Excerpted from “Choler” by Bruce Bond from the Spring 2018 issue of Zone 3:

The long depressive curtain, the castle
stone limned in green, the thin insistent

incursions of rain that scarify the mortar,
what are they if not a promissory note,

the slung burden and authoritative bell
of dreams we take, in dreams, for dead.

The yellow eye wakes, and death’s antagonist—
let us call him scientist, father, creator, god—

draws back in shame and horror from his one
creation. He sees in him a miracle confusion,

drenched in the bile that is our birthright,
and says, in silence, hell. What did I expect.

Cover art “Dimming Superstition” collage on a book cover by Hollie Chastain.

The Spring 2018 issue of The Bellingham Review includes two features: Who Are These Assembled Nations?: New Poems from Palestine with works from Sheikha Helawy [pictured], Najwan Darwish, and Anwar Al-Anwar, and Unbidden Stories: New Writing from Israel with fiction by Orly Castel-Bloom, Anat Levin, and Liran Golod, poetry by Shimon Adaf and Anna Herman, and a hybrid text-image collaboration between Etgar Keret and Neta Rabinovitch. Credit for this curation goes to international consultant Liran Golod who worked with S. Paola Antonetta to bring these collections to readers.

In addition to its regular content of poetry, the Summer 2018 issue of Rattle includes a Tribute to Athlete Poets. “The stereotypes about athletes and poets might make it seem like an odd combination, but poetry lives everywhere, and stereotypes need to be broken,” comment the editors.

Rattle does this by bringing together twenty-two poets that include professional athletes from the NFL and NBA, tennis pros, soccer players, weightlifters, and marathon runners. Add to the mix an interview with semi-pro basketball player (did you know that?) and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn. 

Athletes whose poems appear in this issue include: James Adams, Elison Alcovendaz, Chaun Ballard, Erinn Batykefer, T.J. DiFrancesco, Stephen Dunn, Peg Duthie, Michael Estabrook, Daniel Gleason, Tony Gloeggler, Alex Hoffman-Ellis, A.M. Juster, Benjamín N. Kingsley, Laura Kolbe, Michael Mark, Tom Meschery, Jack Ridl, Laszlo Slomovits, Brent Terry, Martin Vest, Arlo Voorhees, and Guinotte Wise.

In addition to its twice-a-year print publication of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, translations and now plays-in-progress, The Cincinnati Review features free online content, inviting writers published in their print issues to contribute to their blog. “We’re especially interested in posts that can include an audio, visual, or video element, but we’re open to everything.”

One of those “everythings” is a beautiful recipe for scones shared by Siân Griffiths [pictured], which is as much personal narrative as it is recipe: “Let your mind wander as you sift and press the flour and butter in your fingertips. Remember the girl who told you that it doesn’t count as being the daughter of an immigrant if your immigrant father was only British. Remember the precision of your grandmother’s back garden with its perfect border of perfect flowers. Wonder why you even own that stupid pastry cutter.”

The Cincinnati Review online also includes miCRo, a weekly highlight of flash fiction or nonfiction or poem under 32 lines each. Recent contributors include Cady Vishniac, Kelle Groom, Becky Hagenston, Joshua Kryah, and Lisa Fay Coutley. Submissions for this feature are open year-round (excluding during contest submissions). 

The Kenyon Review will be accepting submissions during their open reading period (Sept. 15 – Nov. 1) for a special issue “to engage the possibilities, as well as the limits, of Literary Activism,” with guest editors Rita Dove and John Kinsella. “They share a belief that literary writing offers one of the most effective means for interrogating and challenging social oppression, inequality, and injustice,” writes David H. Lynn in the May/June 2018 issue. “Their goal will also include presenting a range of responses to a world whose soil and water and air are under grave threat.”

Read Lynn’s complete Editor’s Notes: Literary Activism and the World We Live In.

Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction blog for May features an interview between Sarah Einstein and Sven Birkerts, “On Writing, the Distractions of Technology, and Iota.”

Einstein checks in with Birkerts on what may have changed in how we are impacted by technology since just 2015 and the publication of his book Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age.

“If you spend much of the day free-styling between platforms, what do you have to work with in the soul-making department, and what will you use to make your art, if art is what you make?” Birkerts comments.

The two also discuss how we can (if we can) regain “access to the sublime through art” and what exactly Birkerts wishes people would pay more attention to and less attention to in our daily lives.

