Frostic Reading, Thursday February 2nd

January 2012

About Us New Issues  Poetry & Prose  was established in 1996 by poet Herbert S. Scott.   Congratulations, Khaled Mattawa! Tocqueville winner of The Poetry Center Book Award The Arab American Book Award Academy of American Poets Fellowship   Spring 2012 the body | of space| in the shape of the human by Andrew Allport The Radio Tree by Corey Marks Two-Headed Nightingale by Shara Lessley Fall 2012 The Right Place to Jump by Peter Covino The Frame Called Ruin by Hadara Bar-Nadav A Penance by CJ Evans

We would be honored if you would join us for the Gwen Frostic Reading Series. The first reading of the series features novelist Kevin Fenton and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. It will be held Thursday, February 2nd at 8:00 p.m. in WMU's Bernhard Center, rooms 157 & 159. This reading series usually draws a large crowd, so we encourage you to arrive early. The reading is free, and last approximately 45 minutes. Books will be available to purchase, and the authors will be happy to sign their works.   Hope you can join us!   Kevin Fenton's first novel, Merit Badges (New Issues), won the AWP Prize for the Novel. Publishers Weekly writes,  "An impressive vitality, droll wit, and affecting nostalgia lift Fenton's first novel." His fiction has appeared in the Northwest Review, the Laurel Review, and the Emprise Review. His writing on graphic design has been anthologized in Looking Closer 2 and Emigre No. 70: The Look Back Issue. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota and works as an advertising writer and creative director.   www.meritbadgesthenovel.com   Rachel Eliza Griffiths is the author of Mule & Pear (New Issues), Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books) and The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press).  Reviewer Roxane Gay (The Rumpus) writes, "Griffiths tackled sex(uality), slavery, the strength of women, the mark of history, and the power of language, in fierce poems that were so memorable I return to them over and over." A Cave Canem Fellow, she is the recipient of fellowships from Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Cave Canem Foundation and others. A photographer and painter, her visual work has been published widely in both national and international magazines and journals. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York.  www.rachelelizagriffiths.com February Art Hop at Fire, featuring Rachel Eliza Griffiths  Mule & Pear   Griffiths will also read her poetry on Friday, February 3rd at Fire Historical and Cultural Arts Collaborative, 1249 Portage Rd., where her artwork will be on display as part of Kalamazoo's February Art Hop.  www.thisisfire.com     Our titles are available online through Amazon.com and spdbooks.org.

2012 Green Rose Prize

January 2012

About Us New Issues was established in 1996 by poet Herbert S. Scott.   Spring 2012 the body | of space| in the shape of the human by Andrew Allport The Radio Tree by Corey Marks Two-Headed Nightingale by Shara Lessley Fall 2012   The Right Place to Jump by Peter Covino The Frame Called Ruin by Hadara Bar-Nadav A Penance by CJ Evans

Dear Friends,   We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize: Jaswinder Bolina for his manuscript Phantom Camera.  Bolina wins a $2,000 award and publication of his manuscript in the spring of 2013.   Jaswinder Bolina   Jaswinder Bolina is the author of Carrier Wave, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry. His recent work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, the Offending Adam, and in the Best American Poetry 2011. He currently lives and teaches in Athens, Ohio, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Ohio University.    Also accepted for publication: Slip by Cullen Bailey Burns to appear in the fall of 2013    The Green Rose Prize is awarded to an author who has previously published at least one full-length book of poems. Winners are chosen by the editors of New Issues Press. Guidelines are available on our website.     Green Rose Prize in Poetry    2011: Corey Marks The Radio Tree    2010: Seth Abramson Northerners    2009: Malinda Markham Having Cut the Sparrow's Heart    2008: Patty Seyburn Hilarity    2007: Jon Pineda The Translator's Diary    2006: Noah Eli Gordon A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow    2005: Joan Houlihan The Mending Worm    2004: Hugh Seidman Somebody Stand Up and Sing    2003: Christine Hume Alaskaphrenia Gretchen Mattox Buddha Box    2002: Christopher Bursk Ovid at Fifteen    2001: Ruth Ellen Kocher When the Moon Knows You're Wandering    2000: Martha Rhodes Perfect Disappearance   Now available to order:  Flea Circus "Keifetz's (Flea Circus) simply dazzles. The novel takes the reader to the dark place where reason and love collide and collapse under the oppressive weight of loss. A tour de force."   --Kirkus Reviews, November 11, 2011 "VERDICT The experience of Keifetz's second novel (after Corrido) is less like reading a book than having a frighteningly intimate conversation over coffee. A must for fans of literary fiction." --Library Journal, November 15, 2011      Our titles are available online through Amazon.com and spdbooks.org.

AWP 2012

New Issues Poetry & Prose

November 2011 

Fall releases from New Issues by Susanna Childress, Lizzie Hutton, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths are now available.

