The 2020-2021 Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes

The 2020–2021 Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes

The Arkansas International Bellevue Literary Review Conjunctions Foglifter Full Stop Kweli Latin American Literature Today The Massachusetts Review Nat. Brut One Story

The Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes

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Why this prize?

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One Story 2020 Print Prize Winner One Story is built on a singular vision: to publish one short story at a time. Every month since 2002, subscribers have received a single work of carefully curated fiction, printed in a pocketsize chapbook designed to give them a chance to slow down and think deeply. To spotlight new voices, One Story only publishes authors once.

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Conjunctions 2020 Print Prize Winner For four decades, Conjunctions has helped propel literature forward with groundbreaking fiction, poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction that marry visionary imagination with formally innovative execution. Published by Bard College, each issue illuminates a complex theme—such as exile, desire, the body, or climate change—in a book-length format that gives space to long-form work and a multitude of perspectives.

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Foglifter 2020 Print Development Grantee Rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, Foglifter is a platform for LGBTQ+ writers that uplifts powerful, intersectional, and transgressive queer and trans writing. Since 2016, this biannual journal has provided a path to representation for a broad selection of LGBTQ+ voices through publication and community events, centering queer and trans writers of color, youth, elders, and those beyond traditional LGBTQ+ cultural centers.

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Kweli 2020 Digital Prize Winner Kweli is devoted to nurturing emerging writers of color and writers identifying as women by creating opportunities for their voices to be recognized and valued. A quarterly online journal established in 2009, Kweli, which means “truth” in Swahili, celebrates cultural kinship and the role of the literary imagination to envision possibility.

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Nat. Brut 2020 Digital Development Grantee An online journal of art and literature dedicated to advancing inclusivity in all creative fields, Nat. Brut has published print and online issues since 2012, as well as folios that collect work at specific intersections of marginalized experiences, bolstering voices that are buried, ignored, or absent from public consciousness.

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The Massachusetts Review 2021 Print Prize Winner Merging the highest level of artistic concern with a commitment to public engagement, MR has published fiction, poetry, essays, and the visual arts since 1959. MR features work by emerging and established talents from around the world, provoking debate, inspiring action, and expanding our understanding of the world.

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Bellevue Literary Review 2021 Print Prize Winner A literary journal probing the body and mind in illness and in health, BLR was founded in 2001 and is now an independent publication of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by writers from all walks of life: patients, caregivers, family members, healthcare professionals, and creative observers.

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The Arkansas International 2021 Print Development Grantee Launched by the University of Arkansas’s Creative Writing & Translation program, the AI publishes literature from emerging and established authors in the United States and abroad. Issues feature fiction, poetry, essays, comics, and works in translation from around the world. Since 2016, the AI has published writers from over 60 countries.

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Latin American Literature Today 2021 Digital Prize Winner LALT is an online journal of contemporary Latin American literature in its original language alongside English translation. Founded in 2017, it seeks to deepen understanding of Latin American life and literature through fiction, poetry, interviews, essays, reviews, and in-depth dossiers. Every issue is entirely multilingual, with pieces appearing in Spanish, Portuguese, and Indigenous languages as well as English.

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Full Stop 2021 Digital Development Grantee Full Stop is a hub for conversation about contemporary, independent literary culture and the aesthetically, linguistically, and socially marginalized communities of writers and critics of which it is composed. Since 2011, it has published daily reviews, essays, interviews, and multi-genre critical inquiries that highlight, contextualize, and nourish the life of a work after publication.

Whiting Foundation Trustees Peter Pennoyer, President John N. Irwin III, Treasurer Amanda Foreman Kumar Mahadeva Jacob Collins Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary Trustees Emeriti Antonia M. Grumbach Robert M. Pennoyer Kate Douglas Torrey

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Why this prize?

Literary magazines are more than vessels for fresh writing; they’re critical to the evolution of writers’ careers and the health of the literary ecosystem. They find writers their first audience. Agents and book editors discover new talent in their pages. They’re cultural hubs in their region, whether that’s a part of the country or a place in the mind.

Because literary magazines must often do this important work with too few resources beyond taste and passion, the Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes offer support that unfolds over several years to ignite growth and help them strive for visionary goals.

The Whiting Foundation’s other programs provide targeted support for writers, scholars, and the stewards of humanity’s shared cultural heritage. We believe their work deepens the human experience and broadens individual perspective. The Foundation’s support for literature includes the Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama in recognition of early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come, and the Creative Nonfiction Grant, which enables the completion of deeply researched works in progress for a general audience. The Foundation’s humanities programs support work to infuse the richness, depth, and nuance of the humanities into public culture in the US and the preservation of endangered documentary heritage around the world. All of these programs are intended to empower fresh thought and help it reach its audiences.

The 2020–2021 Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes

One Story

Conjunctions

Foglifter

The Massachusetts Review

Bellevue Literary Review

Visit whiting.org/wlmp to learn more about the Prizes and how to subscribe to the winning magazines.

Discount subscription bundles to print magazines are available through the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses at whiting.org/lmp-bundles.

Kweli

Nat. Brut

The Arkansas International

Latin American Literature Today

Full Stop

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One Story

2020 Print Prize Winner

($150,000 to $500,000 budget)

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About One Story One Story is a pocket-sized, subscriber-only literary magazine that features just one short story per month. Each issue arrives in the mail in an envelope and is opened like a letter from a friend. Our simple, advertising-free chapbooks are designed to be slipped into a pocket or bag and read in a waiting room or on the bus. While an individual copy might get wrinkled, dog-eared, and passed along, the story itself stays with the reader.

Our belief has always been that when short stories are presented in a friendly format, even the most challenging work will find an audience, and that the audience will be deeply engaged. We are now in our 19th year of publishing and have over 10,000 readers. A subscriber recently shared this with us: “One Story is valuable because it is so unlike other media outlets: simple, clean, undistracted. There is nothing waiting to be clicked on; an issue of One Story is simply what it is.”

Since the beginning, our goal has been to find and celebrate new and unique voices.

To that end, we publish a writer only once. As of August of 2021, we will have edited and published 280 different stories and 280 different authors. One Story has played a small part in each of their literary careers. We’re grateful to everyone who took a chance on us. And we look forward to the future.

From the Judges Over the last two decades, One Story has become a standard-bearer for elegance in magazine publishing; each lithe issue, its design an homage to zine culture, contains a single riveting short story. This form is often likened to the sonnet, being short and perfectible, but the fictions in One Story create sumptuous, almost novelistic worlds. The magazine has assiduously built a warm and vital community of writers and mentors. Favoring new and untested writers and never publishing the same one twice, One Story is a critical port of arrival.

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Selections from One Story

The warm, slimy creature that is my son is placed in my arms. He is crying a grating, lusty soprano. I stretch my mouth into the likeness of a smile. I don’t look down at the baby. I hold him loosely: too tight and he might squirt out of my grip and ricochet off the white walls of my hospital room.

“We’re going to cut the cord now, mummy,” one of the nurses says, and I nod. She says mummy in that patronizing tone I use when I tell my cousin’s children that they are so big and tall and grown now.

“Can I cut it?” Timi asks.

