Matthew Thorburn Wins Witter Bynner Fellowship

Poet Laureate Charles Simic has chosen New Issues poet Matthew Thorburn for the 2008 Witter Bynner Fellowship and will introduce him at a reading on March 6 at the Library of Congress. The reading will be held at 6:45 p.m. on Thursday, March 6, in the Montpelier Room of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. If you're in the area, everyone is welcome.

Thorburn, of New York City, is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the MFA program at The New School. He is the author of Subject to Change (New Issues, 2004) and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner and Indiana Review. His other honors include a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Mississippi Review Prize.

New Issues Reading at Western Michigan University

New Issues poets David Keplinger and Heather Sellers will read in WMU's Gwen Frostic Reading Series on Thursday, February 21, at 8 p.m. The reading will be at WMU's Little Theatre, Oliver Street at Oakland.

David Keplinger’s third volume of poetry, The Prayers of Others, was published by New Issues Press in 2006 and won the Colorado Book Award. New Issues also published his volume The Clearing and his translations of the Danish poet René Carsten Nielsen, The World Cut Out With Crooked Scissors. He was been awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for his collection The Rose Inside (New Odyssey Press, 1999), as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Katey Lehman Foundation.

Heather Sellers is the author of three volumes of poetry including The Boys I Borrow (New Issues, 2007), Drinking Girls and Their Dresses (Ahsahta, 2002), and the chapbook Your Whole Life. She is also the author of the short story collection Georgia Under Water (Sarabande, 2001), a children’s book, and a series of books on the practice of writing. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for fiction, Sellers is a professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

RATTLE's E-Reviews

Visit Rattle's new site for e-reviews to read reviews of two New Issues titles: Standing in Line for the Beast by Jason Bredle and The Body is No Machine by Jennifer Perrine.
Standing in Line for the Beast reviewed by Peter Matera.
The Body is No Machine reviewed by Cameron Conaway.

Happy Birthday Herbert Scott

February 8 is an important day for New Issues because it's Herbert Scott's birthday. In the past, we would carve out some time in the evening and gather Herb and all the New Issues folks together for a night of Chinese take-out and good wine, talking shop and swapping stories. When we lost Herb to cancer on February 12, 2006, it was hard to imagine the press without its founder. But it was always Herb's vision to see the press continue to publish new work. I know he would be excited about where we are today.

Recently, at the AWP Conference in New York, I had the pleasure of running into a number of our authors. Each meeting was a reminder of how much New Issues has accomplished, how many books we've been able to share with the world, and how many people have benefited from our late Editor's vision.

We ask that you remember Herb today, and raise a glass of good wine to his memory. Cheers.