In its Spring 2017 issue, Michigan Quarterly Review editor, Jonathan Freedman, offers a wonderful tribute to Managing Editor Vicki Lawrence who stepped down in May after twenty years with the magazine. As managing editor, Freedman writes, “she did just about everything: copyedited, proofread, supervised all the other manifold details of the publishing process, helped select the covers, talked the authors into her judicious recasting of the more infelicitous, erroneous, or just plain aberrational turns of phrase or thought. She schlepped copies of the journal to the Ann Arbor Book Festival and the AWP convention with equal vigor and tenacity.”

NewPages enjoyed our professional relationship with Vicki, looking forward to our annual meetings with her at AWP. Along with many others who came to know her as the face of MQR, we will miss her greatly in our literary circle, but look forward to seeing her again soon to fulfill our promise of beers in Ann Arbor!

The Rust Belt extends from the Great Lakes to the Upper Midwest and refers to the deindustrialization the region experienced as needs and supplies changed over the decades. As a Michigander, Detroit and Flint are well-known names from our state representing the Rust Belt sector. But on the tails of any discussion of decline and decay are examples and stories of revitalization and renewal, and these are common literary themes. Rattle takes a uniquely complex approach in issue #57, looking instead to the impact “the shifting political attitude of this region” had on the 2016 election and checks in to “find a first-hand account of what’s going on through the poet’s eye.”

Featured poets include: Joseph A. Chelius, Edward Derby, Heather Finnegan, Jim Hanlen, Zachary Hester, Donna Hilbert, Ananda Lima, Bob Lucky, Herbert Woodward Martin, Andrew Miller, Behzad Molavi, Al Ortolani, Li Qingzhao, Lee Rossi, Michael Sears, Matthew Buckley Smith, and Dennis Trudell, with a conversation with Detroit-based psychotherapist and poet Ken Meisel.

Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus” has gained new popular attention of late, thanks in part to White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller’s comments dismissing the value of its message to immigrants. But, before Miller, this poem engraved on The Statue of Liberty was the inspiration for Breathe Free Press, a magazine the Editor Deborah Di Bari says was “founded in great part to resist the Trump administration’s oppressive policies.” Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Breathe Free Press”

An exerpt from “Darling America” by Kelli Russell Agodon from the ongoing series of Letter to America published on Terrain.org:
…
Listen, the dolls in my dollhouse

are being deported and the landlord is typing
in all caps. How do we recognize humanity

when we’re just a name on a screen? An avatar
of a flag or resist, a red cap or a pink hat?

We’re holding the door for people, until we know
how they voted then we’re tripping each other

into the future, getting high off how fast they fall.
…
Read the full poem and hear it read by the author here.

Publishing fiction, poetry, and essays from the Department of English at Auburn University, Alabama, Southern Humanities Review celebrates 50 year in print with volume 51.1. The issue features an essay by Greg Varner; fiction by Craig Bernardini, Megan Fahey, Beck Hagenston, Ted Morrissey, and Hannah Pittard; and poetry by Jessica Rae Bergamino, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Tarfia Faizullah, Joe Jiménez, Elizabeth Langemak, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Melissa Mylchreest, Sam Ross, sam sax, Derek Sheffield.

After the first few months of getting their online feet wet, Aquifer: The Florida Reviw Online is now open for general submissions. Writers are encouraged [as always] to review the publication content to make sure their writing is a good fit before submitting. “We are seeking top-quality digital stories, graphic narrative, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry” the editors say. TFR  is also introducing a January annual $50 “staff picks” award from among all the authors published in the print TFR  and Aquifer.

Under the Sun online creative non-fiction annual offers teachers “Ten reasons why our online journal would be a good choice in your writing courses,” including the fact that the editors are teachers and writers themselves. They’ve tested Under the Sun  in their own classrooms to positive feedback from students. And students – you have a voice! Let your teachers know about Under the Sun  and other great, free access, literary and alternative magazines at NewPages!

Happy 40th Anniversary to Willow Springs magazine of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and interviews published out of Spokane, Washington. Issue 80 features approriate celebratory cover art by Marta Berens (“Crystal Structure”) of a small girl seeming to be caught in mid-dance, and inside this issue, the poem “Anniversary,” by Elizabeth Austen includes these closing lines: “I twist as if I, like the jellyfishdress, / am suspended, still / thick with possibility, still buoyant.”