Birkerts will be a workshop leader for the Iota Conference in mid-August, where he hopes “to use exercises and conversation to help the writers get closer to the urgency and insistence of their respective projects.”

Read the full, and brief (of course), interview here.

The Common is a print and online publication of The Common Foundation, “a nonprofit dedicated to publishing and promoting art and literature that embodies a sense of place” with an emphasis of publishing new writers from around the world. Issue #15 includes a special portfolio of Arabic stories and artwork from Jordan.

Authors featured (translated by) in this issue: Mahmoud al-Rimawi and Haifa’ Abul-Nadi (Elisabeth Jaquette); Ghalib Halasa, Jamila Amaireh and Fairooz Tamimi (Thoraya El-Rayyes); Ja’far al-Oquaili, Mufleh al-Odwan and Majidah al-Outoum (Alice Guthrie); and Elias Farkouh (Maia Tabet).

TEACHERS: The Common also provides discounted classroom subscriptions, desk copy, and lesson plans to accompany the specific issue, as well as an in-person or Skype visit from Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker or a participating author. Click here for more information.

In addition to poetry and book reviews, the Spring 2018 issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal is a special issue: “Re-triangulating Yeats, Stevens, Eliot” edited by Edward Ragg and Bart Eeckhout. Content includes: 

“Pages from Tales: Narrating Modernism’s Aftermaths” by Edward Ragg
“Yeats, Stevens, Eliot: Eras and Legacies” an Interview with Marjorie Perloff
“Atlantic Triangle: Stevens, Yeats, Eliot in Time of War Ireland” by Lee M. Jenkins
“Crazy Jane and Professor Eucalyptus: Self-Dissolution in the Later Poetry of Yeats and Stevens” by Margaret Mills Harper
“’Where / Do I begin and end?’: Circular Imagery in the Revolutionary Poetics of Stevens and Yeats” by Hannah Simpson
“’Dead Opposites’ or ‘Reconciled among the Stars’?: Stevens and Eliot” by Tony Sharpe
“The Idea of a Colony: Eliot and Stevens in Australia” by Benjamin Madden
“’We reason of these things with later reason’: Plain Sense and the Poetics of Relief in Eliot and Stevens” by Sarah Kennedy

The Wallace Stevens Journal is avaialbe by subscription from John Hopkins University Press and is also available on Project Muse with article previews.

The Spring 2018 issue of The Bitter Oleander features an in-depth interview with European Editor, poet and translator John Taylor. Editor and Publisher Paul B. Roth delves into a variety of issues and interests with Taylor, including influences on his writing; his bout with polio and interest in mathematics in his youth; the value of “slow” travel – trains being a particular favorite mode of transportation and thought/work space for Taylor; the situation of being an American writer living abroad and the concepts of ‘foreignness’ and ‘otherness’; and the “subtle positivity” of Taylor’s writings. The interview is accompanied by over a dozen pages of Taylor’s work.

“If a poem works it’s because you’ve made it such that other people might participate in making it meaningful, and this participation will always rest on another person’s understanding of the poem and its relationship to a world that is not your own. Your own understanding of the poem will evolve over time too, as you reread it in light of your changing world, just as you will find the world altered in light of the poem you wrote to understand a small uncertain corner of it. With poems, you never get to settle on a final meaning for your work, just as you never get to feel settled, finally, as yourself.”

From On Poetry and Uncertain Subjects: Learning from the unknown by Jack Underwood in the May 2018 issue of Poetry. Read the rest here.

From the creators of Creative Nonfiction magazine, True Story provides a monthly home for longform (5000-10000 words) nonfiction narratives. This pocket-sized publication showcases one exceptional essay by one exceptional author at a time. Are you perhaps the next exceptional author to be featured? True Story is looking for a wide variety of voices, styles and subjects, and of course, readers who would enjoy the same. Subscriptions offer this gem delivered to your mailbox each month – perfect for your beach bag and road trip packing. And not just for you, True Story would be a fabulous gift for the readers in your life. For less than a date to the movies, you can send someone True Story for a year. Also available (for even less!) on Kindle. Just want to sample it? There’s a grab bag of back issues available here.

The most recent issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Winter 2018) opens with Associate Editor Keith Taylor’s “What is Found There: Poetry at Michigan,” commenting on this issue’s special feature. He recounts the Spring 2017 200th anniversary celebration at University of Michigan, which included a day-long conference entitled “Poetry at Michigan.” This was a “continuation of two symposia done over the previous few years: one on Theodore Roethke, and the other focising on Robert Hayden and his work.”