About Us New Issues was established in 1996 by poet Herbert S. Scott.   Spring 2012 the body | of space| in the shape of the human by Andrew Allport The Radio Tree by Corey Marks Two-Headed Nightingale by Shara Lessley

Dear Friends, Will you be at AWP? The annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference will be in Chicago, February 29-March 3, 2012. If you plan on attending, please let us know! We'll keep you informed of any off-site readings that may take place, and if you've published with New Issues we'd love to schedule a time for you to sign books at our booth. For your signing to be listed in the conference brochure, please contact me immediately. Sincerely, Kimberly Kolbe New Issues Poetry & Prose We Agreed to Meet Just Here Congratulations, Scott Blackwood!  From The Austin Chronicle: Scott Blackwood Wins Whiting Writer's Award By Kimberley Jones, 4:00PM, Tue. Nov. 1 "We loved Scott Blackwood's 2009 novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here ... and we weren't the only ones. Last week, Blackwood received a $50,000 Whiting Writers' Award, given annually to emerging writers. The Whiting Selection Committee singled Blackwood's novel out for "its marvelous compression, and the elegiac, ominous yearning, the fugue of loss and love and death that pervades the book." The former Austinite received his MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State; he now directs the Creative Writing Program at Chicago's Roosevelt University. Blackwood was one of four fiction writers recognized by the foundation this year; ten writers from fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting are recognized annually for their "exceptional talent and promise." Previous recipients include Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Deborah Eisenberg and Padgett Powell - not too shabby company to be keeping." From www.whitingfoundation.org Whiting Writers' Awards are "awarded annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Writers Awards which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on accomplishment and promise. Candidates are proposed by nominators from across the country whose experience and vocations bring them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent. Winners are chosen by a selection committee, a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation."    http://www.whitingfoundation.org/search/writers/scott_blackwood  Coming Soon... Flea Circus Mandy Keifetz's Flea Circus will be released in January 2012. Look for a review in the upcoming issue of Library Journal.  Pascal's Wager and performing fleas. The Haunted Mansion of Long Branch and an old dockside bar. Raceway Park and a pristine 1971 Plymouth Road Runner. A cat named Altamont. These are all that stand between a young mathematician and madness as she attempts to make sense of her lover's suicide. Narrow margins, you say? Not much to place between a slip of a broken-hearted Jersey Girl and the Abyss? Indeed, it is a treacherous twelve seconds on the quarter mile, hilarious and harrowing by turn. Blink and you'll miss it.  Our titles are available online through Amazon.com and spdbooks.org.

Reading Tonight

Seth Abramson & Matthew Guenette

Kalamazoo Book Arts Center 

 

Poets in Print: Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011, 7-9 p.m.
Broadside artists: Elizabeth King and a collaboration between Alta Price and Jonah Koppel

Join us for the Poets in Print reading featuring Seth Abramson and Matthew Guenette. Readings are free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 with time to browse current exhibitions, the broadsides and books by the poets available for purchase and signing.

Seth Abramson is the author of two collections of poetry, Northerners, winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). He is also the co-author of the forthcoming third edition of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2012). In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize for Poetry, and his poems have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Best New Poets 2008, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Boston Review, Colorado Review, and New York Quarterly. A regular contributor to Poets & Writers magazine and The Huffington Post, he is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Matthew Guenette is the author of Sudden Anthem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press. His latest book, American Busboy, a Finalist and Editor’s Choice of the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize, will be published in 2011. His work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Barn Owl Review, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Indiana Review, and other publications. He is an English instructor at Madison College in Madison, Wisconsin.
 

 

Kalamazoo Book Arts Center

326 W. Kalamazoo Avenue, Suite 103A

Kalamazoo, MI

First Book Submissions

We are currently accepting submissions for our First Book Prize. This year's judge is Jean Valentine:


Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, just out from Copper Canyon Press. Her previous collection, Little Boat was published by Wesleyan in 2007. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia.

Submissions may be sent to:

New Issues Poetry Prize

New Issues Poetry & Prose

Western Michigan University

1903 W. Michigan Ave.

Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5463

Entries can also be uploaded to submishmash: 

http://newissuespoetryprose.submishmash.com/submit.

