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POETS & WRITERS IS MORE than a magazine. We are a nonprofit organization that puts money directly into the hands of writers who give readings and lead workshops in museums, prisons, homeless shelters, libraries, and senior centers. Your subscription to Poets & Writers Magazine supports the all-important work of cultivating literary activity in urban and rural communities throughout the United States.
Poets & Writers Magazine welcomes letters from its readers. Please post a comment on select articles at www.pw.org/magazine, e-mail editor@pw.org, or write to Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine, 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. Letters accepted for publication may be edited for clarity and length.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple reads from The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way, which was published in April by New Press, at this recent event at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
"This is one of the few stories I’ve written for myself, about myself," wrote the late Sean Rowe in the introduction to his essay about his experiences in jail, "An Insider’s Guide to Jailhouse Cuisine: Dining In," which was originally published in Oxford American and reprinted in the third volume of The Best Creative Nonfiction. “That’s a dangerous practice. It’s dangerous because the more personal you get in a story, the harder it is to stay honest. Here I think I pulled it off, but at a price: I had to reveal things I’m not proud of to get at something bigger than me.” Write an essay about something—or a host of things—you’ve done that you’re not proud of. Be honest about what you did, what consequences you faced, and how you feel about it now. What lessons did you learn about yourself, and about life, that you can pass on to your readers?
The Cincinnati Review is currently accepting entries for its 2013 Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in Poetry and Prose. Two winners will each receive one thousand dollars and publication in the Cincinnati Review.
Using the online submission manager, poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers may submit up to eight pages of poetry or up to forty pages of prose with a twenty-dollar entry fee, which includes a year-long subscription to the magazine, by July 15. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, and all entries are considered for publication.
Winners will be announced October 1, and the winning work will be published in the Summer 2014 issue of the magazine. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
Established in 2003 and published twice yearly at the University of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Review is a print journal that publishes both emerging and established writers. General submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, translation, and visual art are accepted online and by mail between August 15 and April 15 annually.
One page of Charlotte Brontë's French homework fetched almost eighty thousand dollars; Sherman Alexie sparked a Twitter deluge with one Tweet; Charlie Savage looks at the prison library at Guantanamo Bay detention camp; and other news.
"Human beings are always going to want to create beautiful things. Language is one medium in which to do that. You can do it with paint, you can do it with clay, you can do it with words. It's all coming from the same fountain," says Kevin Devaney, a street poet in Santa Cruz, California.
In Herman Melville's classic story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1853), the character of the eponymous scrivener repeatedly says, "I would prefer not to," in response to requests at the law firm where he works. Take it a step further: Come up with a signature response of your own and try writing a short story in which it is the only sentence one of your characters ever utters. See where it takes you.
