Subscriber News: August 2018
Recent Honors
Congratulations to J. Weintraub. Oxford University Press recently published his annotated translation of Eugène Briffault’s Paris à Table: 1846, the first English translation of what many consider a classic text in the history of gastronomy. So far it has received favorable reviews from Library Journal ("A fascinating book for readers interested in cultural, social, and food history") and Booklist (“A must-read for social- and cultural-history buffs, especially those with a keen interest in food and eating habits”), and was chosen by Bon Appétit as one of its "Eight Recommended Non-Cookbook Food Books for Summer Reading".
Congratulations to Judith Cody. Her poem “A Thousand Nights at the War Window” won second place in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, an arts outreach program of the National League of American Pen Women. She kindly shares it with us here. The next deadline for this contest, with prizes up to $100 in various poetry and prose categories, is November 30. Cody read her poem at the 2018 Awards Ceremony held in San Francisco. This poem is included in her award-winning manuscript, The Rumor. Cody's “Metamorphosis of the Conqueror” and related poems were selected as quarter-finalist for the 2018 Nimrod Literary Awards: Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. The most recent submission period for this $2,000 prize was January 1-April 30. This poem is included her manuscript Metamorphosis Notebooks. Visit this website for sample poems, performance videos, original music, and news about her books.
Congratulations to Judy Juanita. Her book Homage to the Black Arts Movement: A Handbook, illustrated by Rini Templeton, was published by EquiDistance Press in June. This multi-genre book pays tribute to the father of that historic literary protest movement, Amiri Baraka (1934-2014), through the writing of Judy Juanita, who encountered and emulated his work and activism when she was a twenty-year-old student at San Francisco State. In other news, Juanita, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, and Dr. Raina J. León were interviewed for the Solstice Lit Mag blog by Rochelle Spencer in a piece titled "Roundtable: Women Writers of the Bay". The interview asked women writers of color in the Bay Area of northern California about the role of art in creating social justice and personal transformation.
Congratulations to Alex Mohajer. His article "A Tale of Two Marches", originally published in the Huffington Post on March 16, 2017, won the 2018 National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association's Excellence in Journalism Award for Excellence in Feature Writing. The piece draws parallels between the Women's Marches protesting US President Donald Trump's election in 2017 and a large-scale protest by Iranian women in 1979 following the Islamic Revolution. Mohajer's publicist tells us, "Alex was inspired to pursue a career in journalism following the 2016 presidential election. This marks his first professional accolade as a journalist!" Find out more about him here.
Congratulations to Mary K. O'Melveny. Her poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age will be published September 7 by Finishing Line Press and is now available for pre-order. She kindly shares a sample poem here. Poet and writing professor Jan Zlotnick Schmidt says of this book: "O'Melveny's probing and evocative collection takes us on a journey through such experiences of 'women of a certain age' as aging, menopause, illness, loss, and social activism. The personae in the poems face life's diminishments with verve, vitality and humor." In other news, Mary's poem "The Sounds of Truth Vanishing" was shortlisted for the 2018 Fish Publishing Poetry Prize, judged by Ellen Bass. The most recent deadline for this contest, with a top prize of 1,000 euros, was March 31.
Congratulations to Ian M. Evans. His novel The Eye of Kuruman was published in 2017 by Vanguard Press. In this coming-of-age story, an Englishwoman travels to rural Botswana and South Africa to work as a public health nurse, and finds herself caught up in a love triangle and the challenges of remediating historic injustices. A recent 5-star review on Amazon says, "The author is also a very experienced and insightful psychologist and knows Africa firsthand from having grown up there...This unique background and his deep understanding of human nature and behavior enabled Evans to write a novel that is realistic, beautiful, and compelling both at a human personal and social level."
Congratulations to James K. Zimmerman. His poem "Fog on the 180 (Kings Canyon)" won the 2018 Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry from Reed Magazine. Submissions for this $1,000 prize are currently open through November 1. Final judge Ellen Bass commented: "Its language, with its repetitions and paradoxes, skillfully evokes the fog and captures the experience of seeing trees emerge from the mist. This well-chosen diction, along with the music of the lines, creates a feeling of mystery that matches its theme." In other news, his poem "Listen to the Deer Tick Sing" was chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser as the featured poem for the week of July 9 at American Life in Poetry. His poems "Midflight", "Strangers on a Train", "After We Deplane", and "Ten Minutes Before Boarding (Gate C7)" were published in Adelaide Magazine, an international online journal.
