SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Dinah Cox

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Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Dinah Cox. 

Dinah Cox’s first book of stories, Remarkable, won the fourth annual BOA Short Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2016. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Cream City Review, Salt Hill, South Dakota Review, J Journal, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at Oklahoma State University where she also is an Associate Editor at Cimarron Review.

 

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

PRAIRIE SCHOONER BOOK PRIZE

rsz_ps_cover_2014_winter_frontThe Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series, open January 15 to March 15, welcomes manuscripts in poetry and fiction from all living writers, including non-US citizens, writing in English. Winners, one each in poetry and fiction, will receive $3000 and publication through the University of Nebraska Press. Both unpublished and published writers are welcome to submit manuscripts. Writers may enter both contests. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but we ask that you notify us immediately if your manuscript is accepted for publication somewhere else. For information and a complete set of guidelines, please see our website at http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/?q=book-prize.

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SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Jennifer Givhan

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Jennifer Givhan.

unnamedJennifer Givhan was a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, the DASH 2013 Poetry Prize winner, a St. Lawrence Book Award finalist and a Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways finalist for her poetry collection Red Sun Mother, an Andres Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and a 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize finalist for her collection Karaoke Night at the Asylum. She attends the MFA program at Warren Wilson College with a fellowship, and her work has appeared in over seventy literary journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2013, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and Rattle. She teaches at Western New Mexico University.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Luisa Villani

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Michael Schmeltzer.

Luisa VillaniLuisa Villani is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in poetry, an AWP Intro Journals Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in The New England Review, The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review and other literary journals. Her book, Running Away from Russia, was chosen for the Bordighera Prize by W.S. Di Piero, and selections from her forthcoming book, Highway of the Mayan Sky, recently appeared in the Random House anthology Poetry 180. She currently is a University Diversity Fellow at the University of Southern California.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.
You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Lucinda Roy

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature this podcast by Lucinda Roy.

lucindaroyLucinda Roy’s publications include the poetry collections The Humming Birds (winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), and Wailing the Dead to Sleep; the novels Lady Moses and The Hotel Alleluia; and a memoir-critique, No Right to Remain Silent: What We’ve Learned from the Tragedy at Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Callaloo, Measure, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, and USA Today. She is an Alumni Distinguished Professor in English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in the MFA program.

You can read along with her poems in Issue 8 of Superstition Review.

To subscribe to our iTunes U channel, go to http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/superstition-review-online/id552593273

 

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Cortney Davis

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature this podcast by Cortney Davis.

Cortney Davis is the author of five poetry collections, including Details of Flesh (Calyx Books) and Leopold’s Maneuvers (Univ. of Nebraska Press) winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize. Her non-fiction publications include I Knew a Woman: The Experience of the Female Body (Random House), winner of the Center for the Book Non-Fiction Award, and The Heart’s Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing (Kent State Univ. Press), winner of an Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal. Recipient of an NEA Poetry Fellowship and three Connecticut Commission on the Arts Poetry Grants. Cortney is the poetry editor of the journal Alimentum: the Literature of Food.

You can read along with her poem in Issue 9 of Superstition Review.

To subscribe to our iTunes U channel, go to http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/superstition-review-online/id552593273

An Interview with Lee Martin

Superstition Review is excited to announce our publication of Lee Martin for our next issue, due out this December.

Martin is the author of The Bright Forever, and three other novels, including his latest, Break the Skin, which was published by Crown in June 2011. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at Ohio State University, where he was the winner of the 2006 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Click here for a trailer for Martin’s latest novel, and here for a brief clip of Lee Martin speaking about the story and characters he has created for it.

Superstition Review also had the opportunity to speak with Martin:

Superstition Review: What first made you fall in love with literature?

Lee Martin: I was an only child who spent a good deal of time sitting on porches, in kitchens, in barber shops, listening to the adults tell stories. I was always in love with language. My mother was a grade school teacher, and she had books in our home. She read to me when I was a child. When I started school, I asked my teacher for permission to take my books home to show my mother. I was so proud of them! Before those first school days, when I stayed with my grandmother while my mother was teaching, I would take books off the shelves in her bedroom and sit on the floor with them. I couldn’t read, but I loved the way the books felt in my hands. I loved the way they smelled. I loved the patterns the text made on the pages. All of this is to say, that from an early age I knew books and I had an aesthetic response to them. It was only natural that I would eventually want to write books of my own. I got serious about the prospect of that when I went to the MFA program at the University of Arkansas in 1982. Five years later, I published my first story. At the time, I decided to apply at Arkansas, I was coordinating an Educational Talent Search program that helped culturally or financially disadvantaged people get into college. I shouldn’t admit this to the taxpayers (we were a federally funded program), but I always found ways to spend some time working on my stories when I was supposed to be doing other things for my job. I knew, then, it was time to make a choice to either pursue my craft completely or to give it up. My decision to accept the offer from Arkansas sent me down a path that I’ve never regretted.

SR: What are some of the best things about being both a teacher of literature, as well as a creator of it?

LM: I do love to teach. I love the intense conversations we can have over the choices a writer has made in a story or an essay. I love seeing students develop their skills. I also love those moments of solitude when it’s just me and the page, and I have this material I want to shape, and little by little I do it, which makes me feel that I’ve reached into the world and done something with a little part of it. I like the uncertainty of that process and how it finally comes to something that coheres. Finally, I love doing a reading or talking to classes at the universities I visit. I love performing my work, and I love sharing what I’ve come to know over the years with writers who are just at the beginning of their journeys. I guess, to answer your question more pointedly, I love it all. I love everything about being a teacher and a writer.

