“It bears acknowledging that Drunken Boat 24 arrives in the wake of a substantial loss,” opens Nick Potter’s editorial to the comics section of the newest issue. “Amid the varied responses,” he writes, “I’ve noticed a subset of my friends on Facebook who have updated their profile pictures to a black square. In our increasingly globalized, increasingly visual culture, this act seems intuitive, marking absence, marking erasure, marking the digital equivalence of donning black in mourning, marking a kind of death. In comics, the filled-black panel has often been used as contextual shorthand for death—a kind of visual euphemism in the structural language of the form.”

Potter goes on to offer several panels of black squares, acknowledging the loss of famous people, those whose lives taken made news for their injustice, and for victims of the Pulse Nightclub Massacre, as well as a couple personal losses from Potter’s family. “And so,” he closes, “as we’ve endured so many black panels this year, it’s worth noting that, in comics, all panels, black or otherwise, are given meaning by the panels that surround them. And how we choose to fill those panels, as artists and patrons, comprises the politics with which we envision humanity.”

Executive Editor Jim Hicks opens the newest issue of The Massachusetts Review: The Music Issue with this from his introduction: “For this particular quarterly, given that ‘public affairs’ is the kicker to our moniker, the first reaction of readers might well be, ‘Why?’ Certainly if you think of music as entertainment, as remedy or therapy, you might not see such a theme as urgent. And yet what social movement, what new political formation, hasn’t had its unforgettable soundtrack? Where, after all, do those in the struggle find the force and inspiration to keep moving forward, to get up, stand up, in this world full of tunnels and only occasional light? What brings them together, what lifts their voices, what beats the drum?”

The front cover features “The Music Issue, 2016” created for The Massachusetts Review  by Bianca Stone, and a full list of contributors with access to some of the works can be found here.

Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction January 2017 features three new craft essays: “The Essay and the Art of Equivocation” in which Brandon R. Schrand [pictured] considers our ability to equivocate artfully in the essay; “Truth & Delight: Resisting the Seduction of Surfaces” in which Peter Selgin examines the need to resist total seduction by sounds and surfaces; and  “Beyond ‘Craft for Craft’s Sake’: Nonfiction and Social Justice” with Rachel Tolliver and M. Sausun discussing nonfiction and social justice in the new political era. Brevity’s full content can be read online.

The fall 2016 issue of Seneca Review is a book of poems, Deborah Tall’s final collection, Afterings. “It is a remarkable volume by a poet and nonfiction writer at the peak of her powers. Eavan Boland has called it ‘an essential collection,’ and Mary Ruefle says the poems have ‘not what is to be expected – hints of cessation – but an overwhelming sense of blossoming.'” Deborah Tall edited Seneca Review  for twenty-five years, until 2006. This winter, Seneca Review  will include a copy of Deborah Tall’s final book of nonfiction, A Family of Strangers, with any new subscription to the journal.

In its regular “Rediscoveries” section, the newest issue of Middlebury’s New England Review (v37 n4) features “Two City Sketches” by Charles Dickens. Editor at Large Stephen Donadio provides an introduction, noting that after the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, “there was indeed popular demand for a second selection of sketches. . . The complete collection of some fifty-six pieces came out in 1839, by which time Dickens’s commanding presence on the scene had been securely established. In that 1839 volume, the pieces are grouped in four categories: ‘Seven Sketches from Our Parish,’ ‘Scenes,’ ‘Characters,’ and ‘Tales.’ The two city sketches presented here are the first two included under ‘Scenes’; they are taken from the illustrated Sketches by Boz in the Standard Library Edition of Dickens’s Complete Writings published in thirty-two volumes by Houghton Mifflin & Company (Boston and New York) in 1894.” NER  treats readers to several selections from its current print issue to read online, including these sketches by Dickens.

Editor Nathaniel Perry [pictured] of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review considers in the Winter 2016 Editor’s Note “that poetry is both a serious lifeblood and something seriously fun.” And further questions, “. . .how many poets are still willing to admint that it’s the fun of poetry that maybe primarily attracts us to the art? . . . why must we always take ourselves so seriously? What’s wrong with an occaion for poetry?” And so, Perry set out to creat both the occasion and the invitation to have fun. “I thought if an issue of the magazine could empahsize the fun of the moment, the pleasure in working out draft – it might be a tonic kind of enterprise and, who knows, soemtimes something bigger happens anyhow. In that spirit, this year’s issue was commissioned specifically for the magazine. Writers, both solicited and unsolicited, were told they could write on one of five themes – A Walk, Silence, Water, Frames and Containers. Each poet only had an hour to compose a poem . . . and ‘sonnet,’ formally, could be in interpreted in whatever way was useful to the writer.”

