The upstreet Fan Club

Karen Chase publishesbook-length poem

2011-11-09T13:13:00.001-05:00

Jamali-Kamali: A Tale of Passion in Mughal India (Mapin, 2011), by upstreet author Karen Chase (numbers one, two, three, four, and six), is a book-length homoerotic poem that tells the story of Jamali and Kamali, two men who lived in 16th century Delhi. According to oral tradition, the men were lovers. Although they existed, the book is a fiction about love, sex, separation and death. The Introduction by Mughal scholar Milo Beach includes nine photographs of the Jamali-Kamali Mosque and Tomb in Delhi, where the two men are buried in white marble graves side by side in a small, exquisite tomb.

Karen Chase lives in The Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in many magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic and Southwest Review. Her book of poems, Kazimierz Square, was short-listed by Foreword Magazine as “Best Indie Poetry Book of 2000.” Land of Stone, her nonfiction book about her work as Poet-in-Residence at a psychiatric hospital, was named a Best Book of 2007 by Chronogram and won a Bronze medal in the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards. About Bear, her second collection of poems, Harvard Review said, “Karen Chase’s poems are buoyed by lightness and vitality, a joy in physical pleasures, and an imitable sense of humor.”

Fletcher memoir to be published by University of Nebraska Press

2011-09-09T17:36:00.000-04:00

Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life, a memoir by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, a finalist for the Bakeless Literary Award, will be published on March 1, 2012, as part of the University of Nebraska Press “American Lives” series. Harrison was upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor for numbers three, four, five, and six, and his essay, “Undercurrent,” appeared in upstreet number two.

Harrison holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. He is a National Magazine Award essay finalist and four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and his honors include a New Letters best essay award and a Pushcart Prize special citation. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in New Letters, Fourth Genre, Cimarron Review, New Ohio Review, Water~Stone Review, South Loop Review, Puerto del Sol, Palabra, The Writer’s Chronicle and many other journals. One of his essays, “The Beautiful City of Tirzah,” is featured in the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction as among 50 outstanding works since 1970. He is editor of the online experimental creative nonfiction journal Shadowbox and teaches creative writing at the Regis University Master of Arts program, the University of Denver’s University College, and the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver.

New upstreet Fiction Editor

2011-08-04T16:35:00.000-04:00

Beginning with the upcoming eighth issue, Joyce A. Griffin of Suffern, NY, will be upstreet’s Fiction Editor. She replaces Robin Oliveira, who held this position for the previous five issues.

Joyce holds a BA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, where she worked with authors Mary Grimm, Phyllis Barber, and Lawrence Sutin, among others. She is Managing Editor of The Hastings Center Report and IRB: Ethics & Human Research, journals published by The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, NY. Her fiction has been published in The Berkshire Review and upstreet (“Bits and Pieces,” number one, and “Michael Ryan,” number three). She has been an Assistant Fiction Editor at upstreet for the past two years, and has a novel in progress whose working title is How High the Moon. She and her husband, Michael Mittelman, have a five-year-old daughter, Zooey, and are expecting their second child in September.

Asked to comment on what she would look for in a fiction submission, Joyce said: “What I want to read is a story whose author has spent enough time with it to make it work on every level so that its seams are invisible and what is uniquely wonderful about it can shine through as clearly as possible. I want upstreet to publish the kind of story that envelops me—the kind that makes me forget on its first page that I am reading for upstreet, and instead, just lets me read.”

Submissions for upstreet number eight will open September 1, and close March 1, 2012. For detailed guidelines, and to submit, please visit the upstreet website.

Two upstreet scholars named forPostgraduate Writers’ Conference

2011-08-02T11:30:00.000-04:00

Tiff Holland of Round Rock, TX, and Leah Soderberg of Tempe, AZ, have been named the recipients of two $500 scholarships for the 16th annual Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. These scholarships were provided by upstreet for two qualified students who might not otherwise have been able to attend the Conference. Preference was given to applicants who had been published in upstreet or served on the magazine’s editorial staff. Tiff will be a participant in Ellen Lesser’s short story workshop, and Leah will be taking Kevin Young’s poetry workshop.