Congratulations to Ann Thompson. Her poem "Approaching Gria" won an honorable mention in the 2018 Fish Publishing Poetry Prize and was published in their annual anthology. Her prose poems "Greta, Gardening", "House of Spirits", and "Cross Town, by Train" won third prize in the 2018 Eastern Iowa Review Lyric Essay/Prose Poetry Contest and were published in print and online in Issue #6 (2018). The most recent deadline for this contest with prizes up to $100 was March 31. Ann's "Haiku for the Lost", a video-poem in collaboration with Marie Craven, appeared in Gnarled Oak, Issue #15. Her lyric essay "Roots and Myths" is forthcoming in October in Bacopa Literary Review, an annual print journal from the Writers Alliance of Gainesville.
Recent Publications
Tom Taylor/The Poet Spiel has released an illustrated retrospective of his artwork and writing, Revealing Self in Pictures and Words. Poet and novelist Stephanie Dickinson, the publisher of Rain Mountain Press, says of this book: "Spiel has given us his magnum opus, a revelatory memoir unlike any other, brimming with breathtaking textual and explosive visual images. A son of the Great Plains, a farm boy already a budding artist, a maverick, and gay, we feel the excruciating strictures of the closeted 1940s. Taylor allows us entry to his beautifully rendered inner agonies and mirror-dancing pleasures."
Tim Goldstone's poem "Trade" was the July Poem of the Month at Subsync Press. The editors said, "Here we are smack-dab in the dog days of summer; makes us inclined to lie in the sun and wrest poetry from our steaming stream of consciousness. For instance, our July Poem of the Month, Trade by Tim Goldstone, succeeds in creating a detailed, vibrant world—so real it's unreal. Kick back and enjoy." Follow Tim on Twitter at @muddygold.
Joan Kydd's fantasy novel Water Web, the first book of the Kyanda Trilogy, is available in e-book format from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. In this series, a princess journeying in search of her beloved must learn to cope with magical powers that a sorceress implanted in her without her knowledge.
James Kotsybar gave a poetry reading and lecture in July at the "Science Meets Poetry" session of the EuroScience Open Forum in Toulouse, France, the sister city to his hometown of Lompoc, California. Kotsybar represented NASA science in haiku, sonnets and villanelle, to 5,000 scientists and journalists from eighty countries. No stranger to NASA, Kotsybar has participated in anniversary celebrations of the Hubble Space Telescope, The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Centaur Upper Stage Rocket, but became the unofficial poet laureate of NASA in 2013, when their scientists chose his poem to launch aboard the MAVEN spacecraft to Mars. Visit his website, Bard of Mars, to learn more about his interdisciplinary work.
Anna Scotti's fiction piece "L.A. Winter", the opening to her novel manuscript of the same name, was published in January in Embark, an online journal that exclusively features the beginning pages of novels-in-progress. Visit Anna's website for more news of her prizes and publications.
Annie Dawid's short-short story "Alchemy" was published in Brilliant Flash Fiction #18 (June 2018). Her story "Something Like Pleasure" was published in The Casket of Fictional Delights, a British online journal.
Janet Garber's article "How to Take Care of Yourself When It's Your Job to Care for Others" was published in the July/August issue of Your Workplace, a Canadian magazine.
Terri Kirby Erickson's poem "My Cousin, Milton" was the featured poem for the week of July 16 at American Life in Poetry. The poem is included in her collection Becoming the Blue Heron (Press 53, 2017).
Ihar Kazak's poems "A Poet So Rare" and "An Elixir of Vitality" were included in Kindred, the 2018 anthology from Savant Books. Editor Gary "Doc" Krinberg calls the collection "a testament to inclusion—inclusion of thought, emotion, memory and aspiration by people across the horizon from each other, yet finding a common ground." Read the press release.
Fred Waiss's romantic thriller Just Lucky, Book 2: Love and Hate is available in paperback and on Amazon Kindle. Just Lucky, Book 1: Friends and Enemies was favorably reviewed at Red Headed Book Lover. The same reviewer called his earlier novel, Witchery, "an exceptional fantasy tale with a twist that bewitched me from the very beginning to the very end."
Konstantin Nicholas Rega's poem "Of The" was published in Storm Cellar, Vol. VII, No. 1 (Summer 2018). His poems "Inner Dark" and "Roots" were published in Pidgeonholes. His poems "A Girl Named", "What the River Took", and "What's New, What's Left" appeared in The Write Launch. Visit his blog for more poetry, artwork, and reviews.
Published: August 7, 2018
