Subscriber News: October 2016
Recent Honors
Winning Writers Editor Jendi Reiter won the 2016 New Letters Prize for Fiction for her short story "Taking Down the Pear Tree". Read an excerpt on her blog. Final judge Hilma Wolitzer said, "I anticipated the ending of this sharp and shapely rendering of the quest for parenthood. The pleasure was in getting there, in its aching details and its final sting of truth." The most recent deadline for this contest, with prizes of $1,500 for poetry, fiction, and essays, was May 18.
Congratulations to Reena Ribalow. Her poetry collection The Smoke of Dreams was published this year by Neopoiesis Press. It was listed on Amazon in September as their #1 New Release in Middle Eastern Poetry. Read a sample poem here. Another poem included in this collection, "Jerusalem of Heaven, Jerusalem of Earth", won the 2008 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse from Winning Writers.
Congratulations to Scott Winkler. His story "The Hunt" won the 2016 Hal Prize in Fiction. This contest gives cash prizes up to $150, publication in Peninsula Pulse, and a week-long residency at Write On, Door County, a writers' retreat in Wisconsin. The next deadline will be May 1, 2017. Visit his website to read excerpts from his novel-in-progress.
Congratulations to Roberta Beary. Her poem "Dear Nancy Drew" won an honorable mention in the KYSO Flash HTP Writing Challenge. Beary is the haibun editor for the journal Modern Haiku. Visit her website for sample poetry and links to her award-winning books.
Congratulations to Carmine Dandrea. His latest poetry collection, Love and Loss, will be released October 22 by FootHills Publishing. Read a sample poem here. His book launch reading will take place on Saturday, October 22, at 2:00 PM at Montour House Cafe and Tapas Bar, 401 East Main Street, Montour Falls, NY.
Recent Publications
Laine Cunningham recently released a new novel and a nonfiction book. Reparation: A Novel of Love, Devotion and Danger is the story of a Lakota Sioux man who must save his sister from a Native American-style peyote cult. Reparation mirrors the concepts that drive Laine as an author: helping readers cross boundaries of race, age, culture and belief. Her first novel touched on the real price one biracial Australian Aborigine paid when he was caught up in an adoption program intended as a form of genocide. The Family Made of Dust: A Novel of Loss and Rebirth in the Australian Outback was re-released this year with a new cover and title (formerly Message Stick). Her latest nonfiction work is Writing While Female or Black or Gay: Diverse Voices in Publishing. This book utilizes her 20 years of experience as a ghostwriter and publishing consultant. Laine's current novel in progress, Binding the Unicorn, is set in Europe during the scientific revolution before the Enlightenment. A free African woman must locate a series of tapestries that depict The Hunt for the Unicorn (currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Cloisters). In the novel, the images encode scientific breakthroughs that could shift political power and change the face of Europe. Visit her website for updates on her forthcoming works.
Bracha Nechama Bomze will be reading from her memoir-in-verse Love Justice (3Ring Press, 2015) in the PEN America Women's Literary Workshop Reading. The event will be held on Wednesday, October 19 at 7:00 p.m. at the Wow Cafe Theatre, 59-61 East 4th Street, New York, NY.
R.T. Castleberry's poems "Driving the Central Line", "The Weather on the River", "To Perish", and "The House of Hours" were published in the online journal In Between Hangovers in August and September. His poem "The Bars of Bethlehem" was published in Bird's Thumb. His poems "Waiting for the Insurrection" and "Risking Phantoms" were accepted by Roanoke Review for their 2017 issue and may be included in the journal's 50th anniversary anthology.
Bob Van Laerhoven's short story collection Dangerous Obsessions (Anaphora Literary Press, 2015) has received a number of positive reviews on LibraryThing. "Laerhoven's themes are about love and war; the war within ourselves, between past and present and between freedom and oppression and how illusion and love trick us into thinking we can change war's outcome. The stories in Dangerous Obsessions are well-told tales about the human condition and the currency we waste by refusing to own what we know," writes reviewer Ellin Pollachek.
Ellaraine Lockie was the featured poet for the week of September 23 in the Friday's Poems online feature at Ascent Aspirations Magazine. Her poem "Hearts of Stone" and two untitled haiku were displayed both as text and as incorporated into one of her "pollages", a collage of poetry and images on her handmade paper.
Cheryl Denise Chandler's inspirational Christian poetry collection Assortments of Grace is now available from CreateSpace.
Diane Frank, Cynthia Hogue, and Majid Naficy will be the featured poets on October 16, 4 p.m. Pacific time, at the Moonday Poetry Series at Flintridge Bookstore, 1010 Foothill Boulevard, La Canada Flintridge, California 91011.
Published: October 7, 2016
