Subscriber News: May 2021
Recent Honors
Congratulations to Modou Lamin Age-Almusaf Sowe. His third poetry collection, AfriKa Not AfriCa, was released in April by Ukiyoto Publishing. These poems deal with life in Gambia under dictatorship and democracy. The author descibes them as "poems about Africa and their deep-rooted culture, their nature, rich resources, and rich vegetation, and how indeed, they are a blessed race."
Congratulations to Threa Almontaser. Her debut poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen, won the 2020 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published this month by Graywolf Press. The most recent submission period for this $5,000 prize was September 16-November 16. Read a profile of her in the March/April 2021 issue of Poets & Writers, and Joshua Bartlett's review of her book in Ploughshares. Her poem "Catasterism", first published in The Nation and mentioned in the P&W article, won an honorable mention in our 2020 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest.
Congratulations to Alicia Doyle. Her memoir Fighting Chance won the Best Autobiographical Book category in the 2021 Best of Los Angeles Awards. This book by a journalist who became a championship boxer was our 2020 North Street Book Prize Creative Nonfiction category winner.
Congratulations to Mike Tuohy and Annie Dawid. His story "Pingo Peril" and her essay "Danse Sacrée, Danse Profane" were finalists for LitMag's 2021 Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction. The most recent deadline for this contest, offering prizes up to $1,250 and literary agent review, was November 30. Annie's piece is included in her new essay collection, Put Off My Sackcloth (The Humble Essayist Press, 2021).
Congratulations to Steven Mayfield. His novel Treasure of the Blue Whale (Regal House Publishing, 2020) was a finalist for the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES (winner TBA June 2021), and a semi-finalist for the Chanticleer Mark Twain Award. It was previously an NIEA Finalist, a runner-up in the Hollywood Book Festival, one of Shelf Unbound's 100 Notables of 2020, and a Book Excellence Awards Finalist. From the book blurb: "In this whimsical, often funny, Depression-era tale, young Connor O’Halloran decides to share a treasure he’s discovered on an isolated stretch of Northern California beach. Almost overnight, his sleepy seaside village is comically transformed into a bastion of consumerism." Steven's next novel, Delphic Oracle U.S.A., will be published by Regal House in 2022. Read about him on the publisher's website.
Recent Publications
Winning Writers Editor Jendi Reiter's prose-poem "Tired of My Own Vagina" will be published in the Spring 2021 issue of Quarter After Eight. Their poem "White Season" was a semifinalist in the Knightville Poetry Contest and will be published in The New Guard, Vol. X.
Winning Writers contest judge Ellen LaFleche was interviewed in April in Chris Rice Cooper's blog series "Backstory of the Poem". Ellen talked about her poem "Prayer for Weeping", which was inspired by her husband's death from ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). The piece is included in her most recent collection, Walking into Lightning (Saddle Road Press, 2019).
Armen Davoudian was interviewed in April by editor Susan Glass on the Slate Roof Press blog about his poem "Ararat", co-winner of the 2019 Slate Roof Glass Poetry Broadside Prize. A poet of Armenian ethnicity who grew up in Iran, Armen says of the inspiration for this poem: "Ararat is traditionally seen as the place where Noah's ark landed. I've always been interested in that story and the story of the flood as a kind of allegory for immigration. We leave one world behind, and wash up on the shores of a new world." Discover more of his work in his chapbook Swan Song (Bull City Press), which won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Zoë Pollak reviewed Swan Song in April at AGNI Online: "From beginning to end, Swan Song revels in the tension between union and departure...Its poems limn the distance between loved ones and conjure the child’s incommunicable reality with striking immediacy."
Antoinette Carone's story "The Lady of the Green Scarf" was published in The Thieving Magpie.
Robin Schwarz's poetry appeared in Oberon Poetry Magazine, #18 (2020).
Erika Dreifus will be taking part in an online reading on Thursday, May 20, at 7:00 pm Eastern time, celebrating the anthology 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, hosted by Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia. Poet Matthew Lippman says of her poetry collection Birthright (Kelsay Books, 2019): "Every time I come back to Birthright I am born again out of the little pieces in me that have died. This is the magic of Erika Dreifus's poems. They are the flame in the darkness of Deuteronomy." Watch a video of Erika reading with poets Erika Meitner, Alicia Ostriker, and Alicia Jo Rabins at the Women's League for Conservative Judaism in March 2021.
Duane L. Herrmann has several poetry publications to report from January and February. Six poems were published in Hawai'i Review, Issue 91. "I Didn't Know" and "Wanting to Be Dead" appeared in Iris Literary Journal, Vol. 1, #4 (Winter 2020). A selection of micro-poems and flash prose appeared at I Write Her and was reblogged at The Reluctant Poet. "Miles of Miles" was published in Just Place. Six poems were included in the print anthology To The Newspaper Again, from Poet's Choice (Mumbai, India). Two more poems were published in the first issue of the 2021 Quarterly of the Topeka Genealogical Society.
Susan Stinson's essay "Body in the Mirror" was published in the Craft Capsules weekly column in Poets & Writers. In it she discusses the revelatory power of writing about her own body as a fat woman. Susan's most recent book is the novel Martha Moody, reissued in a 25th anniversary edition by Small Beer Press.
The Poet Spiel's poems "Oiler", "Socks", and "Toilet" were published in the Spring 2021 issue of Wicked Gay Ways.
Neil Perry Gordon published Cape Nome, the second volume in "The Alaskan Adventures of Percy Hope" series. In this historical adventure novel, a journalist from the San Francisco Examiner encounters colorful characters, including gunman Wyatt Earp and a sea monster, while reporting on the 1898 Gold Rush.
Published: May 8, 2021