May Willow Springs continue on another forty years – buoyant and thick with possibility!

Glimmer Train Bulletins are produced monthly with essays written by writers (published in GT) and creative writing teachers on topics related to craft and the industry.

In the most recent issue, #157 August 2017, Rowena Macdonald offers 10 tips for writing dialogue, offering this advice: “. . . remember, when it comes to writing dialogue in prose you need to convey the impression of reality rather than verbatim speech.” Silas Dent Zobal [pictured] offers a meaningful exploration of finding the heart of the story and the difficulty of writing about what can’t be written: “That’s what I want to tell you. Here, right here, is where you can find the heart of the heart of your story. Not in a place but in no place. Not in clarity but in ambiguity.” And Joshua Henkin provides commentary on developing character background: when Mia comes from Montreal instead of Maryland, it changes how her family got there and the impact of their choices on her character in story – and the writer’s responsibility to the “seeds of a narrative.”

Three excellent essays that would be great semester kick-off reading for any creative writing class, and some great basic craft conversation for all writers to consider. Signing up for the bulletins is free.

Second Look is a section in One online poetry journal in which various writers are asked “to take a second look at poems they admire and discuss informally what they admire about the work.” Some of the poems include “Woman Falling” by Franz Wright, “homage to my hips” by Lucille Clifton, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” by Dylan Thomas, “Looking for Songs of Papusza” by Bronisława Wajs, “Celebrating Childhood” by Adonis, “Looking for my Killer” by Thylias Moss, and “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova.

The Mom Egg Review print literary journal about motherhood also has an online quarterly component called the Mer Vox, featuring writing, artwork, craft essays, hybrid works, and interviews. Recent craft essays include: “Women Writers, Mothers And Friendships: How We Sustain Each Other,” an Interview by J.P. Howard, MER VOX Editor-at-Large, of Mireya Perez-Bustillo and Patsie Alicia Ifill; several essays on “Poetry as a Reflection of Self on the Page” curated by J.P. Howard  – “Release the Dam: A Poem is a River” by Keisha-Gaye Anderson, “Writing the Narrative Poem” by Heather Archibald, “Poetry as a Reflection of Self on the Page!” by J.P. Howard, and “Poets and Performance” by Jacqueline Johnson; and a number of writing prompts from the editors as well as other writers (Janet Hamill, Cynthia Kraman, Tsaurah Litzky).

From The Florida Review interview with Denise Duhamel, focusing on her newest collection Blowout:

TFR:
Given the times we suddenly find ourselves living in, is there even more pressure to write in the moment?

Duhamel:
Yes, absolutely. I was thinking so much about how my next book, which is not out yet, is going to be called Scald. [The book came out in February 2017, after this interview.] It’s about feminism and it’s dedicated to three different great feminists. I was so in the zeitgeist of a Hillary Clinton presidency and women, and now I feel so unmoored. But I’m so glad I wrote it when I wrote it because, while I wasn’t thinking of Hillary necessarily when I was writing it, I felt this movement towards women and the feminization of power and saving the planet. Now, we really have to stay in the moment and not stick our heads in the sand. I mean you may have to stick your head in the sand for a week to survive, but then we have to come out strong.

TFR:
I felt like I often heard people say, “We are having more conversations about race during Barak Obama’s presidency and we will talk more about gender with a female president.” Do you feel like we will talk more or less about gender given the president we ended up with?

Duhamel:
He’ll talk a lot less about gender and even his wife will say less. I was reading something just this morning about how she wants to be more like Jackie O. It’s so retro and cultural regression to the max, right? She really wants to go back to the 1960s pillbox hat and not even say anything. We are in big trouble, but I also think because this election is so egregious and Clinton didn’t lose to a man who was moderate or even a Mitt Romney or John McCain, she lost to a misogynist who calls women the worst possible names, I think women are not going to give him a pass. We are going to come back strong, especially since we had a taste of what could have been. I can’t imagine women going, Oh well, we’ll let it go.

TFR:
No.

