable mentions G. Hanlon and Stokes Howell are also included. Other contributors this issue: Dell Lemmon, Michael Lyle, Aillie McKeever, Beth Suter, Claire Scott, Vincent Bell, Marjorie Power, Angela Dribben, Yuyutsu Sharma, Holly Day, Jason Koo, James Trask, Jake Bauer, Francis Klein, Neal Zirn, Bob Coles, A. Kaiser, Kristin Entler, Tim Nolan, Kirk Wilson, Toni Hanner, and many more.

Contest :: Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry 2020

2020 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in PoetryDeadline: April 15, 2020
Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry: A poetry manuscript contest sponsored by The University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English. $1000 cash prize plus publication for your poetry manuscript. Prize includes an additional $500 payment for travel and a reading in the University of Utah’s Guest Writers Series. See www.UofUpress.com/ali-poetry-prize for more details.

The Antioch Review – February 2020

Antioch Review - Fall 2019

The “Atention!” issue of The Antioch Review includes Heinrich Böll’s “Cause of Death: Hooked Nose” (translated by Robert C. Conard) which captures Nobel laureate Boll’s vivid imagery about the corollary of unfettered hatred, unchallenged propaganda, and fearful inertia for countries, communities, and consciences. Rachel Rose’s “Buccal Swab” airs the concerns and realities families face when a member harmlessly hands over DNA to Ancestry.com or some other DNAanalyses company. Stuart Neville’s thriller “Coming in on Time” unfolds in the eyes of a child naïve to passions that stir so strongly and sting so seriously. Find a full list of contributors at The Antioch Review‘s website.

Just a Few Billion Years Left to Go

Until the End of Time graphicUntil the End of Time. Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe By Brian Greene. Book Review, New York Times.

“In the fullness of time all that lives will die.” With this bleak truth Brian Greene, a physicist and mathematician at Columbia University, the author of best-selling books like “The Elegant Universe” and co-founder of the yearly New York celebration of science and art known as the World Science Festival, sets off in “Until the End of Time” on the ultimate journey, a meditation on how we go on doing what we do, why and how it will end badly, and why it matters anyway.

“Until the End of Time” is encyclopedic in its ambition and its erudition, often heartbreaking, stuffed with too many profundities that I wanted to quote, as well as potted descriptions of the theories of a galaxy of contemporary thinkers, from Chomsky to Hawking, and anecdotes from Greene’s own life — of which we should wish for more — that had me laughing.

NewPages Winter 2020 LitPak has been Mailed!

The NewPages Winter 2020 LitPak was mailed to colleges and universities with graduate and undergraduate writing programs and classes last week!

Featured in this LitPak are fliers from

  • Diode Editions
  • Elk River Writers Workshop
  • UNCG MFA in Creative Writing
  • Jackson Center for Creative Writing
  • The MFA at FAU/Swamp Ape Review
  • Killer Nashville
  • Summer Writers Institute at Washing University in St. Louis
  • Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop
  • Rattle
  • december
  • Nimrod
  • The Fiddlehead
  • Fourth Genre
  • Jacar Press
  • Gival Press
  • EVENT
  • Colorado Review
  • University of Utah Press
  • The Main Street Rag
  • St. Petersburg Review/Springhouse Journal

You can view the majority of the fliers included in this LitPak on our website. Feel free to download, print, and share. If you are interested in getting the next LitPak delivered straight to your doorstep, you can purchase a subscription here: npofficespace.com/litpak/subscription/.

Women of a Certain Rage

Women of a certain ago jpegWomen of a Certain Rage. Two New Books Tackle Getting Older—and More Pissed Off. Bitchmedia.

…I can’t say whether the despair I regularly feel is statistical or situational—the world is both literally and figuratively on fire, after all; I don’t trust anyone who isn’t despairing on some level. But as a woman, I also know that there can’t be any discussion of unhappiness at any numerical point of what we call “midlife” without acknowledging the powerful cultural narratives of gender and aging.

Those narratives, and the economic, political, sexual, and pop cultural impact of them, are at the center of two new books. Ada Calhoun’s Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis and Susan J. Douglas’s In Our Prime: How Older Women are Reinventing the Road Ahead both approach their subject matter from generational perspectives, each starting from a place of unsettled personal clarity: Well, shit, I got old. Now what? 

Patti Smith awarded PEN Award

Patti Smith jpg2020 PEN/Audible Literary Service Award: Patti Smith. Pen America.

Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has release 12 albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time by Rolling Stone.

Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and was represented by the Robert Miller Gallery for three decades. Her retrospective exhibitions include the Andy Warhol Museum, the Fondation Cartier, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, Auguries of Innocence, M Train, and Devotion.

2020 Rainbow Book List

Rainbow Book ListRainbow Book List – GLBTQ Books for Children & Teens

The Rainbow Book List Committee is proud to announce the 2020 Rainbow Book List. The List is a curated bibliography highlighting books with significant gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer/questioning content, aimed at children and youth from birth to age 18. This list is intended to aid youth and those working with youth in selecting high-quality books published in the United States of America between July 1, 2018 and December 31, 2019.

