That’s right! This week is the week you can preorder Carve Magazine‘s Spring 2020 issue. From now until April 12, you can reserve your copy of the special print edition and receive automatic free shipping to anywhere on print preorders. You also get 15% off a 1-year print or digital subscription. Need more reasons to preorder this issue? It features four new stories, five new poets, two essays and the winners of the 2019 Prose & Poetry Contest selected by Lydia Kiesling, Analicia Sotelo, and Benjamin Busch.
News
Internet Archive Launches National Emergency Library
Last week Internet Archive launched the National Emergency Library which contains 1.4 million digitized books to serve the needs of students, educators, and learners. This means that they have suspended the waitlists, at least through June 30. This allows students to have the access they need to assigned readings and other library materials.
Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive, says, “Think of this as a huge experiment. In one big push, we can improve online learning and its infrastructure in a way that may otherwise have taken years. This crisis encourages universities to be bold, to make investments that ultimately may mean many more students can benefit. Perhaps 500 undergraduates can fill a hall at MIT, but how many millions can take an online MIT course, once the books, materials and lessons are online?”
The library brings together all the books from Phillips Academy Andover and Marygrove College with much of Trent University’s collections. There is also over a million other books donated by other libraries to readers worldwide. Yes, worldwide. The timeline for the waitlist is timed to the crisis in the U.S., but readers all over the world are able to utilize this collection.
This launch has met with much criticism from the publishing community and writers. In a recent NPR article, it has been revealed that many writers and publishers say that the Internet Archive has been sharing full digital copies of books without permission before the establishment of this new library. The Authors Guild, which provides legal assistance to writers, stated the Internet Archive “tramples on authors’ rights by giving away their books to the world” without permission.
They recommend utilizing your own local libraries and their own e-book lending platforms instead.
Update Your Bookmarks – New Website for Gargoyle
Gargoyle Magazine has moved over to a new website. The new site still has everything the old one had—the ability to order the current issues and back issues, recommended magazines, reader testimonials, a bit of history, news and announcements, and more. The page is a little easier to navigate and has a nice, clean design.
Go visit the website and see for yourself everything Gargoyle has to offer.
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Announce New Titles
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, publisher of online lit mag Sheila-Na-Gig online, is not just celebrating the release of two new titles Robert DeMott’s collection of prose poems, Up Late Reading Birds of America, and Barbara Sabol’s Imagine a Town) but also two new titles in the hopper.
First they have their first-ever fiction title. This will be a re-release of John Bullock’s novel Mark Small: This is Your Life. It was previously titled Making Faces. This is a coming-of-age story set at the British seaside.
The winner of their Spring Poetry Contest, Kari Gunter-Seymour, has agreed to let them publish her forthcoming chapbook A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen. Stay tuned for more information on these titles and grab a copy of their current releases.
Oh, and don’t forget their Poetry Manuscript Contest is open through July 1 annually.
Best Microfiction 2020
Mark your calendars! The Best Microfiction 2020 anthology is slated for release this April from Pelekinesis Press. The series is edited by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke. The guest editor this year was Michael Martone.
Featured in this edition is work originally published in Cherry Tree, E. Kristin Anderson’s “Ted Cruz Attends a Goldfish Funeral” and Catherine Edmunds’ “Her Wing”; Apple Valley Review, “Teeth” by Tim Fitts; Kenyon Review Online, “Thaddeus Gunn’s “An inventory of the possessions of William Kevin Thompson, Jr., age 19, upon his expulsion from the family residence on October 20, 1971”; Anomaly, “This Is A Comb” by Leila Ortiz; Into the Void, JJ Peña’s “the summer heat feels just like love”; The Sonder Review, CC Russell’s “Caught”; and much more.
Pre-order yourcopy today and support the awesome journals these pieces were originally published in.
2019 Blood Orange Review Literary Contest Winners
Online literary magazine Blood Orange Review hosts an annual literary contest. The winners for the 2019 contest were Benjamin Bartu for his poem “Do You Love Her”; Austin Maas for his nonfiction piece “Trigger Finger”; and Joel Streicker for his story “For the Bounty Provided Us.” Read these and more in their latest issue.
Submissions are currently open through April 30 for the 2020 contest.
NewPages March 2020 Digital eLitPak
The March eLitPak was mailed to our newsletter subscribers yesterday afternoon. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up today to get not only our monthly eLitPak, but also our weekly newsletter full of updates on great lit mags, books, events, and more. Plus, you get early access to calls for submissions and writing contests before they are posted to our site.
View the March 2020 eLitPak here: bit.ly/newpages2003elitpak. [Read more…] about NewPages March 2020 Digital eLitPak
The Writer’s Hotel Postpones June All-Fiction Writers Conference
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Writer’s Hotel has decided to postpone its annual summer NYC All-Fiction Writers Conference. The event was originally going to take place June 3-9, but is now slated for October 14-20. The application deadline is now August 9. Follow The Writer’s Hotel on social media for updates on their events.
“Social Poetics” Uncovers the Poetry of Everyday Workers
“Social Poetics” Uncovers the Poetry of Everyday Workers. By Harris Feinsod. In These Time.
Goldman and Antonio both participated in the Worker Writers School (WWS), founded by poet and activist Mark Nowak, who has offered creative writing workshops with trade unions and social movements since 2005. In Nowak’s stirring new book, Social Poetics, he documents how writing workshops can embolden workers who, to paraphrase Trinidadian historian and writer C.L.R. James, seek to chronicle their own struggles “to regain control over their own conditions of life.”
…Nowak’s work follows in the tradition of Langston Hughes, whose 1947 essay, “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” turned away from lyric poems of individual experience to the poetry of social commitment, poems that “stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines and colonies.” Social Poetics relates the history of this tradition: Young English Professor Celes Tisdale and the Abenaki author Joseph Bruchac, for example, created poetry classes in prisons (which included participants in the 1971 Attica uprising).
Cold Mountain Review’s Reaching Inside Project
Cold Mountain Review, celebrating more than 40 years of continuous publication, has launched the Reaching Inside Project.
In an effort to be socially conscious members of the literary world, we began the Reaching Inside Project to provide boxes of ten archived copies of the journal (a total cover value of $80) to organizations with an identifiable need.
The first recipients of this project will be prison libraries across the US. People can choose to help them in this effort by sponsoring boxes. The cost is $20 which covers packaging and shipping. You can even choose a specific prison where you want the box sent. Please note that they do not guarantee the specified prison will accept the box, but will try their best.
Southeast Review Offering Full Issues Online in 2020
In a recent article in The Writer, the future of literary magazines was a hot topic and current editors of journals responded with how the literary magazine publishing landscape is evolving. One thing that was clear was that change and adaptation is needed in order for journals to survive.
Southeast Review created an online component to its print publication known as SER TWO: This Week Online in which they published fresh content on a weekly basis. They are now taking things one step further as they hope to transition to fully online.
Beginning with their Spring 2020 issue, they will offer their biannual issues not only in print format, but also entirely online. Read up on this change in Editor-in-Chief Zach Linge’s Letter from the Editor.