This issue of MQR has now become the even larger discussion of poets and their connections to UofM, including: Donald Hall, “an important professor” at UofM for almost twenty years; an unpublished interview with Seamus Heaney “a regular visitor for almost a quarter of a century, both before and after his Nobel Prize”; Francey Oscherwitz, and undergraduate at the university thirty-five years ago; Hannah Webster, “a recent graduate of the Zell Writing Program,” who “writes about her experience with the Prison Creative Arts Project,” including works from Michigan prison students; and Bob Hicock, not a UofM grad, but who lived in Ann Arbor for some twenty years, has contributed “a provocative essay on the necessary and inevitable changes happening in contemporary American poetry.”

FIELD Magazine Editor David Young writes:

“As FIELD 98, our Spring 2018 issue, arrives, it’s time to let you know that just two more numbers are scheduled: #99, Fall 2018, and #100, Spring 2019. Many have expressed dismay at learning that FIELD will close down, but both David Walker and I feel the need to free ourselves from the burden of editorship. Nobody thought, when the magazine began in 1969, that it would last this long and become such an institution. All good things eventually terminate, however, and fifty years and one hundred issues make for good round numbers.

“We’re hoping to organize a farewell event at next year’s AWP meeting. Meanwhile, we’re very grateful to our fellow editors, our contributors, and our subscribers for their support and enthusiasm. Also, of course, to Oberlin College for its hospitality. It isn’t easy to say goodbye. Thank you for caring and for loving FIELD all these many years.”

Thank you David Young (top photo), David Walker, and all the staff, writers, and readers through the years who helped make FIELD a vital voice in our literary community.

Pittsburgh-based literary magazine Creative Nonfiction is the winner of the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Small Press Publisher Award. The prize was announced in Tampa, Florida, at an opening ceremony at AWP’s annual conference and bookfair, which brings together 11,000+ writers, teachers, and small-press publishers. The other finalists were Fence, the Normal School, and Terrain.org.

AWP’s Small Press Publisher Award is an annual prize for nonprofit presses and literary journals that recognizes the important role such organizations play in publishing creative works and introducing new authors to the reading public. The award acknowledges the hard work, creativity, and innovation of these presses and journals, and honors their contributions to the literary landscape through their publication of consistently excellent work. The award includes a $2,000 honorarium and a complimentary exhibit booth at the AWP Conference & Bookfair in the year following the recipient’s recognition. The prize is given to literary magazines in even years; Creative Nonfiction was a finalist in both 2014 and 2016.

Creative Nonfiction founder and editor Lee Gutkind said, “It’s really nice to be recognized in this way. Creative Nonfiction’s small staff is incredibly dedicated, and does so much with so little. And thanks go to our contributors—the writers and artists whose work makes the magazine possible. Twenty-four years ago, we brought the very first issue of Creative Nonfiction to this conference, and I was so nervous … but we sold every copy. So, thanks go to AWP, too, for all their support over the years.”

Creative Nonfiction is true stories, well told. Each issue of the quarterly features original essays and illustrations; writing that pushes traditional boundaries of the genre; notes on craft; micro-essays; conversations with writers and editors; and more. Almost every issue includes a writer’s first publication, and the editorial team emphasizes a thoughtful editorial process and rigorous fact-checking as vital elements of the organization’s overall educational mission. Visit creativenonfiction.org to learn more.

The Winter 2017-2018 issue of The Main Street Rag features an interview with Michael Dowdy, author of URBILLY, winner of the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. In it, Dowdy talks about his lifelong love of books and choice of the “academic route” over his “recessive hillbilly” DNA strain, his shifting majors in college, taking a stab at the family business, how the poetry for URBILLY  came about, and his interests from Appalachian Latino literature to “undocumentary” poetry.

Readers may already be familiar with The Massachusetts Review, the quarterly print journal founded in 1959, but did you know they also have digital projects available?

Working Titles are e-publications of prose which are too long to be printed in the quarterly. Published bimonthly, there are three ways to purchase and download Working Titles. Recent publications include Table for One by Yun Ko Eun translated by Lizzie Buehler, The Keepers of the Ghost Bird by Jenn Dean, The Leader by Nouri Zarrugh, and more.