I don’t hear what they say to him, how these efficient women tell him no. But I see him step back, his head lowered like he’s been chastised. I could have told him that this is not one of those New Age hospitals that allow men to actively participate in the birth, that the father is merely a bystander here, a witness.

But I didn’t. There are many things I don’t say to my husband.

— ’Pemi Aguda, from the story “Breast Milk” (One Story Issue #277)

We fell in love with Boyz n the Hood—José, Cristian, and me—when we were just turning ten. Instead of identifying with its morals, we saw only ourselves onscreen. When Ricky and Tre split up in the back alleys and the Bloods gunned Ricky down, we clapped and cheered as Ricky fell and his white shirt bloomed into red. We felt famous. Those houses in South Central looked just like ours, had the same trash and the same potholed streets, snapbacks with matching bandanas, malt liquor shatter across stoop steps, the pop-pop whole corner dive, the black and brown faces pressed to asphalt. And José was always something of a Doughboy, did the end of the movie speech best—the one where Doughboy tells Tre the world don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about the hood. Became our motto every time another siren went off or another crackhead came stumbling by.

We’d stay quiet, trading Flamin’ Hots and Kool-Aid while we people-watched from behind my gate, trying not to roast in the awful lake effect heat. Then Cristian would start it and get us all going: “I ain’t been up this early in a long time...”

— Jenzo DuQue, from the story “The Rest of Us” (One Story Issue #268)

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Humair first saw the girl, brittle and angular as a kite, from the window of the train. She stood near the tracks looking up at the sky, her arms in the air, ready to catch something, whatever it might be, in her hands. He had laughed when the pilgrims talked of roadside djinns but he thought of them now, lying in wait for souls to steal. His mother-in-law, Rashda, was sitting next to him. She had fallen asleep, and her head bobbed against his shoulder. Last night, he’d woken whenever the train stopped, which was often, and each time he’d found her awake, staring out the window. Now that she had finally dozed off, her dupatta had slipped from her head and he could feel the sweat pooled around her hairline, damp against his shirt. He shifted, but shamefully; he knew he should sit still, that since Saima’s death the old woman slept little and poorly, and that was his doing.

— Aamina Ahmad, from the story “The Red One Who Rocks” (One Story Issue #259)

Contributor’s Note I attended the One Story summer conference in 2013, and a truly amazing thing happened: the story I workshopped was selected for publication. This was my debut story, and the support I received from One Story gave me the encouragement I needed to apply to and to attend an MFA program. Before the workshop, few knew that I wrote fiction. Today, I am proud to call myself a writer.

That summer, I joined the One Story family. Since then, I have seen the care and attention that One Story bestows upon their community. Besides publishing a wonderful story each month, they also provide online classes, the summer conference, a teen contest, fellowships, and a Debutante Ball, which honors writers who’ve published their first book. What I see—again and again—is tremendous kindness and generosity. One Story champions the emerging writer and gives voice to those previously unknown.

They support the members of the literary community in everything they do.

When I attended the workshop, I couldn’t have imagined that one day I would have an agent and a novel. Part of what has kept me going is the dream that one day I could be at the Debutante Ball. My novel was recently sold and in 2023, I will be a deb. One Story, with its wonderful staff and their ever-present support, has changed and enriched not only my life but the lives of many other writers and will do the same for so many more to come.

— Laura Spence-Ash, One Story #188

Design by Jerry Kelly, art by Oliver Lee Jackon, “Monotype III,” copyright © 2012, photo by M. Lee Fatherree

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Conjunctions

2020 Print Prize Winner

(under $150,000 budget)

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About Conjunctions Conjunctions is a living notebook, one in which new voices, along with those of writers who are further along on their journeys, enrich and complicate the flow of literature.

In forty years of continuous operation, Conjunctions has published nearly two thousand poets, playwrights, essayists, fiction writers, translators, and artists who challenge accepted modes of expression, experiment with language and thought, and marry visionary imagination with rigorous execution. Even heralded masters were once unknown fledglings: we’ve nurtured many writers who began in our pages as promising unknowns and went on to become influential voices in literature, including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Foster Wallace, Can Xue, William T. Vollmann, Forrest Gander, Brian Evenson, Chinelo Okparanta, Shelley Jackson, Mary Caponegro, Jim Crace, Martine Bellen, H. G. Carrillo, Nam Le, Robert Antoni, Raven Leilani, and many others like Ben Okri, Julia Elliott, Karen Russell, and Isabella Hammad, who are included in Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue (spring 2021).

Whether emerging or established, all of our contributors are engaged in the difficult feat of gathering words, those everyday haggard incandescent things, into a poem or story or essay, joining an inspired and necessary continuum of which we’re honored to be a part.

From the Judges Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world. Its longevity is a testament to its cultural staying power. Organized around a unifying idea, each issue stitches together work by storytellers and scholars to create a fluid and expansive survey of our most pressing human concerns.

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Selections from Conjunctions

I’m the finial and flag of my own nation.

I’m the school of knocks.

I’m a little bit of comfort mixed With a little bit of consternation.

I’m the waltz of reason In the season of rain at last!

If you were smart You’d know I’m a good good tree.

— Sandra Cisneros, from the poem “Buen Árbol / A Good Tree”

We were living a life after which hell would’ve been redundant. Between the virus and the wannabe king our voices

broke, breakage’s own truth our toll and our testament, cracked, broke, crackling blueness’s bequest. We were ourselves when we were real, congregant memory misery’s equation, the crown infection it wore of a kingdom not of this world… So it was we sang our bhajan less crystalline than cracked, ourselves when we were real we kept telling ourselves. Between the wannabe king and the virus, between the devil and the deep blue sea, we sipped tea made from rainwater wrung from Aruna’s tights, the legs of a Carnatic singer medicinal we thought — Nathaniel Mackey, from the poem “Eye of the Bhajan Continuing”

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Before I started living on extraordinary time, I used to set my watch by Garbage Thursday. My landlady often jokes that Garbage Thursday is my Sabbath.

Garbage Thursday is a secular ceremony of reckoning and forgetting. You hear the same hymn booming across our leafy block each Thursday evening: the trash bins bumping and scraping over asphalt, the rolling harmonies of a neighborhood remembering in unison that this is our weekly chance to liberate our lives of trash. Smells and peels, used neon condoms and yolky eggshells, kombucha six-packs and leopardy bananas—down the driveways they come, our open secrets straining at white Hefty bags. Clink-clink-clink, we rattle together, the Ghosts of Garbage Thursdays Past, Present, and Future.

Via neighborly telepathy, I always reach the curb at the same moment as my friend Anja. She lives in Unit B of the Cloud Lake apartment complex across the street. The name “Cloud Lake” is like a cemetery marker for the acres of water that once flowed here, drinking in the sunshine of the last century; we live in Multnomah County, Oregon, where the names of the dead can be found on condominiums and athletic clubs and doomed whimsical businesses.

— Karen Russell, from the story “The Cloud Lake Unicorn”

Contributor’s Note Since 1981, writers and readers have relied on Conjunctions for its welcome, its standards, its consistent excellence, as a place that would take our furthest-out fancies, but also provide a consistently astounding residence, containing a worldview, an idea of literature, a confraternity of the surprising and original.

