Subscriber News: April 2020
Recent Honors
Congratulations to Anna Scotti. Her debut Young Adult novel, Big and Bad, was published in March by Texas Review Press. The story follows a teenage girl with a difficult home life who finds purpose in rescuing a dog from a fighting ring.
Congratulations to J Brooke. Eir essay "Hybrid" was the nonfiction winner of Columbia Journal's Womxn's History Month Special Issue competition.
Congratulations to Julian Peters. His new book, Poems to See By (Plough Publishing House, 2020), collects 24 of his graphic-novel renditions of classic poems by Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Siegfried Sassoon, and others. Several of these pieces have been reprinted in the Winning Writers newsletter. Read an interview with him in the April 3 issue of Shelf Awareness, a newsletter for indie bookstores and publishers.
Congratulations to Regina Elliott. Her poem "Requiem for the Fishermen" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Poetrynook.
Congratulations to Gary Beck. His poetry collection Severance was recently released by Cyberwit. His novel Extreme Change is out this month from Winter Goose Publishing. From the book blurb: "A middle-class family flees the crime and poverty of Detroit for a fresh start in New York City. A fire leaves them homeless and they are forced into a public system that is a nightmare and broken."
Congratulations to Tony Zurlo, C. David Hay, and Kaye Abikhaled. They won first, second, and third prizes, respectively, in the 2019 "Light of the Stars" poetry contest co-sponsored by Lone Star Magazine and Conceit Magazine. Other winners were John A. Long, Christine Xu, and Margaret Worley. The current contest is open through October 31; top prize is 40% of fees collected, which amounted to $45 for the 2019 contest. Email Conceit editor Perry Terrell for complete guidelines.
Congratulations to Annie Dawid. Her story "The Closer You Were, The Less You Knew" won the 2019 Sequestrum Editors' Reprint Award, and was published online and in Issue 22 of the print magazine. Read the editors' interview with her here. Her story "Sacred and Profane Dances" was a semi-finalist for the London Independent Story Prize for first-quarter 2020. Read the story and interview on their website. See the quarterly deadlines for 2020 here.
Recent Publications
Winning Writers contest judge Ellen LaFleche was profiled in March on the website FromTheAuthors. Her interview with Christina Hamlett discusses her latest poetry collection, Walking Into Lightning (Saddle Road Press, 2019), and how her working-class background and scientific training influence her writing.
Winning Writers Editor Jendi Reiter's poem "Broken Family Couch" was published in Mom Egg Review in their themed poetry folio "Visions of Home".
Dean Kostos was interviewed by Larissa Shmailo about his memoir The Boy Who Listened to Paintings (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) at the Lambda Literary website in March. Topics included stopping mental health stigma, the influence of his poetry on his prose writing, and heteronormative family dynamics. The book is also currently a finalist in the LGBTQ Nonfiction category of the 2019 Foreword Indie Book Awards. Read another review by WW subscriber Michael McKeown Bondhus at Yes, Poetry.
Freddy Niagara Fonseca's poetry collection The Bomb That Blew Up God and Other Serious Poems is now available from 1st World Publishing. Visit his website for sample poems, videos, and ordering information. Freddy describes his book as "a modern fable about the age-old struggle between Good and Evil, told in a conversational, slightly humorous, yet serious tone showing God's eternal patience and mercy." His recording of "Tango in Buenos Aires" was recently accepted by accepted by Telepoem Booth Iowa. With exhibits around the US (see list of locations here), Telepoem Booth is a vintage phonebooth installation where you can dial in to hear a selection of 800+ poems.
Beverley Chalmers' history book Betrayed: Child Sex Abuse in the Holocaust is now available on Amazon. The study exposes how children were victimized, not only by the Nazis, but also by some of the allies who rescued and sheltered them.
LindaAnn LoSchiavo's erotic poetry collection Concupiscent Consumption (Red Ferret Press, 2020) was favorably reviewed in The Poet Magazine. Robin Barrat wrote: "Her book is titillating and undeniably arousing, and her well thought out words and perfectly structured composition stimulates both the mind and the body. However, there is nothing explicit in LindaAnn's book; she retains (in my opinion) a true sense of what erotica really is: sexual yet subtle, compelling yet intriguing, often witty, with perhaps even a sense of romance." The feature was accompanied by three poems from her collection. In other news, her speculative poetry collection A Route Obscure and Lonely (Wapshott Press, 2020) was favorably reviewed in the British SFF zine Neon. Book critic Krishna Coupland wrote: "This mash-up of the gothic and the modern, the grim and the gleeful, is especially delightful when paired with LoSchiavo’s written style. She eschews rhyme, but pays close attention to rhythm, with the end result that poems feel effortless, but flow off the page with surprising ease."
Iris Leona Marie Cross's first published story, "Crime has come to Penal!", will appear in the anthology The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns (Mango, forthcoming July 2020), edited by Mitzi Szereto. Her piece tells of a triple murder in Penal, a small town in rural Trinidad and Tobago. She found this opportunity in the Winning Writers newsletter. Read a review of the book in Publishers Weekly.
Suzanne S. Austin-Hill's poetry collection Sixty-Seven Pages from the Heart is available on Amazon.
Source: https://fonseca-poems.org/
Published: April 8, 2020