The contributions fill this annual issue of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, including A.E. Stallings. Stephen Dunn, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Mira Rosenthal, Bob Perelman, Katrina Vandenberg, Jon Pineda, Laynie Browne, Rob Shapiro, Eamon Grennan, and many more.

It may not seem that far a stretch for a literary journal published at Mississippi Valley State College to theme an issue on the Mississippi Delta, but indeed, since its inauguration in 2000, Valley Voices has been a publication renown for presenting a global perspective of thought and voice. Past issues have focused on New York School and Diaspora, Michael Anania, Perspectives on African American Literature, Poetic Translation in a Global Context, and issues on southern writers. So, indeed, it is a ‘special issue’ of Valley Voices when the content is fully dedicated to the Mississippi Delta. Editor John Zheng writes in his introduction to issue 16.2, “The Mississippi Delta isn’t a region where tourists can easily seek out natural beauty as they do in Yellowstone or in the Smoky Mountains; its beauty remains to be discovered with a little exploration. . . . We run this special issue for literary or artistic expression, for doumenting the region, for people deeply rooted here or having moved elsewhere. It is hopeful that these voices, literary or visual, will tell interesting stories.” See a full list of the issue’s content here.

Arroyo Literary Review recently announced an exciting addition to their website. A new Excerpts page has arrived with selections from past issues now available as PDFs, and with more on the way. Read six pieces from the current Spring 2016 issue, or travel back in time a few years for Pushcart Prize nominees and other noteworthy work. Writers considering submitting to the magazine can now get an idea of what the editors are looking for without a physical copy. There’s a lot there to keep both readers and writers busy as more winter weather rolls in.

“Why our continuing attraction to Greece?” writes Keith Taylor in his introduction to the newest issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. “There is something in that small country out there on the edge of Europe that doesn’t feel like the rest of the continent. Part of the attraction is certainly to the very different modern history, and to a landscape shaped by human use yet still oddly wild. . . . And, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, we continue to be drawn to Greece by the weight and presence of the classical tradition. We have tried to expand our canon and assume the influence of other traditions, but whether we like it or not, Western ideas continue to reflect the ideas first thought on those dry hills.”

Michigan Quarterly Review Fall 2016 presents Returning to Greece: A special section of poetry on Greece with work by Lauren K. Alleyne, Christopher Bakken, Natalie Bakopoulos, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, and Allison Wilkins.

With its Fall 2016 issue, The Wallace Stevens Journal celebrates 40 years of publishing scholarly articles, poems, book reviews, news, and bibliographies. In his Editor’s Column, “The Wallace Stevens Journal in the Age of Electronic Reproduction,” Eeckhout is able to quantify the popularity, and correlating usefulness, of the journal being made accessible via Project Muse five years ago. Sifting through massive amounts of data, Eeckhout is able to distill numerous points of meaning and their impact on the journal’s continuing success. What works have been most downloaded, from which institutions – and finding among the names Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and North Hennepin Community College, which are the top-most universities downloading, the popularity of specific issues (often themed), full-issue download vs. table of contents only, and more. Eeckhout comments on the how this data provides insight into, not only the world’s continued interest in Stevens’s work, but in the impact of The Wallace Stevens Journal in providing a place for a community of like-minded people to share their interests, explore them, and perhaps discover them for the first time. Four decades of worthwile effort we hope to see continued long into the future.

With their Winter/Spring 2017 issue, Gulf Coast celebrates its 30th anniversary. “Preparing for this milesone issue,” write the editors, “we too tracked the past, interviewing Phillip Lopate and exploring the works of Donal Barthleme. We lingered over Barthelme’s collage. They are inventive and uncanny, encouraging you to look closer and see differently. In that spirit, Digital Editor, Michele Nereim, embarked on the project of creating the small art-pieces featured throuhout this issue, scouring the Library of Congress digital archives, combining and refashioning old images so they might say something new, connect to now. Like how the wedding of unfamiliar words can forge new ideas. Or bring to light what’s already there.” Readers can enjoy these contributions along with a full content of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews – including a Q&A with Phillip Lopate – and the section “Art Lies: Art & Critical Art Writing.”