Readers can also find Digital Chapbooks, showcasing art and poetry from past special sections and art inserts throughout the years of the journal. These features are free to read and easy to access, a good way to spend some time.

While you’re checking out the current “Truth” issue of The Massachusetts Review, be sure to see what digital offerings are up for grabs.

I was relieved to see it wasn’t just me who heard the Bee Gees in my head when I saw the cover of Bennington Review Issue Four themed “Staying Alive.” Editor Michael Dumanis opens the “Note from the Editor” with these two lines from the 1977’s classic, “Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me / Somebody help me, yeah, I’m stayin’ alive.”

Dumanis explains, “As we were reading the poems, stories, and essays submitted to Bennington Review  in 2017 for this, our fourth issue, we noticed a word that come up with remarkable regularity – the verb ‘survive’ in all its various permutations. In Issue Four, it occurs – frequently as a directive, occasionally as the noun ‘survivor’ – twenty-eight times. The word ‘living’ can be found twenty-one times, an the word ‘alive’ shows up an additional twelve.”

A “tonal shift” from their previous issue, themed “Threat,” Dumanis notes that “something has shifted in the cultural landscape. An acceptance of threat has bred a series of reactions – resistance, perseverance, even a measure of optimism . . . there’s now a restored sense of agency.”

Readers can find works by Patrick Williams, Erin L. McCoy, Marco Wilkinson, Ian Stansel, A. Molotkov and many more, with several contributors’ works available to read online.

Stayin’ alive? I’m all for it.

In addition to its regular content of ‘extremely brief’ (under 750 words) nonfiction, Brevity‘s regular feature of Craft Essays in its first issue of 2018 features Chelsey Dyrsdale’s “Transforming an Essay Collection into a Memoir,” Annelise Jolley’s “Capturing the Numinous: Mary Karr’s Sacred Carnality,” and Felicia Rose Chavez’s [pictured] “The Mental Load: Honoring Your Story Over Your To-Do List.” All of Brevity‘s content is available online for free. No reason not to stop on by.

In “The Godfather Speaks,” 3QR: The Three Quarter Review interviewed Lee Gutkind on the two-decade anniversary of the controversial Vanity Fair article, in which critic James Wolcott “accused creative nonfiction writers, of memoir in particular, of ‘navel gazing’ . . . lambast[ing] the form itself as: a ‘sickly transfusion, whereby the weakling personal voice of sensitive fiction is inserted into the beery carcass of nonfiction.‘” Wolcott labeled Gutkind as “The Godfather behind creative nonfiction.”

Gutkind reflects on what could have been devastating to some in their careers: “The Godfather label—the positive aspects of it—stuck. From that point on, emboldened, I was much more in an offensive rather than a defensive mode when it came to creative nonfiction.” And for this, we are all grateful to The Godfather.

The fall 2017 print issue of Schuylkill Valley Journal includes a special section of poetry written by men imprisoned at Graterford Prison in Philadelphia. Fran B. provides an introduction to the section entitled, “A Poetry Workshop at Graterford Prison,” which begins, “In January, 2017, I started a poetry workshop at Graterford Prison. I had wanted to do this for a long time, several years, and my semi-retirement enabled me to think that I finally had the time to devote to the project.” Fran explains how he worked with the Prison Literacy Project of Pennsylvania and a group called Lifers, Inc. in Graterford Prison to get the workshop started, building a rapport with the inmates, and developing guidelines for their sessions. Fran shares some of the prompts he developed and the responses these elicited from participants.

Contributing Writer Eric Greinke provides an editorial comment on the works selected: “Although all of the poems that were submitted have merit, this particular group of five poets display special talent and affinity for poetry. Poetic talent can appear anywhere, under any circumstances, because it is the result of the inner human drive to evolve and connect. These five poets transcend situational concerns and rise to a universal level that communicates to our shared humanity. Their poems have in common an emotional intensity but each poet sings with his own unique voice.”

Included are ten poems by five poets: Reginald L., Terrell C., Ben C., Aaron F., and Eduardo R.

In these turbulent times, we can’t help but wonder just exactly how words do matter, in the sense of “for good” instead of what we see so much of bandied about in terms of knee-jerk thoughtlessness. World Literature Today provides the perspective “Words Matter: Writing as Inspired Resistance” in their January-February 2018 issue. In addition to its regular content is “Treasuring the Tradition of Inspired Resistance”: A Conversation with Maureen Freely by Michelle Johnson, poetry by Iossif Ventura and Anna Maria Carpi, an essay by Liliana Ancalao, three audio poems (online) in Mapuzungun, Spanish, and English, by Liliana Ancalao, a web exclusive interview “Breaking Open Gates: A Conversation with Emmy Pérez,” by Norma Cantú and Chelsea Rodríguez.