Fall 2011

New Issues Poetry & Prose FALL 2011  Fall releases from New Issues by Susanna Childress, Lizzie Hutton, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths are now available for pre-order. About Us New Issues was established in 1996 by poet Herbert S. Scott.    Winner of the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize Andrew Allport has won the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize for his manuscript the body | of space | in the shape of the human. David Wojahn, author of World Tree, judged. Andrew wins a $2,000 award and publication of his manuscript in the spring of 2012 Dear Friends, Thank you so much for making our anniversary a success! We had a wonderful time, and enjoyed a sampling of Susanna Childress' and Lizzie Hutton's new works, which will be available very soon. Here's a preview of our third fall release, Rachel Eliza Griffiths' Mule & Pear: Mule & Pear, New Poems by Rachel Eliza Griffiths Sincerely, Kimberly Kolbe New Issues Poetry & Prose Here's a poet whose intelligence and imagination value truth above any of its enemies: comfort, decoration, lovely music, the blurring of the line between the personal and the human. The poems feel emotionally and intellectually spontaneous, as if we were present at their coming-into-being, a genuine writer-reader intimacy that's hard to achieve at any stage, let alone in a first book. The poems about childhood and adolescence are among the most powerful I've ever read. Tough, sexy, probing, tender, devoid of sentimentality, fiercely intelligent, and always a step ahead of the reader, She'd Waited Millennia is an important debut. --Chase Twichell Susanna Childress writes at the cutting edge of the long tradition of love poetry. Her poems often involve tense negotiations between a sharp cultural intelligence and a body that craves its fulfillment. She writes with grace about love and lust, and she unfailingly delivers rhythmic and linguistic pleasures to her lucky readers as they follow the course of these inquisitive, unpredictable poems. --Billy Collins Smart, nuanced, lush in their beauty, yetnever unaware of beauty's price, the poems in Mule & Pear meditate on what to do with the ghosts of history by which, as if inevitably, we find ourselves now shaped, now cornered, and now inhabited-each of us, then, an unwitting vessel made to carry the past forward. Griffiths is a master at capturing persona, and uses that gift, especially, to consider the notion of heritage-how much is inherited, how much is imposed? How much of what we believe is what we're told is true? The ambition of these poems dazzles, as does indeed their  achievement.--Carl Phillips Our titles are available online through Amazon.com and spdbooks.org.

New Issues Event Sunday, August 28

New Issues Poetry & Prose SUMMER 2011

In This Issue About Us 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize Book of the Year Award About Us New Issues was established in 1996 by poet Herbert S. Scott.    Winner of the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize Andrew Allport has won the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize for his manuscript the body | of space | in the shape of the human. David Wojahn, author of World Tree, judged. Andrew wins a $2,000 award and publication of his manuscript in the spring of 2012

Dear Friends, Can you believe it's been 15 years? By the end of this year New Issues will have published 135 books, and we couldn't have done it without you. Come celebrate this anniversary, and help us show appreciation for all of the hard work and dedication put forth by our departing Managing Editor, Marianne Swierenga. The event will take place at Bell's Brewery, 355 E. Kalamazoo Ave. on Sunday, August 28 from 2:30 pm-5:00pm. We'll feature readings by novelists Jaimy Gordon & Bonnie Jo Campbell, and poets Susanna Childress & Lizzie Hutton. A $5.00 donation will be requested; as a non-profit we greatly appreciate your generosity! Sincerely, Kimberly Kolbe New Issues Poetry & Prose Fall releases from New Issues by Susanna Childress andLizzie Hutton will be available for pre-order. Susanna Childress writes at the cutting edge of the long tradition of love poetry. Her poems often involve tense negotiations between a sharp cultural intelligence and a body that craves its fulfillment. She writes with grace about love and lust, and she unfailingly delivers rhythmic and linguistic pleasures to her lucky readers as they follow the course of these inquisitive, unpredictable poems. --Billy Collins Here's a poet whose intelligence and imagination value truth above any of its enemies: comfort, decoration, lovely music, the blurring of the line between the personal and the human. The poems feel emotionally and intellectually spontaneous, as if we were present at their coming-into-being, a genuine writer-reader intimacy that's hard to achieve at any stage, let alone in a first book. The poems about childhood and adolescence are among the most powerful I've ever read. Tough, sexy, probing, tender, devoid of sentimentality, fiercely intelligent, and always a step ahead of the reader, She'd Waited Millennia is an important debut. --Chase Twichell Translation by Jaimy Gordon It's not just a dog's life-it's a pig-cow-rat's life. In this deftly executed allegorical novel, Beig (Lost Weddings) gives an episodic, animal-centered account of the life of a young woman in rural Germany between the two world wars. Brief chapters-"Horse," "Cat," "Pig," etc.-recount the protagonist's less-than-idyllic encounters with the natural world. At birth, Hermine resembles a mutant horse; at school, she finds herself unable to write the assigned essay "Hurray, We're Slaughtering!" As a young teacher, she inadvertently causes the injury of a pupil during a spirited game based on a bear hunt, and she maims a badger with her motorbike. Disowned by her family for killing their pet goose, she is even scolded by her husband: "No one can have an animal with you around." Granted, "some days Hermine liked well enough," but most days she loses her battle with the bestiary. . . .This earthy, unsentimental novel is the perfect holiday gift for nihilists with a sense of humor. --Publisher's Weekly It would be too bad if, because of Campbell's realistic style and ferocious attention to her setting, "Once Upon a River" were discounted as merely a fine example of American regionalism. It is, rather, an excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom. --Jane Smiley, The New York Times  Our titles are available online through Amazon.com and spdbooks.org.