Subscriber News: May 2022
Recent Honors
Congratulations to Mahnaz Badihian. Her poetry collection Ask the Wind was published by Vagabond in March. She kindly shares a sample poem here. Visit her website for samples of her poetry and artwork.
Congratulations to Antoinette Carone. Her debut novel, Hotel of the Siren, was recently published by Scantic Books. In this novel, a widow who suspects her artist husband of infidelity moves to Naples after his death, falling in love with a man who is secretly connected to the mystery woman in her late husband's life.
Congratulations to Annie Dawid. Her unpublished novel Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown won first prize in the 2022 Screencraft Cinematic Book Competition. The book follows four protagonists, among them Mrs. Jim Jones and the Guyanese ambassador to the United States, as they make their way in and out of Peoples Temple, circling around its leader, Jim Jones, over a period of forty years. Contest judge Glenn Williamson, a producer and co-head of UCLA's School of Film, called this manuscript "really compelling and a different take from what I thought I knew...very engaging, tragic and fascinating throughout."
Congratulations to Gary Beck. His poetry book Lacerations is available from Cyberwit. His poetry book State of the Union—American Sketches was recently released by Winter Goose Publishing. From the book blurb: "These poems examine the consequences of imperial overreach by a fading empire, once the policeman of the world, now trying to reconcile the loss of power and prestige, as influence wanes."
Congratulations to Patricia Brody. Her poem "Blue Hour" won first prize in the 2019 Mother's Milk Books Poetry Prize.
Congratulations to Janet Aalfs. Her new poetry collection What the Dead Want Me to Know was recently released by Human Error Publishing.
Recent Publications
Samantha Terrell's new poetry collection Simplicity, and Other Things We Overcomplicate is now available in print and e-book formats. Read about her invented poetic form, the Trinitas, on her website. An example of this form, the poem "Visual Broadcasting", was recently published at Fevers of the Mind.
Robert Walton's fiction collection Joaquín's Gold: And Other Tales of Old California is available on Amazon. Robert says, "Hidden gold, bloody bandits, vengeful miners, mad ghosts, shipwrecks, rattlesnakes—all these and more are to be found in my stories about Joaquín Murrieta. The individual stories have all been published separately over the past thirty years or so and several have won awards. They are now gathered together for the first time as both a Kindle e-book and a paperback." The real-life Murrieta was a legendary outlaw during the Gold Rush era, who robbed Anglo-Americans as payback for racist mistreatment of California's Mexican population.
Joshua Michael Stewart is creating YouTube videos of his poems. Watch "Yellow" here.
Robert Ronnow's collection Long As You're Living: Collected Poems 1972-2021 is available for PDF download from his website, as are several other books, poems, and jazz recordings.
Deborah DeNicola's book In the Light of the Dark Black Night: One Woman's Journey Through Creative Dream Imagework & Collective Culture is available on Amazon. Based on her personal experiences from Jungian workshops on dream interpretation, and her imaginative skills as a poet, DeNicola describes an intuitive technique for understanding these nocturnal messages from the mind.
J Brooke's essay "The Liar", a darkly humorous piece about working for an ad agency, was published in March at The Normal School.
Michael McKeown Bondhus's poems "Poem Riffing on Lines from Nicanor Parra" and "The first time a guy calls me by my chosen name in bed" were published in April in Diode Poetry Journal.
Sarah Kornfeld's narrative nonfiction book The True (Integral Publishers) was favorably reviewed in Rain Taxi by Ekua Agha, who wrote, "A contemporary reading into the interconnections between post-revolution Romania and the post-Trump U.S., Sarah Kornfeld's The True is an extraordinary satire of the corrupt economy engulfing the world...Beautifully fusing narrative nonfiction, true crime, memoir, and autofiction, The True presents Kornfeld's search for why her former lover, famed Romanian theater director Alexandru Darie, died suddenly; the book deftly invokes the world of theater by bringing the ghosts of theater artists into the haunting Kornfeld experiences. Yet The True also engages the complexities of a Romanian society that has lost its bearings after the revolt against communism failed to develop into a mass social revolution."
Dan Valenti's collaborative poetry book Third Person Singular: 33 1/3 Poems Each was recently published by his Planet Media Books imprint. Valenti, Jerri Chaplin, and Paul Kocak each contributed 33 poems, and collaborated to write the 100th poem.
Published: May 9, 2022