Forty years of innovation. Let’s review the record: the Tributes issue (with Nathaniel Mackey’s unforgettable essay on Whitman and phrenology), the Cinema Lingua issue from 2004 (with Lyn Hejinian’s “Ten Temporary Sonnets”), the Twentieth Anniversary issue (which contained Gilbert Sorrentino, and his son Christopher, as well as John Edgar Wideman, John Yau, Anne Carson, Jorie Graham), the Fifty Contemporary Writers issue of 2008, the two States of the Arts issues, consolidations of all that Conjunctions had accomplished up to that time, Earth Elegies, a requiem for a planet in turmoil, the recent Dispatches from Solitude, so deftly and achingly arriving in the midst of our anguished pandemic present (and including, as you can hear on the website, songs

by Sandra Cisneros), and many more.

It is not outrageous to say that this is the best literary magazine in the United States of America, as I have said before, and am liable to say again, as adjudged in the constancy of its vision, its remarkable longevity, its commitment to a permanent revolution in its contents, and, now, to its commitment to finding new voices and new forms, both in print and online, in a time of ferment and rapid historical change.

— Rick Moody

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Serge Gay, Jr., “Ecstatic”

Foglifter

2020 Print Development Grantee

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About Foglifter Foglifter—created by and for LGBTQ+ writers and readers—continues the San Francisco Bay Area’s tradition of groundbreaking queer and trans writing, with an emphasis on publishing those multi-marginalized and on transgressive, risky, challenging subject matter, innovative formal choices, and work that pushes the boundaries of what writing can do. By putting extraordinary queer and trans literary artists into conversation within our pages, we not only serve a growing community of LGBTQ+ readers and writers, but also implicitly critique limited and damaging mainstream representations of queer possibility.

Foglifter has now entered its sixth year to generous acclaim—including being twice named Lambda Literary Award Best Anthology finalist and being a CLMP Firecracker Award finalist. Work in Foglifter has earned contributors the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, honorable mention in Best American Essays, and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Foglifter is carving out space in the larger literary community for voices that have historically been silenced, and we are confident that the imaginative possibilities conjured and the narratives reflected in our pages are a lifeline for today’s queer and trans community.

From the Judges A passionate commitment to building community, a collaborative editorial project, and an unflagging sense of imagination are Foglifter’s abiding trademarks. A journal made by queer and trans writers imagining the journal their past selves would want to read, Foglifter is a bright spot on the literary map for thinkers, artists, and readers of many generations. The work it publishes is fresh, alive, and ripe with creative energy.

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Selections from Foglifter

What I want is not

to be full of his body —

my father’s hardness — fantasy

from the Greek

phantazesthai to picture oneself

related to phainein, to show, bring

light — seeing

bones all over the yard

the dogs with their empty mouths

begin to relax —

a hole is all I hope to own —

the hunger of an hour —

repeating

the shape of my mother

in the window — the hunger of

cut flowers drinking

water drawn on cut glass —

I want to know love —

something other than

insistence — I should have died —

she didn’t say what we all lost to

my body —

she didn’t have to — I wish you

had never been — what was born — TC Tolbert, “Untitled”

Use the S grip, curled fingers only, which requires strength in the knuckles to circle her body while it is hurting. Smell her and yourself, indistinguishable as two lit matches. Lift up as she straightens with hands and feet on the ground like a tent. Slap her arms til they welt, will them to release their grip before the timer runs out and you are named. Notice the size of the areolas through her uniform as you squeeze your forearms around her ribs. Feel the tiny soft ridges.

Forget how to get hard. Forget your own name. Be flipped to the bottom position.

Land hard on your right elbow.

Find yourself seized by the girl in a ball and socket grip, hand over fist, great for chokeholds and not great for you. Because of the pain in her head she is not thinking about tomorrow, only this hour and your throat and how soft it is and how it yields so easily under her bones. At the whistle breathe again as the ref ends the match to spare you the act of surrendering and/or unconsciousness.

Know your name again.

— Venita Blackburn, from the story “How to Wrestle a Girl”

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without permanent residency, i make every space into an address if only for the time being. i mistake every post office for a wing of the hospital. landing ground to rest before burial. pledge allegiance to the masking tape. the sealed shut & the ceiling. the mailbox is gagging with notices immigration & eviction. there is no difference if all my letters have to end with leaving. i am running out of time before the men arrive in suits. migration: another house of cards to clear out before disappearing. an apartment is empty when no occupants remain. an alien is emptied when our bodies are gutted of paper.

— Laurel Chen, from the poem “removal”

Contributor’s Note The first story I ever wrote indicated how I was still struggling to find comfort and ease in my own skin as a gay man. I produced seven-thousand words of angst and melancholy about a teen boy who is trying to negotiate his sexuality under the toxic nature of a broken family with repeated cycles of abuse and violence. I had pulled it from the depths of my discomfort. When I sent it out, I wasn’t sure anybody else would want to see it, let alone publish it. I didn’t know it was beautiful until someone read it and accepted it for publication.

When I received the acceptance letter from Foglifter, it felt like an invitation to a family I’ve been looking for. It was a home for the strange, melancholy characters I created, a safe haven and a place of validation for my awkward, queer work. Everything in that acceptance letter told me, more than my story had been accepted: I had been too, the bleeding heart behind the words. I was accepted into a literary family that made me feel seen and loved.

Foglifter really is trying to redraw the boundary. They do it with love, compassion, and open arms. For that, the literary world is lucky to have them. Queer folks are lucky to have them.

— Damitri Martinez

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Jeanne F. Jalandoni, “Anxiety”

Kweli

2020 Digital Prize Winner

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About Kweli Kweli means “truth” in Swahili. Since our first issue in December 2009, we have sought out the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous writers that “sing the truth,” both nationally and internationally. This is significant in a world that prefers to bury uncomfortable truth. Our online literary magazine has distinguished itself by publishing Black, Brown and Indigenous writers who take risks. We have featured acclaimed authors like Camille Dungy, Santee Frazier, Cristina Garcia, Charles Johnson, Victor LaValle, Neela Vaswani, Xu Xi, and Tiphanie Yanique alongside emerging poets and writers of fiction and nonfiction who find in our pages validation and visibility, often for the first time. Kweli frequently is the platform that inaugurates successful careers. We were one of the first literary magazines to publish Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and Kaitlyn Greenidge. In addition, we published Naima Coster—recently honored with the “5 Under 35” distinction by the National Book Foundation. Kali Fajardo-Anstine stated that “Kweli came into my life when I needed it most. The guidance and support of other Indigenous writers and writers of color fostered through Kweli gave me encouragement, a newfound understanding of craft, and comradery with writers who had faced and overcame barriers to publication.”

From the Judges Reading this journal is a revelation. Here are stories of deep, lived-in materiality. The abundant respect animating its editorial process means its writers, many of them women of color, do not have to justify their concerns and can simply dive into the pleasures of form and narrative. With its vibrant internationalism and the career- and craft-building opportunities it offers its writers, Kweli strives to publish a more generous, humane world into existence.

