Literary MagNet

by
Staff
From the March/April 2011 issue of
Poets & Writers Magazine

The Literary Bohemian (www.literarybohemian.com), a three-year-old online quarterly, offers visitors to its site more than does the average lit mag. In addition to enjoying travel-inspired poetry and prose, or “words of wanderlust,” as editor Carolyn Zukowski describes its content, readers can peruse or post photos of public signs featuring “garbled grammar, idiotic idioms, silly syntax” or use the Lodging widget to book a bed at hostels throughout the world that fit a writer’s budget. Zukowski—who reads submissions from the Hostel Krumlov House, a literary Bohemian getaway that she and her husband own and operate in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic—is currently accepting work via the magazine’s online submission manager.

The newly relaunched Web site of Tin House (www.tinhouse.com), the twelve-year-old quarterly based in Portland, Oregon, features full-text poetry and prose from the most recent issue of the print edition. Upcoming additions to the site, which also contains information about Tin House Books and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, include stories from the journal’s archives; podcasts of craft discussions, interviews, and readings; and a digital-subscription option. The editors are accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, and essays for two of the magazine’s themed issues—“The Ecstatic” and “Beauty”—through April 1 and for two nonthemed issues through May 31, via Submishmash.

The editors of Barrelhouse (www.barrelhousemag.com), the six-year-old biannual journal of poetry, fiction, and “pop flotsam, cultural jetsam” that late last year offered its first online issue as a companion to the print journal, are showing off their wit with a new line of T-shirts printed with sayings only an emerging writer could appreciate—“I’m famous at AWP” and “Ask me about my chapbook” among them.

Alimentum (www.alimentumjournal.com), a biannual journal based in Nashville, is celebrating five years of publication—that’s more than four hundred works of poetry and prose about food—with issue eleven, which features tasty treats by contributors such as Rhona McAdam, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, and Laura Riggs. Publisher and editor in chief Paulette Licitra, who likes to think of her journal as “a cozy café, the perfect comfortable spot for you to think big, poetic thoughts,” invites submissions—through March 15—of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction revolving around food.

Seventy-seven years before Licitra cooked up Alimentum, New Letters (www.newletters.org) was founded as the University Review at the University of Kansas City (now a part of the University of Missouri system). The quarterly, whose title was changed in 1971, has since garnered recognition not only for the print journal, which has been home to new writing by luminaries such as Annie Dillard, Charles Simic, and John Updike, but also for New Letters on the Air, a radio program featuring authors reading from and talking about their work. Editor in chief Robert Stewart accepts poetry and prose from established and emerging writers through May 1.

The newest issue of Confrontation (www.confrontationmagazine.org), the biannual journal founded in 1968 and published by the English department at Long Island University in Brookville, New York, celebrates its theme of “Transformation” in two ways: with work on the topic by contributors such as Sarah Gordon, Jennifer Anne Moses, and Fred Yannantuono, and with a change in editorship. Jonna Semeiks succeeds Martin Tucker, who will stay on as executive director of Confrontation Publications. “There will be changes of emphasis, and certainly of editorial ‘voice,’” Semeiks says. But the journal will continue to seek eclectic work from established and emerging writers alike.