Beginning January 2017, you will no longer see the familiar blue cover of The Sewanee Review on your bookstore or library shelves or in the mail. The fall 2016 issue features an Homage to George Core [pictured], editor of The Sewanee Review since 1973, overseeing the continuation of one of the longest-continuously published periodicals in the United States – dating back to 1892. Robert Benson offers an introduction to the selection of essays and notes in honor of Core’s retirement, with contributing authors including Dawn Potter, Floyd Skloot, Donald Hall, Jayanta Mahapatra, Sam Pickering, Wendell Berry, B. H. Fairchild, Kathryn Starbuck, Gladys Swan, and many more.

Author Adam Ross has assumed editorial responsibility for the publication and plans to roll out a number of changes beginning in 2017. These include moving away from the traditional blue-covered publication to a cover that will vary with each issue, photo content inside the publication, and more online content for subscribers and purchasers to supplement the print copy. The staff has also expanded from three to five, and submissions are now being accepted online via Submittable.

Readers can most certainly depend upon the quality of the publication to remain high end, with content enhanced from contributors with Sewanee connections – both graduates and writers affiliated with the School of Letters and Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

New from Creative Nonfiction is the monthly True Story, a pocket-sized (4.25×6.75) paperback featuring one long-from essay. Spotlighting one author per month, CNF aims to provide readers the widest possible variety of styles and content in their selections. Steven Kurutz’s Fruitland headlined Issue 1 (39pp; read excerpt here), and just out, Issue 2 delivers Steven Church’s Trip to the Zoo (25pp; read excerpt here). Available in one- and two-year subscriptions, this is a great holiday gift idea for the readers and writers on your list!

November 2016 Poetry Magazine features works from the 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows: Kaveh Akbar, Jos Charles, Angel Nafis, Alison C. Rollins, and Javier Zamora [as pictured]. The Poetry Magazine website includes the full content from the publication, in addition to recordings of several of the Fellows reading their works. The Poetry Foundation selects five poets between the ages of 21 and 31 years annually for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows, each of whom receives $25,800 to support their further pursuits in writing. Read more about each of the Fellows here.

The November-December 2016 issue of World Literature Today is dedicated “cover to cover” to women writers.

Managing Editor Michelle Johnson [pictured] writes in the Editor’s Note: “. . . several months ago [the editors at WLT] decided to dedicate the November 2016 issue exclusively to women writers—and women reviewing women writers. The editorial team briefly considered creating such an issue without comment—as if WLT existed in a utopia of parity where all writers in a literary magazine might just happen to be women. But in 2016, giving women the whole issue is still noteworthy even for a magazine like WLT with a strong track record of publishing women writers.”

The collection opens with Alison Anderson’s “Of Gatekeepers and Bedtime Stories: The Ongoing Struggle to Make Women’s Voices Heard,” part of The Puterbaugh Essay Series. See a full list of contents here.

The Louisville Review celebrates 40 years of continuous publishing with its Fall 2016 issue. In her Editor’s Note, Sena Jeter Naslund writes, “When I first held the newborn literary magazine in my hands, with great joy and satisfaction in 1976, and placed it alone, upright and wobbly on my office shelf, I thought, Someday there will be a whole row of this journal. That vision has come true, thanks to the initial support of the University of Louisville, the diligence of Karen J. Mann and myself in fundraising and cost-cutting, and to the generous continuing support of both the magazine and our Fleur-de-Lis Press by Spalding University. I thank these institutions, and Karen, the writers who have contributed their work to these eighty issues, and the enthusiastic readers over the last forty years.” Thank you TLR and congratulations!

The newest issue of The Bitter Oleander: A magazine of contemporary international poetry and short fiction, features an interview with and a selection of poetry from Katherine Sánchez Espano.

Espano received her MFA from the University of Florida and has taught English and creative writing classes at several colleges. Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Green Mountains Review, The Bitter Oleander, Sycamore Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others. Her work has also been included in the American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America anthologies. In 2015, she published her first book of poetry, The Sky’s Dustbin, the winner of the 2014 Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award.