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Selections from Kweli

Lacey was all out of tears in a while, and she was shivering under those blankets, as cold as if she weren’t inside a house at all. She got up and found the coin jar under the sink. She had been filling it back up ever since Robbie left. It was mostly pennies. She gave Jenkins a pat good-bye and carried the jar out to the car. She drove downhill along the service road to the store. Inside she found a clerk and asked for Hank, and she waited for him by the coin machine, trading in all her pennies for a flimsy receipt that explained she had earned nine dollars. Hank surfaced from one of the aisles in blue jeans and a pretty yellow workers’ vest. His hair was long and combed over so it hung down one side of his face.

He waved her out the sliding doors and into the parking lot, where he kissed her behind the ear and lit a cigarette to hear her out. He didn’t offer her one.

—Naima Coster, from the story “Cold”

At Old Fort Craft Park Delores links hands with the flushed face men in floral shirts who are too polite to decline, and the women in broad straw hats whose thin lips fix in frightened smiles. Before the tourists pass Delores’s stall, she listens to the prices the other higglers quote them—prices that make the tourists politely decline and walk away. So by the time they get to Delores—the last stall in the market—she’s ready. She pounces. Just like she does at Falmouth Market on Tuesdays as soon as the ship docks. But the tourists hesitate, as they always do, probably startled by the big, black woman with bulging eyes and flared nostrils. Her current victims are a middle-aged couple.

“Me have nuff nuff nice t’ings fah you an’ yuh husband…come dis way, sweetie pie.”

— Nicole Dennis-Benn, from the story “What’s For Sale”

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I waited a few weeks before I told anyone my plan. I knew if I said it right away, they’d say I wasn’t serious, that I didn’t know what I was talking about. That it was grief talking. As if grief is a temporary thing, like being drunk. As if I’ll wake up in a few days time with a dry mouth and a sore head and fading regrets. My grief is a bone. It grew inside me when I touched your cold skin, and it got muscles and ligaments and blood when I watched them put you in the ground. And now my grief’s like a sixth finger or a tail on my behind: embarrassing to other people maybe, maybe something rude, but a part of me just the same.

— Kaitlyn Greenidge, from the story “Emperor of the Universe”

Contributor’s Note I have long admired Kweli and hoped that I would one day see my stories in the magazine, alongside the work of visionary, powerful writers whose words have inspired and sustained my creative practice. I was thrilled when Kweli published my short story “Cold” in 2016, a year and a half before my debut novel, Halsey Street, was published.

When “Cold” was later included in the Best of Kweli anthology, I traveled from North Carolina to New York City for the launch event. There I met literary heroes of mine, including Nelly Rosario and Angie Cruz. Since that first meeting, Cruz has become an important, beloved mentor to me. When Kweli hosted a launch event for my first novel at the New York Times Conference Center, Cruz gave the introduction before my conversation with the brilliant journalist Concepción de León, whose work I’ve continued to follow. This event was a milestone and honor for me just as my first book was entering the world.

My second novel, What’s Mine and Yours, ultimately grew out of the short story I first published in Kweli. It was only fitting that my first reading for the novel be sponsored by Kweli months before the publication of the book. Kweli has been an early, steadfast champion of my work, and has supported and amplified my writing. Kweli has brought my work to readers, and it has brought me into contact with other writers and a vital literary community, invaluably shaping my writing life and career.

— Naima Coster

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Nat. Brut

2020 Digital Development Grantee

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About Nat. Brut Nat. Brut’s mission is to bring to the fore creative voices that have been buried, ignored, or disappeared from public consciousness. We bring together work that is both serious and funny, formal and experimental, by artists and writers who are trained and untrained, emerging and established. Each of our issues assembles pieces from different experiences, perspectives, and aesthetic styles. We believe in the power of presenting all of these voices in proximity, so that innovative, affecting works can be seen in relation to each other with all their dissonant, odd connections.

Our design philosophy manifests a deep fascination with found photos, illustrating each piece with an image culled from the public domain. We believe that there is something exciting about the notion of “the cloud,” an unseen ether that materializes in flea market booths, library archives, attic-bound shoeboxes, back-alley gutters, and the vast warehouse of virtual detritus that is the World Wide Web. Reimagining what has been forgotten in the Internet’s visual landscape directly mirrors the way we seek to honor artists and writers who have been historically underrepresented in the literary community.

From the Judges Nat. Brut has carved out a corner of the internet and filled it with style and ingenuity. Its aesthetic is one of fascinating unorthodoxy, gracefully pairing each piece with a Creative Commons image sourced from the depths of cyberspace.

This is a magazine that supports its writers and editors at all stages of their careers, providing opportunities for collaboration and creative exchange, and that shows us how to relish what mainstream culture has overlooked or forgotten.

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Selections from Nat. Brut

all the chambers in our peripheries let me act as a guided arrowhead such precision despite the distance how I’d attune myself to the wind how I’d adjust to slight my gilded target grazing country before I’d claim it the land existed in its own merit its credence wasn’t in us naming it — Asiya Wadud, from the poem “then take shelter” (Issue 14)

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“We have this much in common,” the corpse clawed at a stubborn tangle, tearing out the offending hairs by the root. “Your grandmother didn’t think very much of me. Like I was a sad little doll that came bundled with my brothers, something to clothe and feed and beat with the heel of her fist whenever it made too much noise. I hated her too,” she admitted, her stems budding thorns. “Not for her cruelty. I hated her for being poor.” A housefly flew out of a gap in her teeth.

“For being a fishmonger’s wife, coming home from the market with the stench of saltwater and blood, embarrassing me in front of my friends with her darker skin and crass tongue. Most of all,” she craned her neck and spat out a fat beetle, “for being so satisfied with what we had, when she should’ve wanted more for her children.”

— Catherine Kim, from the story “The Hundred Gardens” (Issue 12)

Contributors’ Notes As an editor myself, I know what it looks like when a team works well together and devotes themselves deeply to the product they create. Nat. Brut’s culture of care shows in every step of the editorial process. The editorial team is committed to the sacred task of selecting work that moves them, no matter how risky that work may be, or how unknown its creators, and in doing so they push the literary world forward. They create inclusive platforms for talented writers of all styles. They curate a beautiful collection and then continue to honor that work with their time well after its production. They also pour their superior talent into designing content to suit the parameters of any device it may grace. Nat. Brut is poised to inspire our literary community with their innovation and polish, and to create a lasting legacy as we move into the future of publishing.

— Emily Pittinos

Nat. Brut is a publication that promotes social responsibility, awareness, and editorial fortitude at a time when we most need these to be guiding principles in the literary scene. While prioritizing diversity and equity in terms of what types of stories and writers they publish, Nat. Brut at the same time promotes a high level of aesthetic, formal, and intellectual rigor, as well as a willingness toward experimentation.

— Dao Strom

Anna Schuleit Haber, Bloom, 2003. WHITE MUMS AND ORANGE TULIPS ON THE FIRST FLOOR OF THE MASSACHUSETTS MENTAL HEALTH CENTER, BOSTON. Commissioned by the Harvard Medical School and the Department of Mental Health of Massachusetts.