This year’s Postgraduate Writers’ Conference will take place August 9-15. Designed for experienced writers with MFAs or equivalent backgrounds, the Conference features workshops limited to six participants, faculty and participant readings, craft classes, issues forums, and individual consultations with faculty, all within a vibrant, inclusive community atmosphere.

upstreet authors serving on this year’s award-winning faculty are Conference Director and short story workshop leader Ellen Lesser (“Impound,” upstreet number seven), short story workshop leader David Jauss (“Depositions,” number six), and creative nonfiction workshop leader Sue William Silverman (Interview, number six). Conference participants whose work has appeared in upstreet are Tiff Holland (“Ooh Baby,” number four, and “Eidetic,” number five) and Meg Harris (“You Could Save My Life,” number two). upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel will also be a Conference participant, for the fourth time.

For more information on the VCFA Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, go here.

Courtney Maum publishes short story collection

2011-06-22T17:17:00.001-04:00

Small Things in Big Places, a short story collection by upstreet author Courtney Maum (“I Used to be Rich,” upstreet number six) has been published by Troy Bookmakers.

Courtney is an interdisciplinary writer who lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Besides writing fiction, she specializes in the development of brand identity for companies and individuals through the alignment of voice and story, work which earned her the Audi Talent Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. In addition to upstreet, her fiction has appeared in The Coe Review, Defenestration, Stamford Festival of the Arts, Daedalus, In Other Words, Slice Magazine, and Freerange Nonfiction.

Small Things in Big Places, which won an Honorable Mention in the Dzanc Books short story collection competition, can be purchased online from the publisher.

Gretchen Fletcherpublishes poetry chapbook

2011-06-14T14:20:00.000-04:00

The Scent of Oranges: poems from the tropics, a poetry chapbook by upstreet poet Gretchen Fletcher (“Recitation in Clover,” upstreet number three) has been released by Finishing Line Press. The poems in the collection are set in South Florida, and were inspired by the flora and fauna of that area.

Gretchen’s poems have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Pacific Coast Journal, Northeast Corridor, Inkwell, Pudding Magazine, and other journals. They have also been anthologized in Poetic Voices Without Borders, Open Windows 2005, Sincerely Elvis, You Are Here: New York Streets in Poetry, and Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge: Poems About Marriage. She received the grand prize in San Francisco’s Artists Embassy International Dancing Poetry Festival, and first honorable mention in Canada’s lichen literary journal Serial Poet competition. She was a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and a juried poet at the Houston Poetry Fest.

In 2008, Gretchen was a winner in the first-ever national contest for poetry inspired by Times Square, “Bright Lights/ Big Verse: Poems of Times Square,” and read her winning poem, “Two Giant Men in New York,” in Times Square on June 23. This competition, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and the Times Square Alliance, selected five winners from a pool of close to 700 entrants. Besides the trip to New York to read her poem, she received a prize of $1,000.

Gretchen grew up in Palm Beach and attended the University of Miami. A resident of Fort Lauderdale, she leads poetry and creative nonfiction workshops for Florida Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress. You may visit her on the web at Open Art Space.

Pushcart Board nominatesfour upstreet works

2011-03-31T09:54:00.003-04:00

In addition to the nominations sent in by independent publishers and literary magazines, Pushcart Press also considers work nominated by its own Board of Contributing Editors. For the fourth year in a row, the Pushcart Board has nominated work from upstreet to be considered for inclusion in the next Pushcart Prize anthology, along with the six nominations made by our editors. The nominated works from upstreet number six are a poem by Karen Chase, "Leaving Home," a short story by Erik Wennermark, "The True Story of Yu Tien," and two essays, "That Furrowed Brow," by Andrew D. Cohen, and "The Barest Shapes of Light," by Nina Feng. It is a great compliment for upstreet to be singled out by this Board, which contains many distinguished writers. Congratulations to all four nominees, and best wishes to them in the competition.

Robin Oliveira novel chosen fortwo community reading programs

2011-03-03T20:00:00.000-05:00

My Name is Mary Sutter (Viking Penguin, 2010), a novel by upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira, has been selected by two communities for their annual reading programs. Community reading programs typically include book discussions, readings, lectures, workshops, film and/or theatrical productions, and other events directly or thematically related to the chosen book.

The city of Roswell, Georgia, selected the book for its Roswell Reads Program, which began in February and will conclude with a literary luncheon at 11:30am Saturday, March 5, at the Roswell Adult Recreation Center, at which Robin will give a talk on her novel.

Schenectady County, New York, chose the novel for its One County, One Book Program, which will take place in April and feature a talk by the author at 2pm Saturday, April 9, at Schenectady County Community College, followed by a reception and book signing. Area book groups may enter a drawing to have lunch with Robin preceding her SCCC appearance.