She is also a poet with the We Are You Project, an international organization “created to inform, enlighten, stimulate, and educate the public on the many facets and realities of Latino identity as it emerged over the past four centuries and continues to evolve in this, the 21st Century” through art exhibits, documentaries, poetry, lectures, and seminars.

Read an excerpt from the interview and one of her poems here.

Crossing Through the Present: German Poetry in Translation is a special section in the current issue of Middlebury College’s New England Review (v37 n3). “The selection of writing from Germany assembled here,” writes Carolyn Kuebler, “came about as the result of both intention and accident—NER ’s ongoing intention to offer an inspiring, provocative range of literary voices, and the happy accident of our own Ellen Hinsey’s living for a time in Berlin. While there, Ellen read a particularly intriguing essay about poetry, notebook-keeping, and Hannah Arendt, and she suggested it would be worth translating for NER. . . She also met the essay’s author, the writer Marie Luise Knott, who offered to share her familiarity with the scene to help us choose a selection of new German poetry. Add to that a call for submissions, a series of meetings in Berlin cafés, and several time-zone-jumping phone calls, and the result is that this issue contains not only a multitude of voices from the English-speaking world, as always, but also a multitude of voices from the German-speaking world. They meet here in our pages.”

Two works, “Zakid’s Delicatessen, Bremen” by Peter Waterhouse (trans. Iain Galbraith) and “on classification in language, a feeble reader” by Uljana Wolf (trans. Sophie Seita), are available to read on the NER website along with Kuebler’s Editor’s Note for this issue.

“Nobody wants to feel everything, just as nobody wants to read work by a writer who is emotionally incontinent. In real life, I may be strung out on anxiety, or aching from bad news, or jubilant, or missing someone I love. However, I know that my job is not to directly transmit those emotions to the reader. My job is to live my life, feel my feelings, and then learn to translate what I’m feeling without making it about me.”

From “Emotion is Not Plot: Using Detachment to Create Powerful Fiction” a craft essay by Claire Rudy Foster in the online journal Cleaver Magazine.

Issue 53 Fall 2016 of Brevity is a special issue on Race, Racism, and Racialization and includes such essays and authors as “Black in Middle America” by Roxanne Gay, “A Pop Quiz for White Women Who Think Black Women Should Be Nicer to Them in Conversations about Race” by Deesha Philyaw, “How to Discuss Race as a White Person” by Samuel Stokley, “Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps” by Sejal Shah, “How to Erase an Arab” by Julie Hakim Azzam, and “Mexican Americans and American Mexicans: An Etymology” by Sarah A. Chavez.

The online journal also includes guest editors for this issue Joy Castro and Ira Sukrungruang in conversation with one another about “what they hoped for and what they learned” in putting this issue together, as well as the accompanying craft essay “Three Commandments for Writing About Race” by Xu Xi [pictured].

3Elements Review is an online quarterly literary journal publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography. Unique to this publication, submissions for each issue must include the three elements the publishers post in advance. Past issue elements include: labyrinth, trace, reflex; measure, cleaver, silver; mania, tower, exposure.

The most recent issue (Fall 2016 #12) features the elements passageway, relic, kiss. “When we first chose the elements for this issue . . .” write the editors, “we worried that this specific trio of words would be a bit too leading. Would we get dozens of submissions about alluring, illicit affairs, kisses stolen along the shadowy hallways of castles and cathedrals? As it turned out – the answer was no. This issue is filled with writers and artists who surprised us, who made us see and consider the elements in ways we never had before, and we are honored to be able to share their work with you all.”

The elements for Issue 13 are THREAD, GLAZE, MURMUR with a submission deadline of October 31.

Able Muse has announced that Nicole Caruso Garcia has joined their staff as Assistant Poetry Editor, replacing the departing Richard Meyer. Nicole Caruso Garcia was born grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, earned her B.A. in English from Fairfield University, and an M.S. in Education from University of Bridgeport. She was a 2006 Summer Institute Fellow of the Connecticut Writing Project and currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Trumbull High School in Connecticut. Her poetry has appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Willow Review, The Raintown Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Soundings East, The Ledge, Poetry Midwest, and Small Pond Magazine of Literature, and she received the Spring 2010 Willow Review Award. But, to show her ability to flex poetic styles, while she tends toward formalist poetry, “her rapping alter ego, Capital G, often visits to bust a rhyme for her students.” We at NewPages can dig it.