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The Massachusetts Review

2021 Print Prize Winner

($150,000 to $500,000 budget)

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About the Massachusetts Review The Massachusetts Review is a quarterly of literature, the arts, and public affairs; it was founded in 1959, at the suggestion of Jules Chametzky and other visionary faculty members at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During this time of expansion and evolution in higher education, the magazine was a major and early force in publishing underrepresented writers. In 1970, civil rights activist and author Julius Lester commented, “It is amazing that so much significant writing on race and culture [has] appeared in one magazine.” Over the past decade, we have recommitted to our mission of promoting voices that expand social justice and equality across communities and borders, focusing in particular on publishing BIPOC writers and work in translation.

For over sixty years, our goal has been to publish politically engaged and imaginative literature that inspires our readers and reframes the world around them.

From the Judges Can a magazine stay at the forefront of literary culture for over 60 years? The answer is in the read, and the Massachusetts Review has proved it deserves its place. This rigorously edited magazine publishes lucid, risk-taking writing with flair and exquisite judgement, featuring work by emerging writers and Nobel laureates that revels in formal experiment and traditional narrative. Delving into this journal is an act of discovery and a reminder of great literature’s timeless value.

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Selections from the Massachusetts Review October 16, 1961 Re: your recent application to our group Dear Applicant, We appreciate your interest in our supergroup and the time you’ve invested in applying for the Associate Hero opening.

While we acknowledge that your abilities as “The Outsider” (i.e., heightened powers of perception, an ability to subtly blend in with your surroundings) could be assets to our organization, at the current time our invisibility needs have been met.

On behalf of everyone here, thank you for your interest in our organization. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

Sincerely, THE FANTASTIC FOUR P. S. Thank you for your service in the war. We didn’t realize that you were born here, and we apologize for the mistake. (However, it would not have changed our decision on your application.)

— Charles Yu, from “RE: Your Recent Application to Our Group” (Volume 59, Issue 4: Asian American Literature, Rethinking the Canon)

This is the story of when I stopped trusting people.

I’m seventeen, living the life. Work all day, drink all night, never worrying about bills or tomorrow. The songs I was listening to were my script. We’ve all been there; I don’t need to go into it. What happened, though, was that one bleary bright morning I run into a guy in a parking lot who tells me somebody I know got raped last night, maybe at a house I’d been in for a few minutes. I know the girl well, go straight to her, and her face has been pounded — eyes swollen shut, lips hamburger, the works.

What I do then is get a little steel bat, go back to the house it’s supposed to have happened at.

— Stephen Graham Jones, from the story “The Guy with the Name” (Volume 61, Issue 4: A Gathering of Native Voices)

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which blazes all my branches white with eels,

all my nests, suddenly bloom, rattling with light or I am dirt,

worn through by mice

or the rivers suddenly again with fishes.

A cup of cups that runneth over, a list of geese and hours through air

from the eyes of my two darks laughing.

Laughter that is milk. Count this

among the happiness they say.

— Aracelis Girmay, from the poem “Milk” (Volume 62, Issue 1: Spring 2021)

Contributor’s Note The Massachusetts Review is among the most prestigious literary journals in America.

Since its beginnings, a primary focus has been to provide a space for underrepresented writers and voices: in the 1960s, civil rights and African-American history; a double issue of women writers in 1972, titled Woman: An Issue; in 2008, their Especially Queer Issue; and, in the past decade, Asian American Literature and A Gathering of Native Voices. But one of the Massachusetts Review’s most important ideological positions— and one which a decade ago affected me directly—is this: a staunch belief that the new frontier of aesthetic excellence and social awareness is international in scope. I experienced this firsthand in 2016 when they published my novella, Tomorrow We Never Did Talk About It, translated by Anne McLean, as part of their Working Titles series, and again, three years later, when they published the transcript of a roundtable on translation, in which I participated. Four times a year, when I receive their new issue in the mail, I’m as excited by its beautiful design and artwork as I am by the feeling that I’m about to enter another world, inhabited by some of today’s best writers, regardless of their language or nationality. In that world, in those pages, international writers are integrated—not highlighted. Writing in translation as great writing, and not some exotic thing with feathers.

— Eduardo Halfon

Martin Kline, Patchwork, 2019, encaustic, rope, hammock on panel, 96 x 48 x 4 3/4 inches Photo credit: Andy Wainwright

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Bellevue Literary Review

2021 Print Prize Winner

(under $150,000 budget)

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About Bellevue Literary Review Moments of illness are where the human spirit is at its most vulnerable; these planes of vulnerability are also deep sources of creativity. Bellevue Literary Review strives to illuminate the human condition through the prism of health, healing, illness, and disease. The Covid pandemic has reminded us that even with robust scientific data, we must still grapple with fear, uncertainty, and mortality. For this, the arts is often the more appropriate prescription.

BLR was the first literary journal to mine the intersection of medicine and the arts. Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, BLR continues to showcase new and established voices in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that are unafraid to explore the nuanced tensions of our lives both in sickness and in health. Beyond the page, BLR collaborates with dance, film, photography, fine art, and disability communities, as well as with healthcare organizations to interweave the literary arts with the broader arts and healthcare spheres.

From the Judges Born in a legendary city hospital as the brainchild of writers and healthcare professionals, Bellevue Literary Review captures—with great intimacy and concision—the experience not just of pain, or treatment, or healing, but of day-today life itself, deepening our understanding of the human body and literature’s role in exploring it. Bellevue Literary Review is loyal to its theme but never constrained by it, uncovering boundless tonal and narrative possibilities as it contemplates the body as a physical entity, probes the manifestation of mental illness, or reckons with how the racialized and gendered body is perceived.

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Selections from Bellevue Literary Review “Is your cocker spaniel going to be okay?” a woman asks me. She’d seen me hand Houdini over to a veterinary student. Houdi, incessant lover of women, had pawed at the student’s thighs and, despite his heart condition, displayed one of his inopportune erections, which the vet student chose not to acknowledge.

Then Houdi sat on her feet and offered himself up for adoration.

Just after Rajiv’s first round of chemo, we adopted a puppy and named him after the escape artist for his almost prestidigital ability to open cabinet drawers and unlid garbage cans. Despite all the troubles my garbivore caused—or maybe because of them—he became a life-line in my widowhood, filling my existential emptiness with the immediacy of bodily fluids to be cleaned off floors, displacing my nevermore with now.

I’ve come to think of the waiting room as a threshold between two states of being, a transition between the civilian world outside and the medicalized world “in the back.” It’s here, in the waiting room, that the idea of death congeals into reality. As your beloved declines, you try to offer the universe your own life in exchange for his, wishing you could die so that he may live.

— Deborah Thompson, from the essay “Canine Cardiology”

The doctors say I’m suffering from postpartum psychosis, that I need medicine to adjust the levels of neurotransmitters in my brain. A wee bit more serotonin and they promise I’ll stop shrieking from the tabletops of playgrounds on Saturday afternoons.

A bit unfair, because that happened only once. But perhaps if I’d taken the drugs as prescribed, I might not be standing here on trial. Once you’ve heard the whole story, it’s your job to decide: Am I the crazy one, or is it all of you?

If you strolled through my climate-science department and perused the frames on my colleagues’ desks, you’d notice plenty of sweaty bikers in spandex, but a conspicuous lack of offspring. We never talked about it, but we all agreed: no point propagating a doomed species.

