We are excited to announce our 2023 judges: Susan Nguyen (Poetry), Sasha LaPointe (Creative Nonfiction), and Corinne Manning (Fiction)! Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press 2021) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems …
During the month of November 2022, we will be waiving Submittable fees for BIPOC folxs — send us your poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid writing. We can’t wait to read!
Congrats to current and former contributor Troy Osaki on being a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow! Read Troy’s new featured poem, “Martial Law Memorial.”
My lyric essay “Licked By Our World We Get Licked By Our World,” which you were kind enough to publish (Thanks again!), is the final essay in a series inspired by the four classical elements of Western antiquity: earth, wind, fire, and water. This is the water one. Previous essays revolve around occasions where I’ve eaten dirt, had a radon reduction tube installed in my house and set myself on fire. For this essay, I started my draft with times when I almost drowned.
Kristina Gorcheva-Newbery is a writer to watch out for. In her lyrical and harrowing debut story collection, What Isn’t Remembered, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry provides her readers with the most valuable opportunity in fiction: to empathize with strangers on the page.
I wanted to write a short story that followed Aristotle’s idea of the perfect tragic play: one place, one time, one action. There was a period of about a decade when I traveled frequently between Montreal and Kolkata, and often had long ‘addas’ — conversations — with family members, conversations that involved unresolved conflicts in sitting rooms.
This poem came to be during a workshop in the fall of 2020 with C.S. Giscombe. It was in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic, and the worst fire season I’d experienced living in northern California. Looking back, there was a desire to find fullness and sensuality in the mundane—and precarious—every day of living a life as it is.
What are my values as a poet, as a person, and how am I living those values out in the way I usher this book through its journey? For me, it came down to community. This book is a way to be in community with more humans around big questions and little questions, and just being human together.
When do I know when a moment is a poem? Or worth attempting to see if it’s a poem? For me, it’s a lot about discomfort. When is there a moment where there’s just an edge—there’s something that leaves me with that brow furrow, you know? Like how does that happen? How is that part of the human condition…why? Why, my seven and 10-year-old have been asking the whole time I’ve been lucky enough to be watching them be humans. The “why” is this brow furrow that starts the process and then over time, the sounds and the line breaks are what helps me figure out if this is a poem or if it’s just a journal entry and needs to just sit at my desk for a while.