Continuing an annual tradition started three years ago, Creative Nonfiction presented a list of topics to its newsletter subscribers and social media followers and had them vote for the ones they liked best. “Mistakes” was the first issue (#53), followed the next year by “Waiting” (#56), and now, for 2016, “Childhood” (#60), with the subtitle: “It’s not all fun and games.” Each Readers’ Choice issue also includes a Best Essay contest. Readers can access on the CNF website the winning essay, “The Walk Home” by Judith Barrington, and an interview with Barrington; “Before We’re Writers, We’re Readers” by Randon Billings Noble – 15 nonfiction authors on the true (or mostly true) stories they read as kids; Lee Gutkind’s introduction; and two additional pieces: “I Survived the Blizzard of ’79” by Beth Ann Fennelly and “Writing Motherhood” by Marcelle Soviero.

Copper Nickel, the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver, features several Translation Folios in each issue, spotlighting the works of several writers in translation. The Fall 2016 (#23) issue includes five poems by Jerzy Ficowski introduced and translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, three prose poems by Shoba introduced and translated by Paula Gordon, and four poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski introduced and translated by Piotr Gwiazda.

The Antioch Review, “one of the oldest, continuously publishing literary magazines in America,” celebrates 75 year of publishing fiction, essays, and poetry from both emerging as well as established authors. The celebration begins with the Summer 2016 issue, Part I, with a selection of “firsts” and a few “favorites” from the 40s – 60s. Editor Robert S. Fogarty includes the first poem and first story published in the journal, as well as the “most downloaded” essay which was first published in 1943.

Also shared within this historical collection is the “Preamble and Statement of Principles” collectively written by The Association of Literary Magazines of America when those 19 magazine organizers first met in 1961. It begins: “Resolved, that we form an association, the purpose of which is to increase the usefulness and the prestige of the literary magazines in the United States and Canada,” and later makes the following statement that still rings true today: “A nation’s body of literature does not depend wholly on a the great, and since the magazines have served as a seedbed for each generation of creative writers they have also helped to preserve the very impulse to literary creation. The literary magazines of the present generation are continuing this indispensable tradition.”

The American Poetry Review provides readers a glimpse inside their bi-monthly publication by providing featured works of poetry on their website. From the September/October 2016 issue, readers can enjoy works by Marie Howe, Afaa Michael Weaver, Nicole Steinberg, Jane Wong, Carlos Pintado, and Beth Ann Fennelly. Available in the print edition is the full content, which includes Michael Dowdy’s commentary “Reading Latina/o Poetry in the Summer of Trump” and Edward Hirsch’s “What is the Task?” – a version of an essay which appears as the introduction to The Best American Poetry 2016.

“On Writing” is a series of guest posts written by writers for the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter, curated by Rob McLennan. On Writing #107 features former NewPager and poet Gina Myers. Entitled “Is there room in the room that you room in?,” borrowed from the opening sonnet in Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, Myers explores the concepts of community and inclusivity as place in poetry. Read the full post here.

The annual print issue of Baltimore Review allows readers to catch up on a full year of reading in one volume. The 2016 print issue includes poems, stories, and creative nonfiction from the Summer 2015, Fall 2015, Winter 2016, and Spring 2016 online issues, as well as contest winners for the Summer 2015 and Winter 2016 issues.

In addition to work by 17 poets that opens the issue, Rattle #53 features a Tribute to Adjuncts. The editors write, “Over 65% of U.S. college faculty now work as adjuncts, facing low wages, limited hours, and high instability. We wanted to highlight their writing, while also showing support for recent efforts at gaining better treatment by the university system. As always, the goal was to show the wide range of creative work that the featured group is producing, so while many poems address their careers, others cover a variety of subjects. All of them share their thoughts on adjuncting in the contributor notes section.”