Readers can access five articles per month without a subscription; WLT is a paying market for writers and encourages subscriptions.

Ecotone‘s mission is to publish place-based work exploring “the ecotones between landscapes, literary genres, scientific and artistic disciplines, modes of thought.” The Fall/Winter 2017 issue is themed on “Craft” and opens with Editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s “From the Editor: The Craft of Editing,” which includes the insightful list of eight “Guiding Principles for Ecotone Editors.”

Content includes fiction by Jill McCorckle, Alexis Schaitkin, and Farah Alie, nonfiction by Ellie A. Rogers, Andrea Mummert Puccini, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ben Miller, and poetry by Cortney Lamar Charleston, Nina Sudhakar, George David Clark, Jessica Guzman Alderman, Dawn Manning, Lauren Camp, Cate Lycurgus, Lynne Thompson, David Macey, Athena Kildegaard, and Molly Tenenbaum. Each contributor also offers one sentence on craft, “what hopes and concerns about craft, writerly and/or otherwise, the writers and artists who are part of the issue might have.”

The gorgeous cover and bookmark insert for this issue deserves recognition: designed and printed by Rory Sparks at Working Library in Portland, Oregon, with text hand-set in Lining Gothic, Franklin Gothic, And Garamond Italic, and printed on Mohawk Superfine Eggshell 100lb on a Vandercook Universal I AB P.

Founded in 2011 by Christine Brooks Cote, Shanti Arts celebrates and promotes Art, Nature, and Spirit. Along with publishing a wide array of books, Shanti Arts also produces Still Point Art Gallery and  Still Point Arts Quarterly. The print publication features full-color art throughout, and the website includes the full exhibition of artwork. Nature’s Textures is the current exhibit, running through January 31, 2018.

Artists’ works honored in this exhibit:

Best in Show
Tricia Hoye

Award for Uniqueness of Concept and Originality
Jane Gottlieb

Award for Exceptional Composition and Design
Stefynie Rosenfeld

Award for Distinctive Interpretation of Theme
MJ Edwards

In a double issue (Fall 2017/Winter 2018), The Chattahoochee Review focuses on “Neighbors.”

Editor Anna Schachner writes, ” Some of our special-focus topics are more wistful than others. This one – Neighbors – certainly is. When our editorial staff chose the topic, I don’t think any of us were specifically thinking of borrowed cups of sugar or Christmas carolers at our front door, but, given current national and global events, it’s hard not to yearn for that simplicity and purity. Still, most of the work in this issue fluctuates between a kind of yearning for proximity, for connections, and a kind of wry suspicion of it.”

See a full list of contributors here.

Speculative Fiction in Translation (SFT) “often flies under the radar, despite the fact that it is an important part of the speculative fiction universe,” writes author and editor Rachel Cordasco in her introduction to a special section of “Speculative Fiction in Translation By Women” in Anomaly 25. While “SFT has been growing in popularity over the last few years,” Cordasco notes that, “like the publishing world as a whole, the world of SFT is often dominated by male authors.”

Her selection of included works highlights some of what she feels are the best female authors writing speculative fiction in languages other than English, offering readers a variety of stories and styles. In addition to this, Cordasco started SFinTranslation.com, a site on which she indexes SFT, reviews works, and posts news and interviews relative to SFT. Cordasco herself is working on translating Italian SF.

The December 2017 issue of Allegro Poetry Magazine online features poems that “celebrate that perennial feature of poetry workshops and courses: The prompt.” Editor Sally Long writes, “Poets were invited to describe the prompts that gave rise to their poems. The result is an issue that not only includes some amazing poetry but also a selection of ideas that will hopefully inspire new poems.” Contributors include Sarah Law, Bill Brown, Kersten Christianson, Rick Blum, Cathryn Shea, Lisa Stice, Charles Rammelkamp, Cat Campbell, Andrew Turner, Helen May Williams, Harry Youtt and more.