Duhamel:
I think we’ve been letting it go for decades and centuries and I don’t think we can let it go anymore.

TFR:
I think that’s also what I admired about your book. You didn’t let it go. You talked about it.

Read the full interview on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.

Are we still talking about our addiction to Facebook despite its evils? Apparently, yes, we still are, with New England Review Editor Carolyn Kuebler contributing a new perspective to the conversation – especially for writers. In her editorial for Issue 38.2, she addresses some of the known issues with the social media platform, and comments that “Facebook seems to present a special kind of hell for writers” in that it “offers the possibility of an audience beyond one’s circle of friends (the real kind)—and even better, an audience that responds immediately, positively, and in great numbers.”

But, alas, what about when there is NO response? What about the silence of a Facebook post? “Writers have always known that theirs is a lonely art,” Kuebler comments, “but after spending time on Facebook it’s as if we have to learn this all over again. We have to remember that the audience for literature is largely silent; it takes its time.”

Read the full editorial here, and Kuebler’s closing comment of appreciation for writers, even if it is only ever offered in silence.

Issue 43 of New Orleans Review is themed “The African Literary Hustle” and opens with the editorial by Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Laura T. Murphy, “This Hustle is Not Your Grandpa’s African Lit.” The two issue editors examine the historical ‘presentation’ of African literature published in Western culture as “all too often realist, in English, and in the spirit of Chinua Achebe. But romance, science fiction, fantasy, epic, experimental poetry, satire, and political allegory all find expression in Africa, though not necessarily publication.” The editors confront this disparity, “Those who are called to write often have to hustle to get recognition by writing a coming-of-age colonial encounter tale or hustle even harder to have their unique voices heard. So the post-Achebe generation writer faces all sorts of firewalls.”

Thus, the call went out for this issue, and writers responded with the editors hoping “to provoke some interesting and unpredictable writing and thinking that would reflect and respond to the spirit of the hustle.” Oddly enough, the editors note, “eighty percent of the submissions were from white non-African-identifying writers who thought they could hustle their way into a volume of African literature and had no qualms about it.” Seriously.

The editors close on the comment, “But what is African literature? Is there, can there be, was there ever and African literature? In asking you have answered your question. African literature is a question. It is an open question that invites, and has to keep on inviting, different geographies, languages and forms.”

Thus, this issue of New Orleans Review: The African Literary Hustle.

The Southampton Review Editor Lou Ann Walker recounts the day, ten years ago, when Robert Reeves, who would be rebuilding the MFA Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, opined that a “distinguished MFA program” should likewise have a “distinguished literary journal as its intellectual and creative center.” Then he asked Lou Ann: “Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested in founding and editing a literary review?” She writes that it had been her “secret dream” to do just that. Ten years later, Walker has created exactly the publication worthy of the university’s writing program – and vice versa! Publishing two issues per year, readers can also find selections available to read on the TSR website.

Hanging Loose, published by Hanging Loose Press since 1966, includes the section “Writers of High School Age” in each issue. Featured in issue 108 are two young poets who contribute several works each.

Elizabeth Girdharry writes of math and sciences with “Filling Empty Spaces,” including the lines “Mathematical formulas, / on how to stay tangent to the line, / somehow slipped my mind,” and “There Was Geometry” begins: “There is geometry in my junk drawer.” And comes back around to, “More importantly, / there is geometry in my junk drawer. / Angles and tangents twist out of circles / the same way you smooth back flyaway wisps of baby hair / when you’re pondering a hard science theory.”

Elise Wing crafts strong imagery to draw her readers in. “The Microscope” begins “Dead diatom / Crisp as a leaf skeleton,” and “The Living That Terrifies” begins with the amusing but poignant, “Your ears are the trees for egrets to nest in,” and “Tomorrow, the Seagulls” starts, “The future is as frightening as a three-headed hyena.”

NewPages includes Hanging Loose in our Young Writers Guide where we list publications written by and for young writers and readers as well as a vetted, ad-free list of contests for young writers.