This year, our committee has noticed an abundance of genre fiction, as well as books whose plots do not revolve around anxiety concerning a queer character’s identity. Micro trends that we’ve noticed this year have been books about birds or with birds in the title, and books about queer witches. We’ve also seen an increase in books with non-binary, asexual-spectrum, and bisexual characters.

 

“Poet Laureate? Poet Illiterate? What?”

Luis J Rodriguez poet laureateDoes poetry matter? L.A.’s former poet-in-chief Luis J. Rodriguez explains why it’s life changing. Los Angeles Times.

Confusion aside, I felt it was about time “poet laureate” became a household term. The United States now has more poet laureates than ever before. There are poet laureates for states, counties, cities, communities, small towns, and Native American reservations (Luci Tapahonso became the first poet laureate of the Diné Nation). Claudia Castro Luna, a Salvadoran American, served as Seattle’s poet laureate and later held the same post for Washington state. Two Xicanx poets, Laurie Ann Guerrero and Octavio Quintanilla, did the same for San Antonio. Sponsored by New York City–based Urban Word, there is also a Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate (I helped pick two of them) and the first ever National Youth Poet Laureate, eighteen-year-old Amanda Gorman.

…It’s hard to figure out poetry’s worth when there is a hierarchy of “values” hanging over our heads determined not by nature or skill but by powerful men in the publishing, media, and political industries — entities that are about making money. I’m not talking about family values or cool traits. I’m talking net worth, the bottom line: “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”

If that’s the case, poetry should perish.

 

$2 million book deals about the Trump administration are anything but brave

$2 million book deals about the Trump administration are anything but brave. Vox.

The book publishing industry has many problems, but the one I find most chilling as a former book editor who now reports in the industry is that people who have vital information about our democracy are rewarded for putting such info in books rather than coming forward.

For book lovers such as myself, the silver lining of Trump’s election was the possibility that readers would be looking for escapism and big ideas in art. So it’s particularly demoralizing to watch publishers package the ongoing debasement of our country as entertainment. If Trump’s best political weapon is being at the apex of an infotainment media system that is consumed like cable news, then publishers aren’t obligated to play his game.

Poem: At Least

Poem: At Least. By Ha Jin. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. New York Times Magazine.

In a wry poem of direct counsel, Ha Jin dismisses obligatory mingling and networking. He’s talking to himself or to any of us, as the poem quietly advises and reasons. “A Distant Center,” Ha Jin’s profoundly appealing collection of poems written in Chinese, then translated by the author into English, contains so many breathtaking cleanses-of-spirit — begone bombast and posturing! Reading it is better than going to a spa. The title of this poem adds another encouraging nod to the topic. We may not know everything, but “at least” this.

“…Look, this skyful of stars,
which one of them
doesn’t shine or die alone?
Their light also comes
from a deep indifference.”

Call :: The MacGuffin Volume 36 Number 3

The MacGuffin is featuring formal poetical works in Volume 36, No. 3! We’ll take a look at any poem in an established metrical form, but save any free or blank verse for a different issue. Send up to five poems, listing their titles and forms in an email cover letter, using “Form Issue” in the subject line. Submissions also considered via post and Submittable (themacguffin.submittable.com/submit). Please send all work by April 1, 2020. Prose is still being considered for general publication in this issue. For more information, please see our website at www.schoolcraft.edu/macguffin or send us an email at [email protected].

‘Real censorship’: Roxane Gay responds to American Dirt death threat row

Roxane Gay jpg‘Real censorship’: Roxane Gay responds to American Dirt death threat row. The Guardian.

The author argues the debate around Jeanine Cummins’ controversial novel shows how people are threatened for ‘daring to have opinions’

Gay, who explained that she receives death threats every week, and pays for a security service to monitor and protect her, said that it was “important to acknowledge the death threats people receive for daring to have opinions, for daring to be black or brown or queer or disabled or women or trans or any marginalised identity”.

“People need to realise what real censorship looks like. They need to understand how unsafe it can be to challenge authority and the status quo,” she said. “These are not things that should be taken lightly, nor should this level of harassment be dismissed as mere trolling. You never know when one of those so-called trolls is going to take his rage from the internet into the physical world.”

How to Raise a Reader

How to Raise a Reader jpgHow to Raise a Reader (Does Anyone Actually Know?) BookRiot.

From what I can tell, the advice from these books can be distilled into three main points. One, read to your children, all the time, for as long as you can (even after they can read for themselves). Two, surround them with books and make books easily accessible. Borrow books from the library, buy books new, buy books secondhand, whatever it is — just have books at home. And three, model reading to them. One of the best ways to raise readers is to be a reader yourself, and let your child see that.

But thinking about these tips and advice also made me wonder: how effective are these tips? Can readers be made or are they born? The rest of these musings are exactly that: musings based on anecdotes and in no way on rigorous scientific research but it’s interesting to ponder.