The Autumn 2017 issue of The Fiddlehead features “Remembering Alden Nowlan.” Poet, novelist, and playwright Nowlan passed away in 1983, and this past fall, Goose Lane published the Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan. Fiddlehead  Editor Ross Leckie writes, “It is an occasion for a celebration of Nowlan’s remarkable achievement. In this issue of The Fiddlehead  readers will find a brief appreciation by David Adams Richards and a previously unpublished interview with Nowlan conducted just before his death by two intrepid high school students [Corinne Schriver and Carmen McKell].”

The Fall 2017 The Wallace Stevens Journal is a special issue focused on “Teaching Stevens.”

The volume includes “Reflections by Poets” from Rachel Hadas, James Longenbach, and Lisa M. Steinman as well as poetry by Josepth Duemer, William Virgil Davis, Sharon Portnoff, Navlika Ramjee and more. Several of the essays focus on global contexts, such as teaching Stevens in Israel, Belgium, China, Sweden, and Portugal. Other essays include:

“Valuing Stevens’s Acts of Imagination” by Charles Altieri
“Stevens and Race: ‘Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery’ Revisited” by Marvin Campbell
“Stevens’s Poetics of Variation as a Guide for Teaching” by Lisa Goldfarb
“Casting for Keener Sounds: How to Make Difficult Poetry Fun Again” by Alex Streim, Zachary Tavlin
“As if Blackbirds Could Shape Scientists: Wallace Stevens Takes a Seat in the Classroom of Interdisciplinary Science” by David J. Waters
“Mountain Climbing in the Poetry Classroom in Malta: Teaching a Stevens Metapoem” by Daniel Xerri

The Wallace Stevens Project Muse website includes a full table of contents as well as previews of each article and full access for subscribers.

 

Publishing since 1967 from the University of Victoria, The Malahat Review is one of Canada’s leading literary journals. Editors since its inception have included Robin Skelton, John Peter, Constance Rooke, Derk Wynand, Marlene Cookshaw, and currently John Barton (since 2004).

Originally subtitled “An International Magazine of Life and Letters,” The Malahat Review  now focuses on Canadian and international poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The publication’s website also features book reviews, interviews, contests, podcasts, and publishing tips – a bimontly guest column in which authors share how to improve professionals skills: “from the writing of cover letters, to what house style means, to choosing a rhyming dictionary, to having an author photo (as opposed to a selfie) shot.”

Happy Anniversary Malahat! Here’s hoping for another great half-century to come!

Edited and published by Richard Peabody, along with the work of Associate Editor Lucinda Ebersole, Gargoyle celebrates 40 years of publishing with a ‘two-sided’ issue: Issue 65 – Side 1 and Issue 66 – Side 2. Sadly, Lucinda passed away March 20, 2017, as Peabody notes, “I’m heartbroken that my literary partner in crime has passed away. My plan is to shepherd her short story manuscripts and novel into print over the next few years. She was one of a kind and the funniest human I have ever known.”

Gargoyle‘s impression on the literary landscape is vast, and it’s with great hope and support for Richard and his staff that they will continue well into the future. In celebration, from the Gargoyle website:

In our first 40 years, Gargoyle has published work by:

10 Acker Award winners,
6 National Book Award-winning authors,
3 PEN/Faulkner winners,
4 Pulitzer Prize winners,
2 MacArthur Fellows,
2 Nebula Award winners,
2 Yale Younger Poets,
1 Hugo Award winner,
1 Poet Laureate,
6 Iowa Short Fiction Award winners,
6 Flannery O’Connor Award winners,
3 James Laughlin Award winners,
2 Lamont Poetry Selection winners,
2 William Carlos Williams Award winners,
8 National Poetry Series winners,
5 Orange Prize Long List writers,
2 Orange Prize Short List writers,
2 National Book Critics Circle Award winners,
6 Lambda Literary Award winners,
1 Gertrude Stein Award winner, and
3 Firecracker Alternative Book Award winners, among others.

In her Editor’s Notes to Issue 13 of Saranac Review, Elizabeth Cohen begins by quoting Emily Dickinson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

Cohen writes, “We are sometimes asked at Saranac Review  how we select the work we publish, and I think Dickinson’s words are applicable. Of course we seek work that has strong voice, craft and originality, but in the end, it is the visceral response that probably most informs our choices. We choose poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and plays that make us feel and evoke in us a response that physically affects us, while simultaneously reminding us why we read in the first place. If you could read our notes to one another on Submittable, you would see a lot of this: ‘Made me tingle,’ ‘heart stopping,’ ‘took my breath away.'”