But my body must have forgotten to read the latest U.N. Intergovernmental Panel report. Despite the tiny blue pill I swallowed every morning, one of my husband’s zealous sperm cells managed to infiltrate my reluctant egg and suddenly I was barfing up my avocado toast.

For forty weeks, I split myself: the data-scientist half crunching numbers predicting the end of humanity and the mommy-to-be half blissfully choosing the right cloth diaper.

— Hadley Leggett, from the story “The Crazy One”

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Some of y’all pray to God I pray to the yellow warblers and their frail whistling on wildfire winds It’s a shame to be a stranger to the continent of my body when I have loved the earth so well a quiet watcher of things — Eileen Elizabeth Waggoner, “Yellowthroat”

Contributor’s Note I received the 2021 BLR Prize for Poetry for my poem “Never the Less.” The BLR editorial team honored my vision for the poem’s 11 tercets, adjusting margins meticulously until the three-column layout mirrored the rhythm of the title. I’ve published work in nearly a dozen journals and rarely have my words been handled with such care.

BLR invited me to collaborate on a unique performance titled Reading the Body: Poetry, Dance & Disability, to narrate poems while dancers performed original choreography. I was given the freedom and support to engage in deep conversation with each dancer about the role of disability, and the intersections with race, culture, identity and artistic practice. This approach made for a seamless performance: dancer and poet in concert, words and movement intertwined. No small feat considering the entire process was coordinated remotely.

The dancers and I admire that BLR demonstrates their commitment to racial equity in tangible ways. As disabled BIPOC artists, we are all too familiar with providing unpaid emotional labor. In contrast to blanket platitudes of many public gestures of racial solidarity, BLR provides robust social media exposure and honoraria. I was laid off as a result of COVID and I am forever grateful that BLR sought outside funding to compensate my artistry. I was recently invited to join the BLR team as an Assistant Poetry Editor. The team understood my request to instead begin as a Reader, which will allow me to balance medical treatments, job searching, and parenting. It has been an honor to collaborate during this 20th Anniversary season.

— Saleem Hue Penny

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Jason Jones

The Arkansas International

2021 Print Development Grantee

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About the Arkansas International The Arkansas International seeks to put emerging and established authors from across the world in conversation with one another. Launched by the University of Arkansas’s Creative Writing & Translation program in 2016, the Arkansas International has published fiction, poetry, essays, comics, and works in translation from over 60 countries.

The term international not only represents geographical points on a map, but also the wide spectrum of human experience. We value work that challenges notions of what counts as international and regional U.S. literature. In addition, we value diversity: as a team made up of staff with varied tastes and identities, we appreciate the vital role of art as a response to the world around us and its ability to spark critical inquiry.

The Arkansas International awards the annual C.D. Wright Emerging Poet’s Prize and an Emerging Writer’s Prize, both given to authors who have not yet published fulllength works.

From the Judges Distinguished by exceptional fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics that are as attentive to place as they are to language, the Arkansas International lives up to its name, publishing fiercely observant and open-hearted work by writers from around the globe. When this literature converges and collides with emerging work from within the United States, the result is breathtaking. The ambition of this bright new star in the literary firmament is nothing less than to build a world community of writers and readers.

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Selections from the Arkansas International

There are a few things I can say about pine trees.

During winter they don’t look like Death’s capillary system.

During summer, they carry echoes of a hummingbird filled with light.

The soft and hard bugs pour out of the nights.

— Sy Hoahwah, from the poem “Approximate Wingspan of my Favorite Cancer” (Issue 10)

She was half white and said that being with me made her feel more Chinese. The only time I ever spoke Chinese around her was when I was ordering for us at the dimsum parlor on the top floor of a mall in Flushing, where the waiters wore suit vests and the carpet was duck-blood red and there was a plastic chandelier that combed our hair with light, hers long, mine butch. Her hair was that color I could never name, a spectrum like the sky between afternoon and night, sometimes light and sometimes black, almost blonde when she turned her head away from me. She alchemized depending on her distance from me: from a block away she looked like a woman, but up close there was something boneless about her, her face amorphous and jelly-coated like one of those underwater creatures that latches onto the bellies of other things and lives forever clinging.

At the dimsum restaurant, I ordered in Fujianese, which I explained to Mina wasn’t the same as Mandarin or Cantonese. She said, I know, you don’t need to tell me that. The hargow ruptured when I plucked it up with my chopsticks, and I watched the skin shiver open, flashing the pink curve of the shrimp like a stiffened nipple. Before Mina, I didn’t know nipples could be pink. I sucked on its firm meat, gold grease. Mina said that she used to come here with her grandma, but she could never come alone after her grandma died. Because I don’t know how to order, and then I felt bad about it, Mina said. I told her that it didn’t matter what language she ordered in. It only matters whether you’re a customer or a server, eating or working. Whether you’re sitting here in the chandelier-lit room or if you’re in the kitchen making the food. So we’re the same, I said, because we’re both sitting here on a Sunday afternoon, getting served. Language doesn’t cinch the distance between anything.

— K-Ming Chang, from the story “Mina” (Issue 10)

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I have thirteen fathers. As you know, being a son is hard with only one father; with thirteen, you avoid a lot of problems. My first father was born far away and taught me to round my vowels when I pronounced them: Mon Dieu!, parfait, croissant; these were his favorite words. Sometimes, he blurted strange phrases like J’ai deteste ici or Mais l’amour infini me montera dans l’àme. Years later, I learned I had half-brothers and sisters on his side but I never knew if I was his favorite.

The second was a little older and always looked to the left. “This inequitable country,” he would say, “must be made into a machine for justice.” Maybe this is why all his mistresses loved and spoiled me with presents and kisses: before any endearment or hug, I would sit down and devour fiery red books.

On winter nights in New England, he would read Poe’s stories to me, repeating Nevermore!, while on Christmas he refused to give me any presents. “As long as there is hunger, we cannot accept gifts.” I loved him a lot until the day he died under the snow.

— Carlos Villacorta Gonzáles, from the story “Thirteen Fathers” Translated from the Spanish by Gillian Esquivia-Cohen (Issue 11)

Contributor’s Note As our world increasingly experiences tremendous geopolitical and climate changes that force the movements of refugees, immigrants, wildlife, coast lines, city limits, the boundaries of what we call and think of as home…the Arkansas International emerges as a critical space, whose artists, students, and faculty are bold enough to take up the challenge of interrogating what it means to belong to a country, to a regional space, to a species…and what it looks like when the human experience is represented artistically through this shifting, disorienting lens. I believe in their mission, and I believe in these individuals—not only their artistic integrity, but their integrity as people who are working hard to make sure that in a sometimes unforgiving industry with very tight budgets, no voice is left out, and no experience or language diminished or marginalized.

I have them bookmarked and am watching carefully as a student of all they’re doing and publishing now and in the near and long term.

— Bonnie Nadzam

Cover of LALT No. 14 with Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez at the 2017 Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Photo credit: Pako Mera/Alamy Live News.

