Bellingham Review Publishes Issue 76

The Bellingham Review announces the publication of the sixth issue under the editorship of S. Paola Antonetta, Issue 76, which includes two international sections of particular relevance. One, titled “Who Are These Assembled Nations?,” features new poems from Palestine, while the other, “Unbidden Stories,” contains fiction and poems from Israel. Issue 76 also has the winners of our 2017 annual literary contests, as well as a remarkable collection of stories, poems, essays, and hybrid work from US and international writers. The issue features the painting “Fort Mason” from Susan Bennerstrom, and we are thrilled to share it with you.

Marking the third of four Spring issues of the Bellingham Review which will feature a folio of international writing, Issue 76’s “Who Are These Assembled Nations?” contains work from three Palestinian poets, Sheikha Helawy, Najwan Darwish, and Anwar Al-Anwar. Our second international section for this issue, “Unbidden Stories” includes work from several Israeli writers, including 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. These two sections would not have been possible without the hard work of our international consultant, Liran Golod, who collaborated with S. Paola Antonetta to curate this remarkable work.

Also featured are the winners of our 2017 literary contests: Susan M. Stabile, John Blair, and Janis Hubschman.

Contest judge Robert Cording selected Blair’s poem, “The Art of Forgetting,” as the recipient of the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. Cording said of his experience with Blair’s work, “The reader feels the complicated generative emotion of the poem: the speaker’s sense of the complicated past and present the ‘you’ and the you’s ‘son’ find themselves lost in; and their hunger for the ‘definitive’ in a world of what-ifs and what-might-have-beens.”

Hubschman’s short story, “Escape Artist,” earned the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Contest judge John Dufresne remarked, “There’s a surprise in every paragraph, a juddering washing machine, gluey time, the suede belly of a dog, and the daughter’s body as rigid as an icepick. The writing is savvy, fearless, provocative, and quite beautiful. What talent, what nerve, what a marvelous story.”

Contest judge Julie Marie Wade said that Stabile’s essay, winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, “does what the best essays do: walks the reader through a series of narrative and contemplative moments, all hinged on a seemingly ordinary observation that—with repeated viewing and thoughtful probing—continues to reveal itself anew.”

You can subscribe to receive this and future issues at bhreview.org or on our Submittable page, at bhreview.submittable.com.

The Bellingham Review is the literary journal produced by Western Washington University’s MFA program. For more information about the multi-genre MFA program, click here.