Every one of us who teaches in higher ed should buy copies of this issue to give to our dean, provost, vice president, president. board of trustees – whomever is responsible for the decision-making that retains, and continues to increase, these miserable working conditions for adjunct faculty. Perhaps better still, assign this issue in your classes, have students read it; the real change will need to come from dissatisfied “customers.” If they are outraged about egregious labor practices and refuse to buy their products from certain companies, they should be as equally outraged about the education for which they are paying a premium price to support an oppressed working majority. [Rattle cover artist Allison Merriweather]

TriQuarterly, taking full advantage of its online format, several years ago began featuring video essays in each issue. The editors commented that it was “an emerging form Marilyn Freeman described as ‘the mixed-breed love child of poetry, creative nonfiction, art house indies, documentary, and experimental media art.’ At its core the video essay is, like its print counterpart, an attempt to figure something out.” The most recent issue of TriQuarterly features video essays by Ander Monson, Blair Braverman, and Heather Hall.

The newest issue of New Orleans Review is a special tribute to Shakespeare. According to Guest Editor Hillary Eklund, “The primary motivation for this issue is that 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, and we wanted to commemorate that by looking at Shakespeare’s 21st century literary afterlives.”

The original call for submissions was: “Four centuries after William Shakespeare’s death, his name ennobles a variety of cultural institutions, from libraries and endowed chairs to summer camps and rubber duckies. Even as these structures—both lofty and lowly—rise and fall, we bear witness to the greatest power Shakespeare described: that of poetry itself to preserve without rigidity, to endure without sameness, and to inspire without dominance. Beyond the array of institutions that bear his name, what conversations do Shakespeare’s eternal lines animate now?”

“We welcomed submissions that riff on, respond to, reimagine, or recast any of Shakespeare’s works in any genre,” says Eklund, “including short fiction, poetry, image/text collections, creative nonfiction, and scholarship. The response was great. We had submissions from poets, fiction writers, essayists, and scholars. We especially relished the opportunity to put creative work in direct conversation with scholarly work; few journals have the license to do that, and the result is, I think, quite exciting.”

Eklund herself is a scholar of early modern literature and Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. She has published articles and chapters in Shakespeare Studies and in essay collections on early modern literature. Her book Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies came out in 2015 with Ashgate Press, and she has a collection of essays, Groundwork: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, forthcoming from Duquesne University Press.

When I asked about the experience of editing this issue, Eklund responded: “The experience has helped me to focus the chatter around Shakespeare, who this year more than ever seems to be everywhere, and I hope it will have a similar effect on our readers. As we take stock of the many commemorations and celebrations of Shakespeare in 2016, the pieces in this issue help us think through the question of what we gain from Shakespeare today – what, if anything, reading or thinking about Shakespeare is good for. Some of our contributors have taken up Shakespeare’s enduring themes and respun them in modern contexts. Others have used contemporary contexts to rethink some of the problems Shakespeare’s work presents, particularly problems of gender and race.”

In his Welcome Readers Summer 2016 column, Editor M. Scott Douglass begins, “It may have gone unnoticed since we didn’t make a fuss about it, but The Main Street Rag recently experienced a milestone.” Having started in May of 1996, that milestone is 20 continuous years of publishing MSR, beginning as Main Street Rag Poetry Journal. “We’ve gone through many changes,” Douglass writes, “taken advice from notable people like Dana Gioia who advised me to diversify our content and broaden our audience. We did and it did. So did the workload.”

Douglass comments on the efforts of many committed individuals who have supported the publication through the years – with blood, sweat and tears, and “who work specific projects for cheap, sometimes for beer and/or Chinese food.” Sounds like literary publishing as we know it. But Douglass has built quite a publishing house, producing “as many as 200 titles in a single year, but now averages between 100 and 120 titles per year, when you include our titles, this literary magazine and those we produce for others, and the books we produce as a contractor.”

I’m sure there are hundreds of individuals, if not in the thousands by now, who owe some thanks to The Main Street Rag for having given them the opportunity to be published and read, and certainly in those thousands, those who have appreciated being able to read from this publishing house over the past 20 year. MSR has been a mainstay in the literary community. We congratulate them on two great decades of dedication and commitment to literary publishing, and wish them many, many more years of good work.

The Summer 2016 issue of The Georgia Review includes a special feature on Coleman Barks. In addition to an introduction by Editor Stephen Corey, the section includes several poems and a prose piece by Barks. The prose, an essay titled “Figures from My Boyhood,” begins, “Steve Corey asked me to do a prose piece (on my influences, he suggested) for The Georgia Review. But I seem to have more energy for childhood obsessions. Sorry to be so self-absorbed.” Exactly what we would expect from Barks.