NewPages February 2020 Digital eLitPak

NewPages has sent out our monthly digital eLitPak to current newsletter subscribers yesterday afternoon. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up here: npofficespace.com/newpages-newsletter/.

Besides our monthly eLitPak featuring fliers from literary magazines, independent presses, and creative writing programs and events, we have a weekly newsletter filled with submission opportunities, literary magazines, new titles, reviews, and more.

Check out the current eLitPak below. You can view the original newsletter email here. Continue reading “NewPages February 2020 Digital eLitPak”

How to Write Fiction When the Planet Is Falling Apart

Weather by Jenny OffillHow to Write Fiction When the Planet Is Falling Apart. New York Times Magazine.

Jenny Offill is the master of novels told in sly, burnished fragments. In her latest, ‘Weather,’ she uses this small form to address the climate collapse.

In 2005, the naturalist Robert Macfarlane asked, in an influential essay in The Guardian: “Where is the literature of climate change? Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?” How should we understand the paucity of the cultural response to climate change, he asked, compared with the body of work catalyzed by the threat of nuclear war? In recent years, however, planetary collapse has emerged as a dominant concern in contemporary fiction…

The climate crisis, Offill shows, is reshaping not just our world but also our minds. “Weather” joins other new fiction in transforming the novel of consciousness into a record of climate grief. “Sometimes I think that people today must be the saddest people ever, because we know we ruined everything,” the heroine of Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport” thinks.

‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’ Edited by Richard Peabody

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Book Review by Katy Haas

As a writer who is very prone to anxiety and stage fright, I’ve always turned down the opportunity to participate in readings. I can’t help running all the worst case scenarios through my head. This led me to picking up my copy of What Could Possibly Go Wrong? the pocket-sized anthology edited by Richard Peabody, featuring 36 writers sharing their own readings gone wrong.

The anthology starts off on a more serious note. Brett Axel’s reading devolves into a protest as police crash it, assuming the worst of teenage attendees. Abby Bardi’s publicity tour ends prematurely as it coincides with 9/11.

But a majority of these horror stories are less serious and more humorous. Mark Baechtel walks himself into a corner with one bad decision he commits to. Barbara Esstman has a selection of not one but four bad readings, and, luckily, she approaches each of them with levity. Alma Katsu is interrupted by a loud cheerleading practice. Both good weather and bad weather interfere with multiple readings. Tim Wendel must compete against the midnight release of his nemesis: Harry Potter.

Each writer presents their story with lightness and humor. Things didn’t go as planned, but they made it through and are still around writing and participating in more readings. I now find some comfort in the seemingly universality of readings gone awry. Sure, things might go wrong, but at least the experience will be there to laugh at (and possibly write about) later.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Edited by Richard Peabody. Paycock Press, 2019.

True Story – No. 34

True Story - Issue 34

The single-author True Story has released a new issue. In “Plume: An Investigation” by Mary Heather Noble, a former environmental investigator applies her forensic skills to a family mystery. What happens to us when we are exposed to toxicity, both literally and figuratively? Can we change what we pass on to our kids? And at what cost?

Plume – February 2020

Plume - February 2020

Plume‘s February 2020 issue features selection is “Engraved Phrases on Open Seas: Poems and Notes on Translations of Khal Torabully” by Nancy Naomi Carlson. Charles Simic pens an “Essay on the Prose Poem,” and Mark Wagenaar reviews Mark Irwin’s Shimmer. Poets in this issue include Sawnie Morris, William Logan, Mary Jo Salter, Mark Irwin, Kim Addonizio, Andrea Cohen, Adam Scheffler, and more.

Call :: Jewish Fiction .net Fall 2020 Issue

Jewish Fiction .net, (www.jewishfiction.net) a prestigious literary journal, invites submissions for its Fall 2020 issue. We are the only English-language journal devoted exclusively to publishing Jewish fiction, and we showcase the finest contemporary Jewish-themed writing (either written in, or translated into, English) from around the world. In 9 years we have published 400 stories or novel excerpts, originally written in fifteen languages and on five continents, and we have readers in 140 countries. We’ve published such eminent authors as Elie Wiesel, Savyon Liebrecht, and Aharon Appelfeld, alongside many fine lesser-known writers. For submission details, please visit our Submissions page at www.jewishfiction.net/index.php/contactus/submission/.

The Main Street Rag – Winter 2020

The Main Street Rag - Winter 2020

The Main Street Rag Winter 2020 issue includes featured interview “Living for the Day” with Laura Thurston by Richard Allen Taylor. Also in this issue, find fiction by Nancy Bourne, Michael Gaspeny, Nick Gardner, Don Stoll, Laurence Levey, and Michael Washburn; poetry by Joan Bauer, Ace Boggess, Les Brown, Brian Fanelli, Mary Alice Dixon, Sean Thomas Doherty, Vicki Mandel-King, Gerard Sarnat, Sibani Sen, Young Smith, and more; plus a selection of five book reviews.