Set in the mid-19th century, My Name is Mary Sutter follows the aspirations and difficulties of a brilliant, somewhat odd, yet remarkable young midwife from Albany, NY, whose lofty hope of becoming a surgeon far exceeds what her family and the physicians and medical schools of her time are willing to accept. She travels to Washington, DC, to work in the Civil War hospitals, only to find the challenges formidable and the pull of home unavoidable.

Robin Oliveira grew up in Loudonville, NY. She holds a BA in Russian from the University of Montana and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a Registered Nurse. In 2007, she won the $10,000 15th annual James Jones First Novel Fellowship, awarded to an American author of a first-novel-in-progress by the James Jones Literary Society and Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA. She has been Fiction Editor for upstreet number three, four, five, six, and the upcoming seven, which will appear in June of this year. Robin lives in Seattle with her husband, Andrew, their daughter, Noelle, and their son, Miles. My Name is Mary Sutter is her first novel.

Tiff Holland wins Rose Metal PressShort Short Chapbook Award

2011-03-02T12:53:00.002-05:00

upstreet author Tiff Holland has received the Rose Metal Press Fifth Annual Chapbook Award for short fiction. Her book, Betty Superman, was chosen from among 117 contestants by judge Kim Chinquee, and will be released in July 2011.

Rose Metal Press describes the book this way: “The stories in Betty Superman are true, except when they’re not. They’re based on Tiff Holland’s relationship with her mother, a story arc all its own, only Betty isn’t her mother and Holland’s not the narrator, not completely. … In unsentimental and percussive prose, Holland examines Betty as character, dragon lady, and mother.”

Tiff’s essay “Ooh Baby” was published in upstreet number four, and her essay “Eidetic” in upstreet number five. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in many other journals and anthologies, including Hobarts, Smokelong Quarterly, The Atlanta Review, The Mississippi Review, and Elimae. In 2007 her story “The Boys” was named one of StorySouth’s top 100, and the following year “Cadet” one of Wigleaf’s top 50. She has also won a Wick Award from Kent State University. Her poetry chapbook, Bone in a Tin Funnel, is available through Pudding House Press.

Tiff lives in Round Rock, Texas, with her husband and daughter, and teaches at Austin Community College.

Frances McCue poetry collectionto be launched February 20

2011-02-12T00:10:00.001-05:00

The Bled, a new poetry collection by upstreet poet Frances McCue, will be launched by Factory Hollow Press at 5pm February 20 at Flying Object, a bookstore, letterpress and gallery at 42 West Street, Hadley, Massachusetts.

Derived from the Arabic word baladi (land), “the bled” is a term invented by the French, who colonized much of North Africa. In this context, it means hinterland, or raw desert. Frances McCue and her family lived in Morocco for a year, on the edge of the bled, and this book is about the time they spent there. Frances’s husband, Gary Greaves, died on February 12, 2010, a year ago today.

“This book is that rare and necessary thing that real poetry is—a clear-eyed, ruthless, beautiful, terrible look at what it is to be human with a body and a brain and heart, to find love and to lose it, to be knocked around by death and grief, to wonder how you can go on living but knowing you must. To try to understand—through words—what can’t be understood.”—Rebecca Brown

“This is the most moving account of a spouse’s death that I have ever read.”—James Tate

Frances McCue is the author of the poetry collection The Stenographer’s Breakfast (Beacon, 1992) and the nonfiction book The Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo (University of Washington, 2010). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in upstreet number seven, Cutbank, The Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Northwest, MS. Magazine, and other publications, and in several anthologies, including Looking Together, For a Living: The Poetry of Work, and World in Our Words: Contemporary American Women Writers. Her essays and reviews have been published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, including The Georgia Review, Tin House, The Seattle Times, The Stranger, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The New York Times Book Review.

Frances’s honors include a 2009 Pushcart Prize nomination, a 2009 GAMMA award, a 2006 Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs grant, a 2006 Jack Straw Writers Fellowship, and a 4Culture 2004 Individual Artist Award. She is Writer in Residence and Lecturer at the University of Washington in Seattle, and has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar and Lecturer at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakesh, Morocco. She was Founding Executive/Artistic Director of the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, the largest literary center west of the Mississippi.

A second launch event for The Bled will take place March 4 at Open Books in Seattle, Washington. You may visit Frances McCue online at her blog.