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Latin American Literature Today

2021 Digital Prize Winner

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About Latin American Literature Today Based at the University of Oklahoma and forming part of the World Literature Today editorial family, Latin American Literature Today aims to bridge the gaps that keep contemporary Latin American literature contained. We seek to help Latin American writers earn the recognition they deserve on an international scale by publishing their writing both in its original language—be it Spanish, Portuguese, or one of Latin America’s many Indigenous languages—and in translation to English. We seek to break down the editorial barriers that often prevent Latin American writers from sharing their work outside their own countries, working with a wide network of collaborators and correspondents to capture the vibrant heterogeneity of Latin American voices for audiences both within and outside the region. And we seek to level the playing field between the essential participants in the Latin American literary world, emphasizing the role of the translator and making space for both promising new voices and oncerenowned figures now at risk of being forgotten. We believe in the vital importance of literary encounter, and we are honored to help great works of Latin American literature continue their journeys from language to language and from reader to reader.

From the Judges Only four years old, Latin American Literature Today is an astoundingly ambitious publication, an essential literary bridge across the Americas distinguished by its fully bilingual issues featuring the greatest contemporary writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and Indigenous languages. LALT has built an impressive network of contributing editors, providing a first port of call for authors and translators seeking an English-language audience. Its website provides rich context, publishing individual dossiers that track a writer’s evolution, helping readers toward a deeper understanding. LALT already feels indispensable to American and international intellectual life.

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Selections from Latin American Literature Today They leave one by one, distance guiding them in search of life.

For them, life means living in their own way, which is why the search continues.

An abyss has come to their doorsteps, not in the way they’ve been told but in a way lived by the eyes because, it seems, only fear walks the streets.

Fear, and screams coming from nowhere.

Sesentemej ye yajtiuej.

Youej uejka kontemoskej chikaualistle.

Chikaualistle kijtosneke, kualtsin chantiskej ken nochipa ye chantinej.

Inkalijtik tokniuan yokalakiko on koxkuajle, amo ken okintlajtlajtouilijkej, amo ken okinemilijkej kitaskej, kijtouaj tej kampa ipan ojtin sa titlamakasis tonkisas kampa mojmostla tsajtsiua, poliuilo.

— Martín Tonalmeyotl, from the poem “Migrants” Translated from the Nahuatl via the Spanish by Whitney DeVos

Translation is much more than an issue of metric equivalence. As Miguel Sáenz said, “one does not translate words, nor sentences, but what those words say, which is not the same thing.” Translators often state that in order to translate what the words and sentences are trying to say, they have to capture the spirit of the original text’s language. And what is the spirit of a language?

Si ésa fuera la cuestión, la traducción sería un asunto de equivalencias métricas y como dijo Miguel Sáenz, “no se traducen palabras, ni frases, sino lo que esas palabras dicen, que no es lo mismo”. Los traductores mismos aseguran que para traducir lo que quieren decir las palabras y las frases hay que entender el espíritu del lenguaje del texto original. ¿Y qué será el espíritu de un lenguaje?

— Esther Cross, from the essay “Of the Samovar and the Teapot” Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

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Essay writing is provisional, it probes the same territory through which it spreads, knowing that no fixed path exists, no safe road toward certainty. To write an essay, to experiment with unusual intersections, to tighten the string knowing that it can break, mixing what refuses mixing, making forays into the enemy’s camp—these are some of the essay’s modes and strategies. But its radical fragility is one too, the awareness of its limits and the always threatening presence of misinterpretation.

La escritura del ensayo es provisional, va tanteando el territorio por el que se desplaza sabiendo que no existe rumbo fijo, camino seguro hacia la certeza.

Ensayar, experimentar con extraños cruces, tensar de la cuerda sabiendo que puede romperse, mezclar lo que se rechaza entre sí, incursionar en el campo del enemigo, son algunos de los modos y de las estrategias del ensayo. Pero también lo es su radical fragilidad, la conciencia de sus límites y la presencia siempre amenazante de la equivocación.

— Ricardo Forster, from the essay “The Craft of Suspicion: The Essay in the Social Sciences” Translated from the Spanish by Brendan Riley

Contributor’s Note In less than five years, Latin American Literature Today (LALT) has become one of the leading literary magazines in the publishing world. It has been my honor to collaborate with the magazine in a variety of roles since its founding—translation editor, translation editor-at-large, freelance translator—and my admiration has only grown.

Interpreting “Latin American” in its fullness to include all literatures written in Spanish, Portuguese, and the Indigenous languages of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas, LALT has redefined what it means to be cutting-edge by publishing innovative and underrepresented genres—twitterature, flash fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, cli-fi, and Indigenous lit—while also publishing the best contemporary literary fiction, poetry, and criticism.

The magazine’s commitment to creating a space for emerging and internationally known writers and translators is especially noteworthy. From never-before-published contributors to Cervantes Prize laureates and their translators, LALT embraces translators and writers no matter where they are on their professional and creative journey. By engaging students, LALT acts as a laboratory where students gain invaluable translation and publishing experience.

With every issue, LALT proves that its commitment “to publish Latin American literature in the spirit of mutual generosity and understanding across borders, hoping to be of benefit to Latin America itself and to the world that reads its writers in our digital pages” is more than just a mission statement—it’s the essence of what literature and translation are supposed to do.

— George Henson

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Eric Jett

Full Stop

2021 Digital Development Grantee

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About Full Stop Full Stop turns criticism into the work itself, diving into the vacuum between text, where marginalia is found. The all-volunteer editorial collective documents the findings of its critics through a daily-updated website (reviews, interviews, longform essays), digital quarterly, review supplement, newsletter, podcast, and fragmentary and sometimes indecipherable reports from the most liminal of cultural spaces. The nature of the enterprise is educational—but it’s also a rescue mission. For contemporary literature to flourish, to rise from its tacitly fallen state, it cannot just be transmitted. It must be interpreted, discussed, run through filters, color-shifted, and dissected.

Full Stop’s goals include provisioning critics, young and old, for their expeditions to come—through fellowships, extensive guidance, and the space and encouragement to explore without a tether—often providing the most in-depth engagement with a work in the literary sphere.

From the Judges A dynamic and richly eclectic platform for criticism, Full Stop has the intellectual independence to remain untethered to the zeitgeist while striving to be fearlessly contemporary in its curiosity and range of topics. For the past ten years, this digital magazine has been devoted to fighting the decline of criticism, supporting small presses through its impressive reviews supplement that brings hundreds of books that might otherwise go unnoticed into larger literary conversations. Here are reviews of books that may not be brand new, but which Full Stop’s editors have recognized as neglected or underappreciated, or both. Here, too, are essays that are personal, political, literary, and always exhilaratingly askew. In an era of digital sameness, this approach has never seemed more vital.

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Selections from Full Stop

There lies a siren for our times. What are marginalized writers deprived of when denied access to form as imagination? Beneath the charade of “is it true/is it not true,” embedded is a suspicion of the very contract of fictitious form: the bargain seems to be that in exchange for readership, the most interesting reveal of fiction — by women in particular — has to be its flashing signals of biography. So it feels marvelous when writers reject this offer, giving publishing systems and their associated readers the slip. When they can get away with concealment in their work; when they are able to resist the novel-as-social-autobiography calls to clarify form. Elena Ferrante is one such writer. Another is Bette Howland.