In celebration of TLR’s 40 years of publication and “looking toward the future,” Sena Jeter Naslund writes in the Editor’s Note, four guest editors all under the age of forty were invited to select works for this first issue year 41. “Each of them is a graduate, in various areas of concentration, of the Spalding University low-residency MFA in Writing Program,” notes Naslund. Making the selections: Eva Sage Gordon, nonfiction editor; Ellyn Lichvar, poetry and Children’s Corner editor; Amina S. McIntyre, drama editor; Flora K. Schildknecht, fiction editor.

The summer 2017 issue of Rattle features a tribute to poets living with mental illness. “An estimated 26% of Americans experience mental illness in a given year,” write the editors, “and we wanted to acknowledge and explore that reality, while also helping to diminish the associated cultural stigma of these illnesses. [. . . ] While the topics of the poems themselves vary greatly, each of the poets live with some form of depressive, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, bi-polar, post-traumatic stress, or eating disorder—all of discussed openly and bravely in their contributor notes. In the conversation section, we talk about mental illness and a wide range of other topics with Francesca Bell.” [Cover Art by Jasmine C. Bell.]

Artists say things with objects, images, symbols, and metaphors that are difficult, if not impossible, to express any other way.
Artists have tremendous courage, a necessary quality when it comes to expressing personal dreams and emotions so all can see them.
Artists break down barriers of thought, time, custom, and expectation.
Artists make the intangible tangible.
Artists see the trees and the forest.
Artists challenge us to see and understand our world differently than we do now.
Artists are born with open hands and open hearts, courageously willing to accept whatever is given.
Imagine our world without artists, without their ability to see, dream, express, break down barriers, and challenge the rest of us to imagine our world differently.

Excerpted from Christine Brooks Cote, “Imagine Our World Without Artists,” from Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2017.

The June 2017 issue of Poetry features photographs and artifacts from the Poetry Foundation’s forthcoming exhibit, Matter in the Margins: Gwendolyn Brooks at 100, curated by Anna Chen, June 16–August 25, 2017.

Chen writes: “Gwendolyn Brooks’s literary archives, now in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reveal that she clustered and bundled papers as well as life experiences: she tucked notes inside pieces of paper folded into makeshift pockets, slid photographs behind other photographs in albums, and pasted clippings on top of each other in scrapbooks. She added further layers of meaning with her copious annotations, like the detailed notes she wrote on the backs of many of her photographs (given in quotation marks in the accompanying images) in order to preserve the knowledge of the people and events they captured.”

Read Chen’s full introduction to this feature as well as view a slideshow of the photographs and artifacts here.

Fusion is Prarie Schooner’s online series, which Editor Kwame Dawes says, “is an opportunity to create dialog across geographical spaces and cultures through the sharing of art and writing. It represents an effort to create bridges between the many silos that separate us, and to do so by asking writers to think about the very things that connect us and distinguish us in different parts of the world.” Issue #11 is a collaboration with Ugandan poetry and art on the theme “Shoes.”

In her essay, “Ngato! Ngato! Shoes!” Ugandan Poet Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva [pictured] writes, “It’s often the most silent shoes that are the strongest. It’s the shoes that allow thieves to stalk upon unsuspecting people and the shoes that enable a cheetah to pounce on its prey. The silent shoes do not desire unnecessary attention to detract them from their mission.”

Read the full issue here.

In his introduction to Issue 63 (Spring 2017) of Creative Nonfiction, themed “How We Teach,” Lee Gutkind writes about attending a yoga and creative writing retreat where he is teaching creative nonfiction to an “ecclectic” group of attendees. Just as varied is the group’s experience with yoga, which the yoga instructor misjudged by giving too rigorous of a few first sessions. Gutkind writes that the instructor backed down after that, teaching technique and form basics, regardless of the participant’s experience level. “We hard-core students thought we knew all of this stuff—some of us have been practicing for decades—so we were somewhat apprehensive at first. But as the lesson progressed, we began to realize that going back to the basics and relearning what we thought we knew was quite helpful.”

Gutkind likens this to our need to review our own practice, weed out bad habits we may have developed over the years, and get back in tune with the basics: “In yoga or writing—or in practicing any art or skill—it does not hurt to start over once in a while just to make sure you know what you think you know. In fact, it occurs to me this is also why teaching can be reinvigorating—I know many writers who make their primary living by teaching and who often find their inspiration in writing prompts given to their students. But maybe there’s also something about focusing on the basics that can inspire innovation and transformation.”

