Subscriber News: May 2020
Recent Honors
Congratulations to Carol Smallwood. Her new poetry collection Thread, Form, and Other Enclosures will be published by Main Street Rag in August and is now available for pre-order. She kindly shares a sample poem here.
Congratulations to Patricia Brody. Her poem "Blue Hour" won the adult category of the 2019 Mother's Milk Books Poetry Prize. Judges Ruth Aylett and Beth McDonough cited its "typographic inventiveness" and "sharp and quirky language". Read the winners here. The most recent deadline for this contest, with a top prize of 125 pounds, was January 31.
Congratulations to Linda Rosen. Her debut novel, The Disharmony of Silence, was released in March by Black Rose Writing. Read a sample and author interviews on her website. From the book blurb: "In her desperate quest for family, Carolyn Lee, fitness trainer and amateur photographer, is determined, against all advice, to reveal a shocking eighty-four-year-old secret that she has uncovered. It has the potential to tear lives apart, or to bring her the closeness and comfort she longs for."
Congratulations to Gregory Jeffers. His story "Quitting Time" won the 2019 Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition. This contest offers a top prize of $3,000 and publication for a story of 1,500 words maximum. The most recent deadline was January 13. See all deadlines for Writer's Digest contests here.
Congratulations to Mary K. O'Melveny. Her first full-length poetry collection, Merging Star Hypotheses, is now available from Finishing Line Press. A poem from this book, "Escape Velocity", was a finalist in our most recent Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest, placing in the top 25 of the 5,516 entries we received.
Congratulations to Cheryl J. Fish. Her poetry collection Crater & Tower was published this month by Duck Lake Books. The book is a poetic response to the deadliest volcano in US history, Mt. St. Helens, which erupted in May 1980, and the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. She kindly shares a sample poem here.
Congratulations to Janet Qually. She won the April haiku contest at FanStory and kindly shares her poem below (published on the site under the pen name "Spangle"). FanStory offers several themed writing contests with cash prizes each month, which are free to enter for paid members of the site.
wheelchair—
her struggle to lean over
and touch a rose
Recent Publications
Winning Writers Editor Jendi Reiter's poem "Ovotestes" was published in Solstice Lit Mag's National Poetry Month 2020 feature.
Jill C. Baker's novel Absent, the third book in the Sutherland series, is now available in print and e-book formats. Jill says, "This is a stand-alone book but character-connected to the others. To sample those, you can find Tory Roof under Historical Fiction on Reedsy Discovery, and can find Silver Line under Sci-Fi/Time Travel." Visit her website to learn more.
J.C. Todd's poem "where water has no skin" was published in Parks & Points.
Helen Leslie Sokolsky's poem "When We Had Orchards When We Had Moonbeams " was published in the Fall/Winter 2019-2020 Issue of The Aurorean, a journal from Encircle Publications, which nominated the poem for a Pushcart Prize.
Ken Boe's podcast "Getting Poetry in Bisbee" featured Arizona poets Ramzi Eid Masarweh and Meg Sowid-Porter.
Ellaraine Lockie's latest poetry chapbook, Sex and Other Slapsticks (Presa Press, 2019), was favorably reviewed by Sarah Bartlett in Mom Egg Review. Bartlett said Lockie "guide[s] us to the lighter side of awkwardness and pain with a piercing directness that will not allow us to lower our gaze...each poem contains its own universe of ignorance, revelation, desire or abandonment of norms, always with understated self-acceptance."
Published: May 7, 2020