W-3 is not a recognizable form. What does one expect from a memoir about being institutionalized in a psychiatric ward? If there is a singular confession, it is cleverly eased over: yes, a suicide attempt, yes, a note on the method, yes, an insight into the machinery that kicks into action once you survive an attempt in 1960s urban America. But it is not a memoir that confesses to an intimate or spectacular inhabitation of neuroses.

— Sharanya, from “Review of W-3 by Bette Howland”

In book publishing, as in science, the publishable and the predictable are strongly correlated, and as nonfiction sales extend their lead over fiction sales, the mind is, for many readers, increasingly within the purview of Francis Crick’s descendants. Indeed, as I take a break from writing this, I see The New York Times has just published an article titled “Three New Books Explore the Machinery of the Mind,” a review of books by a cognitive psychologist, a neuropsychiatrist, and a pair of economists. But between all the big books trying to tell us what we are, there are still those that remind us that the author is not merely a means to information and that the reader is not merely a means to the bestseller list. That we are always collaborators in meaning. Because there is no such thing as a lay audience when it comes to the mind.

— Eric Jett, from the essay “Zones of Darkness”

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If we feel as if we do not have a personal stake in the literary imagination of illness, disease, or contagion, then perhaps we have internalized a stigma against open, honest dialogue surrounding our most vulnerable moments in life. There is comfort in containing what cannot be easily contained. This book dares to break that silence — it demands an address to the self that dissociates with some part of itself in the act of reading and writing. It is vulnerable work, so it requires care: care for the voice of the work and care for the self in response as a reader.

— Kara Laurene Pernicano, from “Review of Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth”

Contributor’s Note Under Full Stop’s auspices, I learned how to write book reviews and tried art writing for the first time. Throughout this process, I was guided by the editorial eye of editor Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, who remains one of the most thoughtful, compassionate, and insightful editors I’ve ever had. She made my writing stronger, keeping my prose intact while elevating it, clarifying it, and asking pointed questions—and understanding, always, what I was trying to do, when in draft sometimes I only reached two thirds of the way. This careful, compassionate editing, in addition to the unprecedented freedom I had as a columnist, allowed me to explore ideas and discover the kind of writing that I was best at. I cannot emphasize how incredibly freeing and nurturing of an experience that was.

Full Stop has always published weird, experimental, thoughtful, incisive writing that doesn’t bow to pageview requirements or cave to clickable headlines. It’s this independent, smart approach to writing online that has kept the magazine a haven for creative thought, especially for young and emerging writers—dozens of whom have gone on to make waves in the worlds of criticism, fiction, and reportage.

After my first essay for them—a short piece about the strange appeal of glitch art—I was given the opportunity to write nearly anything I wanted for their blog.

I truly believe that that freedom, and Full Stop’s editorial guidance, allowed me to flourish as a writer, and I owe the writing that I do now to that beginning at Full Stop.

— Larissa Pham, author of Pop Song

Permissions in order of appearance

Excerpt from “Breast Milk” by ’Pemi Aguda. Copyright © 2021 by ‘Pemi Aguda, used by permission of One Story. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Rest of Us” by Jenzo DuQue. Copyright © 2021 by Jenzo DuQue, used by permission of One Story. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Red One Who Rocks” by Aamina Ahmad. Copyright © 2021 by Aamina Ahmad, used by permission of One Story. All rights reserved.

Contributor’s Note for One Story copyright © 2021 by Laura Spence-Ash. All rights reserved.

Conjunctions cover design by Jerry Kelly. “Monotype III” by Oliver Lee Jackson, copyright © 2012 by Oliver Lee Jackson. Photo by M. Lee Fatherree. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Buen Árbol / A Good Tree” by Sandra Cisneros. Copyright © 2021 by Sandra Cisneros.

All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Cloud Lake Unicorn,” first published in Conjunctions 76. Copyright © 2021 by Karen Russell. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Eye of the Bhajan Continuing” by Nathaniel Mackey. Copyright © 2021 by Nathaniel Mackey. All rights reserved.

Contributor’s Note for Conjunctions copyright © 2021

by Rick Moody. All rights reserved.

“Ecstatic” by Serge Gay, Jr., on the cover of Foglifter.

Copyright © by Serge Gay, Jr. All rights reserved.

“Untitled” by TC Tolbert. Copyright © 2021 by TC Tolbert. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “How to Wrestle a Girl” by Venita Blackburn. Copyright © 2021 by Venita Blackburn.

All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “removal” by Laurel Chen. Copyright © 2021 by Laurel Chen. All rights reserved.

Contributor’s Note for Foglifter copyright © 2021 by Damitri Martinez. All rights reserved.

“Anxiety” by Jeanne F. Jalandoni. Copyright © by Jeanne F. Jalandoni. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Cold” by Naima Coster. Copyright © 2021 by Naima Coster. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “What’s For Sale” by Nicole DennisBenn. Copyright © 2021 by Nicole Dennis-Benn.

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Excerpt from “then take shelter” by Asiya Wadud.

Copyright © 2021 by Asiya Wadud. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Hundred Gardens” by Catherine Kim. Copyright © 2021 by Catherine Kim. All rights reserved.

Contributor’s Note for Nat. Brut copyright © 2021 by Emily Pittinos. All rights reserved.

Contributor’s Note for Nat. Brut copyright © 2021 by Dao Strom. All rights reserved.

Bloom by Anna Schuleit Haber, on the cover of the Massachusetts Review. Copyright © 2003 by Anna Schuleit Haber. WHITE MUMS AND ORANGE TULIPS ON THE FIRST FLOOR OF THE MASSACHUSETTS MENTAL HEALTH CENTER, BOSTON. Commissioned by the Harvard Medical School and the Department of Mental Health of Massachusetts. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “RE: Your Recent Application to Our Group” by Charles Yu. Copyright © 2018 by Charles Yu. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Guy with the Name” by Stephen Graham Jones. Copyright © 2020 by Stephen Graham Jones. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Milk” by Aracelis Girmay. Copyright © 2021 by Aracelis Girmay. All rights reserved.

Contributor’s Note for the Massachusetts Review copyright © 2021 by Eduardo Halfon. All rights reserved.

Patchwork by Martin Kline, on the cover of Bellevue Literary Review. Copyright © 2019 by Martin Kline.

Photo by Andy Wainwright. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Canine Cardiology” by Deborah Thompson. Copyright © 2021 by Deborah Thompson.

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Excerpt from “The Crazy One” by Hadley Leggett.

Copyright © 2021 by Hadley Leggett. All rights reserved.

“Yellowthroat” by Eileen Elizabeth Waggoner.

Copyright © 2021 by Eileen Elizabeth Waggoner.

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Contributor’s Note for Bellevue Literary Review copyright © 2021 by Saleem Hue Penny. All rights reserved.

Arkansas International cover art by Jason Jones.

Copyright © by Jason Jones. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Emperor of the Universe” by Kaitlyn Greenidge. Copyright © 2021 by Kaitlyn Greenidge.

Excerpt from “Approximate Wingspan of my Favorite Cancer” by Sy Hoahwah. Copyright © 2021 by Sy Hoahwah. All rights reserved.

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Excerpt from “The Craft of Suspicion: The Essay in the Social Sciences” by Ricardo Forster, translated by Brendan Riley. Copyright © 2021 by Ricardo Forster.

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