Read the full editorial here.

Today, Shanti Arts announced changes coming to Still Point Arts Quarterly.

• Art submissions in response to calls will be free. Everything else about the exhibitions stays the same: 30 artists will be featured online and in Still Point Arts Quarterly with five winners awarded. “The Art of Structure” is the current, open call.

• The journal is transitioning from a print quarterly, to an interactive digital magazine. Paid subscriptions to the print journal will be honored until they expire.

• Because of these changes, subscriptions and single copies of the digital magazine will be free for readers. Subscription sign-ups for the digital magazine are now being taken at the magazine’s website.

Check out what else founder and editor Christine Cote has to say about the changes at the Shanti Arts blog.

The American Poetry Review May/June 2017 issue includes a special supplement interview by Lance Rutkin with Paul Muldoon. Included in their discussion: Muldoon’s thoughts on “commissioned” work; how to approach art when writing poetry about it; playing with linguistics in poetry; structuring a volume of poetry; the place of poetics in contemporary Irish politics; his poetic relationship with Seamus Heaney; and the sonnet form in the current day. Read the full interview here.

The May – August 2017 issue of World Literature Today features New Native Writing: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock, guest edited by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish. The section includes “twenty-eight writers with tribal affiliations from throughout the continental US as well as Guåhån (Guam) and American Samoa.” In her introduction, Mish writes about the 1992 WLT  feature “From this World: Contemporary American Indian Literature” in an issue “released just before Returning the Gift, a historic Native writers’ conference held on the University of Oklahoma’s campus, the home of World Literature Today.” 

Mish used that 1992 date as the start point for the works she collected for this feature, “to avoid creating categories and to reaffirm the impact of Returning the Gift, I solicited submissions from United States Native writers whose first book was published after the 1992 festival. Despite the simple, temporal structure of this approach, I believe the aesthetics and thematics Native scholars and writers have identified are clearly present in the work.” A full list of contributors can be found here.

Twenty-five years later, Returning the Gift Literary Festival returns to Oklahoma University campus (October 8-11, 2017). For more information about the festival, visit here.

In his Spring 2017 Welcome Readers! section, Main Street Rag Publisher M. Scott Douglass offers readers a historical assessment of the publication’s genre content. Having originally started as a poetry journal, Douglass says it was from the advice of Dana Gioia and others that he started publishing fiction and then later book reviews. Now, he says, with the Spring 2017 issue, “for the first time ever – the balance has been tipped in the favor of prose.” He considers possible reasons for this, but the bottom line: “Main Street Rag needs poetry submissions. We need a lot of them. And we need them as soon as possible or the Summer issue may end up being a totally prose edition.”

Whatever you can do to help, readers. The publication DOES accept simultaneous submissions, Douglass assures – though the website may not yet reflect this change in policy. Writers can expect a reasonable report time, and, according to Douglass, a review by “a tougher poetry editor than we’ve ever had before. . . but that only makes the magazine better.” MSR  takes submissions via Submittable; there is a reading fee which is waived for subscribers.

Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine is “an online lit mag where artists of word and image explore the ephemeral boundary between human and animal.” Each month, Animal publishes one story, one poem, and one essay, and for each, there is an accompanying “cover art” image. The Cover Art page on Animal is a collection of truly amazing and stunning artwork that will have viewers on a slow scroll to contemplate and enjoy each piece.

Southern Humanities Review has been published fiction, poetry, and essays quarterly from the Department of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama since 1967. The newest double issue (Vol 50.3&4) marks their 50th Anniversary, and features the essay winner of The Hoepfner Literary Award “Time, Sight, Orbs, Memory” by Megan Kerns. Fiction winner “Landfall: A Novella” by Michael Knight and poetry winner “Epithalamium” by Brandon Amico appeared in Vol 50.1&2. Full text and excepts from the winning works can be read here.