SR: If you could offer your students–or any aspiring writers for that matter–just one piece of advice, what would it be?

LM: I think it’s so important to begin to read a good deal and to read the way a writer does–to read with an eye toward the various artistic choices that a writer makes and what those choices allow and, perhaps, don’t allow. Young writers in undergraduate programs will have plenty of opportunity to read the way a literary theorist does, but it’s important to remember that stories, poems, essays, and novels are made objects. If you want to write them yourselves, you have to start figuring out how they get made.

Look for Lee Martin’s work in the forthcoming issue of Superstition Review.

 

Launch of Issue 7: Poetry

Superstition Review Issue 7 has launched and to celebrate we will be featuring blog posts about our artists and authors. Today we will be highlighting a few of the talented poets who are featured in Issue 7.

Angela S. Gentry is the two-time recipient of the Devine Summer Fellowship in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her first chapbook, Stirrings of Movement, was released in 2010 from Finishing Line Press. She received her BA in Christian Education from Cedarville University and her MFA in Poetry from BGSU. In her spare time, she would like to build a tree house, in addition to writing, but finds herself inordinately occupied with evaluating student papers. She currently resides in Michigan. Read her poem “My Barber” featured in issue 7. Angela Gentry’s Website

Marge Piercy is the author of 18 collections of poetry, most recently The Crooked Inheritance and this spring, her second volume of new and selected poems 1980-2010 The Hunger Moon, out from Knopf. She has published 17 novels, most recently Sex Wars. Two of her early novels, Dance The Eagle To Sleep and Vida, are being republished with new introductions by PM Press this fall. Her work has been translated into 19 languages. Her memoir Sleeping With Cats is available from Harper Perennial. Read her four poems featured in issue 7. Marge Piercy’s Website

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of Barolo (The University of Nebraska Press), Pot Farm (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press), Warranty in Zulu (Barrow Street Press), The Morrow Plots (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), Sagittarius Agitprop (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga (Pudding House Publications), and Aardvark (West Town Press). Recent work appears in The New Republic, The Huffington Post, Field, Epoch, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, North American Review, Pleiades, Crab Orchard Review, The Best Food Writing, The Best Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, Gastronomica, and others. He was born and raised in Illinois and teaches at Northern Michigan University. Read his poem “The Sticking-Place, Stripped Screws” in issue 7. Matthew Gavin Frank’s Website

Patricia Clark is Poet-in-Residence and Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. Author of three volumes of poetry, Patricia’s newest book is She Walks into the Sea; she has also published a chapbook, Given the Trees. Patricia’s work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily; she has won Mississippi Review’s Poetry Prize; and been honored as the 2nd prize winner in the 2005 Pablo Neruda/Nimrod International Journal Poetry competition. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic MonthlyPoetrySlateStandThe Gettysburg Review, and many other literary magazines. Read her poem “Until it Speaks” in issue 7. Patricia Clark’s Website

Tanaya Winder is from the Southern Ute and Duckwater Shoshone Nations. She graduated from Stanford University in 2008 with a BA in English. Tanaya was a finalist in the 2009 Joy Harjo Poetry Competition and a winner of the A Room Of Her Own Foundation’s Spring 2010 Orlando prize in poetry. Her work appears in Cutthroat magazineYellow Medicine ReviewAdobe WallsBarrier Islands Review, and Lingerpost. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo. She is currently pursuing a MFA in Poetry at the University of New Mexico. Read her two poems published in issue 7.

 

The full magazine with featured art and artists from issue 7 can be found here.

Michelle Hoover At Changing Hands Bookstore

At Superstition Review, we like to keep up with upcoming literary events in the Phoenix area. Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference scholar and Pushcart Prize nominee, Michelle Hoover, will be visiting Changing Hands Bookstore on Tuesday October 12th at 7 p.m. She will be reading from her debut novel, The Quickening, which was released in June.

Based on her family’s rich history of oral story-telling and her grandmother’s diary, The Quickening narrates an interminable feud between two Iowa farming families. The conflict lasted over four decades, spanning across both World Wars and well into the Great Depression. A timeless tale of humanity’s intuition in times of peril, Hoover’s entrance into the world of literature is felicitous.

While The Quickening is Hoover’s first novel, her first-hand experience of growing up in Ames, Iowa ensures validity in her work. It is obvious that this experience combined with the recounted stories from family members over the generations has provided the necessary knowledge to convey this story with immense accuracy. Michelle Hoover has also previously published fiction in The Massachusettes Review, Best New American Voices, and Prairie Schooner, as well as others. She teaches writing at Boston University and Grub Street, Inc., a group that assists writers in developing their manuscripts through six to ten week workshops.

Hoover’s website, http://www.michellehoover.net/, includes a list of upcoming readings and events and a video message about The Quickening. It also offers the opportunity to tell your own story about working or growing up on a farm. Stories must have a minimum of 500 words and be submitted by December 1st to be eligible. Two lucky winners who have shared their story will be picked to receive a copy of The Quickening. The winners will be posted on her website on December 15th. You can also follow Michelle Hoover on Twitter via http://twitter.com/quickeningnovel for frequent updates on her successes and recent work.