With such discerning criteria, writers have got to meet that bar, providing readers much to look forward to in each issue of Saranac Review.

“Twenty years ago,” writes Brevity Editor Dinty W. Moore, “I had an idea for a magazine that combined the swift impact of flash fiction with the true storytelling of memoir, and Brevity was born. To be honest, I expected it to last a year.”

Instead, Brevity has aged into the most well-known publication of its kind, with a rich history of publishing new authors who have become some of the most respected in the genre, and guiding writers as they learn and practice their craft.

In celebration, Brevity reached out to authors who have appeared multiple times in Brevity over the years and commissioned their submissions for an anniversary issue. Authors includes Lee Martin, Diane Seuss, Brenda Miller, Sue William Silverman, Rebecca McClanahan, and Ira Sukrungruang. Moore notes that readers “may detect a common theme (or at least a common word)” among the works.

Read Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction as well as book reviews and craft essays online here.

After publishing 12 print issues from 2004-2015 in association with Columbia College Chicago, and a brief hiatus, Court Green is back with issue 13, “the first in its new incarnation as an independent online journal” edited by Tony Trigilio and David Trinidad.

Featured in this revival issue are poems by Matthew Burgess, Chris Green, Ginger Ko, Robert Siek, Kimiko Hahn, George Kalamaras, Annah Browning, Kimberly Lyons, Hafizah Geter, Megan Fernandes, Diane Seuss, Lynn Crosbie, Harlee Logan Kelly, Kenyatta Rogers, and C. Russell Price.

A special bonus features: “Robert Siek: 13 Instagram Photos”; Peter K. Steinberg, “‘A Fetish Somehow’: A Sylvia Plath Bookmark”; and “Radio Free Albion: Interview with George Kalamaras.”

Welcome back Court Green!

Boulevard‘s fall symposium on campus protests includes essays by Jim Craig, Megan Giddings, Ena Selimovic, Andrew Weinstein, and Robert Zaller responding to the question: “Have the recent campus protests – ranging from demonstrations to the use of safety spaces – against mainly right-wing speakers contributed to a dumbing down of American colleges, or are they effective and necessary?”

Celebrating its 35th Anniversary, Alaska Quarterly Review Editor-in-Chief Ronald Spatz, while marking the milestone with gratitude, considers this passage of time and what AQR, like many literary publications, has witnessed. “In the past we counted on artists, scholars, scientists, and journalists as reliable firewalls against ignorance. But increasingly there are powerful efforts to silence or marginalize these agents of understanding and change . . . as writers, poets, editors, and publishers, we must redouble our efforts to seek truth in all of its parts while creating every possible opportunity for compassion and empathy. In our view, the role of the arts has simply never been more crucial.”

New England Review Editor Carolyn Kuebler writes in the 38.3 Editor’s Note that, while the twenty-three pieces in issue 38.3 (2017) were not chosen for nor do they have a focused message or singular theme, “. . . it surprised me to see how frequently the shadow of war—to take one obvious example of a culture of violence—darkened the edges of these disparate writings. With the world always in the throes of some violence or other, it’s no wonder; whether we’re civilians or soldiers or doctors, we all become part of it. Born during the Vietnam War, finishing college at the start of the Gulf War, and then becoming a parent during the War on Terror, I’ve learned that being in a state of war doesn’t always have a clear beginning and end, and now it’s not even always clear where the war is actually happening and who’s fighting it. It’s not just in this magazine or in this moment in time that writers are contending with such themes; it’s always.”

Read the full editorial here and access full-text of several works from this issue, including Louise Aronson’s “Necessary Violence.”

Cover: Warfare  by Sabra Field

“The decision to consider the work in the current issue of Bennington Review through the lens of threat,” writes Editor Michael Dumanis, “- be this threat political, global, localized, or existential – was made during an uncharacteriscially emotional editorial meeting on Thursday, November 10, 2016, two days after a certain historical event. We felt completely unprepared to imagine what might come next. Animated by collective anxiety – this sense of abrupt dislocation of expectaions, as well as new actual danger – we gravitated toward poems and stories and essays where paradigms were similarly disrupted, where characters suddenly found themselves destabalized by external forces, where institutions and individuals in which we’d placed our trust failed to hold up their end of the bargain.”

See a full table of contents with several sample works from the issue here.

Cover image by Prague-based artist Jakub Geltner: “Cultural Landscape.”