Other authors whose works in tribute to Barks are included: Ty Sassaman, Hugh Ruppersburg, Jody Kennedy, Ravi Shankar, John Yow, Norman Minnick, Gulnaz Saiyed, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lisa Starr, and Gordon Johnston. Several of the works, including one of Barks poems, can be read online here.

The newest issue of New Letters (v82 nos 3 & 4) includes a special section of Cuban & Cuban-American Writers & Artists co-edited with Mia Leonin, author of Braid (Anhinga Press) and Unraveling the Bed (Anhinga Press), and a memoir Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). Leonin currently teaches creative writing at University of Miami. The introductory note by Editor Robert Stewart reads:

“Humans don’t wait for revolution or democracy in order to live their lives,” says Mia Leonin…Her point underscores both the force of literature and art, and the hope found there. The impulses to generalize about certain groups, to categorize and perhaps condemn–to indulge in the quality of discourse imposed on us by many critics and politicians–find their antidote in literature. “The poems, stories, and essays in these pages,” Leonin continues, “remind us that Cuba is not an idea or ideology, a photo op or a news line. Likewise, its diaspora is neither offshoot nor derivative. Whatever its temporality, literature is the present moment unfolding, and these writers carve out each moment with authenticity and vision.”

Authors and artists whose works are featured: Chantel Acevedo, Alfredo Zaldivar, Ruth Behar, Lisiette Alonso, Cristina Garcia (“Berliners Who, two stories” can be read here), Orlando Ricardo Menes, Ana Menendez, Laura Ruiz Montes, Pablo Medina.

Valley Voices Spring 2015 is a special issue on Michael Anania, guest edited by Michael Antonucci and Garin Cycholl, who write, “Anania’s space is the river, the imagined city – a Chicago of relentless modernity, one capable of reinventing itself and making itself for sale again and again as the waters rise and fall. From here, the poet observes and reflects on this Chicago on the make – a sprawl of fresh water and wind, candy and steel.”

Featured in the volume is an interview with Anania as well as several of his poems. Also included are essays on Anania’s work: “Modernist Current: Michael Anania’s Poetry of the Western Rivers” by Robert Archambeau; “‘Out of Dazzlement’…Chiaroscuro Revisited” by Peter Michaelson; “‘Energy Held in Elegant Control’: Vortex Anania” by Lachlan Murray; “Another Italian-American Poet in Omaha: Italy in Michael Anania’s Poetry” by William Allegrezza; “Michael Anania’s The Red Menace: A Study in Self-Production” by David Ray Vance; “‘Like Hands Raised in Song’: Proper Names in Michael Anania’s ‘Steal Away'” by Lea Graham; “On Michael Anania’s In Natural Light” by Reginald Gibbons as well as several more.

“This collection of essays and original work,” the editors write, “offers a set of moments in lands (and waters) surveyed by Anania. That land pretends a relentless modernity – one that Anania has evidenced for readers, colleagues, and other artists page by page, line by line. Charles Olson argued that the poet either rides on or digs into the land. This collection of essays and Anania’s writings attest that he has done both.”

Well, this is a first for me in all the years I’ve been working with literary magazines. The July/August 2016 cover of Poetry is a special treat for those who can access the print version. Artist Chris Hefner has created a glow-in-the-dark moon to celebrate the “moon poems” by Federico García Lorca, translated by Sarah Arvio. The issue features “Two Evening Moons,” “Of the Dark Doves,” and “Ballad of the Moon Moon.” Read more about the translations as well as a statement from the artist about his work and several other images from his collection here.

Issue #97 of Brick, writes Publisher Nadia Szilvassy, if it had a theme, would be “bittersweet,” as it pays tribute to the life and work of two of the magazines “longtime contributors and dear friends, C. D. Wright and Jim Harrison.” The issue is also the last for Szilvassy as publisher. After over nine years with the magazine, she leaves Editor Laurie D. Graham, Managing Editor Liz Johnston and Designer Mark Byk to steer the publication. “You will…” Szilvassy promises, “find yourselves newly inspiried and delighted.” Farewell Nadia. Our best to you.