The Wallace Stevens Journal Editors Steven Gould Axelrod and Natalie Gerber introduce readers to the Spring 2017 special issue feature Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost: A Reconsideration with these words: “One of the well-worn ironies of epoch-fashioning in literature is its tendency to position literary oeuvres in ways that serve the need for distinction and contrast without attesting to the surprising overlaps and conjunctions that exist in the lives and careers of the era’s foremost practitioners. This, in a sentence, is the story of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, two modernist American poets who have emerged—more so than most of their peers—at opposite ends of the modernist spectrum.”

For a full list of contents, click here. Those with access to the journal through Project Muse can read full text; others can read the beginning portions of each entry.

In Poet Lore‘s Spring/Summer 2017 feature World Poets in Translation, Hodna Nuernberg translates Togolese poet Anas Atakora. Nuernberg introduces the poet, “Atakora writes in a French that is simultaneously limpid and roiled by the undercurrents of Kotokoli, his mother tongue. . . Atakora’s genius lies in his ability to draw inspiration from this duality, creating a poetic voice that plays with oppositions as he develops a personal lyricism rich with polyphony and intertextuality.”

Nuernberg goes on to explain, “Atakora considers himself to be among the third generation of Francophone Togolese poets, tracing his lineage back to the neo-Négritude writers of the 1960s and 70s. The content-driven and politically engaged writing that characterized the work of the neo-Négritude writers is tempered in Atakora’s work by his interest in stylistic invention and by his commitment to liberating poetic language from formal constraints, a sensibility he shares with writers of the second generation, who came of age during the cultural renewal of the 1990s.”

Photograph “Paula/Window #1” by Roger Mullins on the cover of v16 i2 of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley inspired this week’s theme of lit mag covers.
A detail of “The History of Nature” by Brad Kunkle on the Spring 2017 issue of Arroyo is from his Light & Leaf series, paintings “embellished with genuine gold and silver leaf, which reflects light in a room differently than paint.Therefore, they can appear contrastive and unique when the point of view or source of light has changed.”
And for a dose of humor, Issue #49 of Pembroke Magazine features a photograph taken by Editor Jessica Pitchford at the annual John Blue Cotton Festival in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Love it.

Editor Chris Agee included a handwritten note with v9 n2 of Irish Pages, “This issue is already highly controversial. . . ” Why? The focus: “Israel, Islam & the West” with feature content: Gerard McCarthy on the refugee crisis in Greece; An unpublished survivor’s account of Bergen Belsen; “A Trial” by Hubert Butler; Writings on Iran, Bosnia and Islam; Avi Shlaim on “Israel and the Arrogance of Power”; Dervla Murphy’s “Hasbara in Action”; John McHugo on Syria; Chris Agee on “Troubled Belfast”; Ghazels of Hafez; Lara Marlowe on Mahmoud Darwish; New poems on the Middle East by Seán Lysaght, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ciarán O’Rourke & Cathal Ó Searcaigh; and “I am Belfast”, a photographic portfolio by Mark Cousins.

Dear America,

A cento of Adrienne Rich

You’re beginning to float free
Toward a new kind of love
Burning itself, burning down
The blueprint of a life.

I wanted to choose words that even you
Intend to refuse shelter
With a lie. And each
A beautiful tumor
Feeding on everything.
. . . 

[Read the rest and listen to the poet read his own work on Terrain.org]

Issue #55 (Spring 2017) of Rattle includes a selection of poems on the theme “Civil Servants.” “The collection features seventeen civil servants — poets who have worked for various government agencies, including the EPA, the FDA, the CIA, the Census Bureau, and many more,” write the editors. “Apparently working for the public produces a dry sense of humor, because many of the poems lean sardonic. These poets are also smart and down-to-earth, and just may restore your faith in bureaucracy.” Some of the writers included: Lisa Badner, Dane Cervine, A.M. Juster, Bruce Neidt, Pepper Trail, Jane Wheeler, John Yohe. See a full list of contributors here.

Editor Wayne Miller has announced several changes to Copper Nickel with its recent re-launch, including paying contributors: “starting with issue 24, we’ll be paying $30 per printed page. (We wish it could be more!)” Indeed, it is more than nothing, which is a great step for any literary publication to be able to take. Additionally, issue 24 of Copper Nickel includes a flash fiction portfolio featuring 22 works selected by Fiction Editors Teague Bohlen and Joanna Luloff. Cover image: “Tape Loops” by Eleanor King.