Feldman upstreet poem chosenfor Best American Poetry 2011

2011-02-08T23:12:00.005-05:00

“In November,” a poem by Alan Feldman appearing in upstreet number six, has been chosen for publication in The Best American Poetry 2011 by Guest Editor Kevin Young.

Alan Feldman’s most recent full-length poetry collection, A Sail to Great Island (U. of Wisconsin Press), was awarded the 2004 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and in 2005 was one of two finalists for the National Jewish Book Award in poetry. Another full-length collection, The Happy Genius (Sun, 1978), won the 1979 Elliston Book Award for the best poetry collection published by an independent U.S. press. His poems have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, upstreet number four (“Preparing for Class” and “The Grounding”) and upstreet number five (“On the Water”).

Alan’s work is also represented in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2001, and he has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. He and his wife, artist Nan Hass Feldman, live in Framingham and Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where he likes to cruise his double-keeled boat on Cape Cod Bay. You may visit Alan online at his website.

The editors of upstreet are delighted to congratulate Alan on his inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2011.

upstreet Fiction Editor featured in two AWP events

2011-01-31T15:54:00.004-05:00

upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira, author of the historical novel My Name is Mary Sutter, will be a participant in two events at the Annual Conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Washington, DC. She will be a featured reader in the Vermont College of Fine Arts 30th Anniversary reading, from 1:30-2:45pm Thursday 3 February, in the Maryland Suite Room on the Lobby Level of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. She will also conduct a panel, “The Craft of Historical Fiction,” from 1:30-2:45pm Saturday 5 February, in the Coolidge Room on the Mezzanine Level of the Marriott.

The reading will be a celebration of VCFA’s 30-year history as one of the first low-residency MFA in Writing programs in the country. As an innovator in the field, the College will celebrate this milestone with an introduction by Mark Doty and a reading by former faculty member Sydney Lea, Robin, and three other alumni/ae—Nin Andrews, Earl Braggs, and Wally Lamb (who was the subject of the upstreet number three author interview).

The panel will be an exploration of the craft of historical fiction by Robin and four other debut authors—Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Kelly O’Connor McNees, John Pipkin, and Anna Keesey, the authors of, respectively, Wench, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, Woodsburner, and Little Century. They will delve into the role of imagination, the use of fictional versus real characters, the incorporation of research, and the commitment of the author to real events.

upstreet is having a party—and you’re invited

2011-01-27T17:40:00.002-05:00

upstreet will host an off-site reading and celebration during the 2011 AWP Conference, which will take place at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC, from February 2-5.

Our party will be at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday 3 February at Medaterra, 2614 Connecticut Avenue NW, a restaurant within walking distance of the Marriott. This event is free and open to the public. The readers, all poets and prose writers from upstreet number six, will be Mark Halliday, David Jauss, Jay Kauffmann, Maureen Sherbondy, Robin Underdahl, and Michelle Yasmine Valladares. upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel will emcee the festivities.

Following the reading, there will be an opportunity for authors to sign copies of upstreet number six, or their own books, which will also be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be provided. Come help us celebrate AWP 2011 in Washington—and don’t forget to visit upstreet’s table (#C10) in the Bookfair. On Saturday, the final day of the Conference, admission to the Bookfair will be open to the public at no charge.

upstreet poet awarded NEA Fellowship

2011-01-14T17:12:00.005-05:00

upstreet poet Yerra Sugarman (“We Were a Boat,” upstreet number four) has received a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship of $25,000 for Poetry. Her first collection of poems, Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow, 2002) received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Poetry Award. Her second book is The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow, 2008). Her other honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, and its Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and a 2008 Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers.

Yerra was born in Toronto and lives in New York City, where she has taught creative writing in undergraduate and MFA programs. She is currently Writer in Residence at Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts, and teaches poetry at Rutgers University. You can visit her at her blog .

Sybil Baker story collection to be released in December

2010-12-05T21:15:00.000-05:00

Talismans, a short story collection by Sybil Baker (“Cape of Good Hope,” upstreet number four), will be released on December 7 by C&R Press. In a series of linked short stories, this collection follows the journey of the protagonist, Elise, as she comes to terms with the deaths of her first love, her mother, and especially her father, and learns what she must hold onto, and what she must leave behind.

“Sybil Baker’s Talismans is a contemporary Heart of Darkness.”
—David Jauss, author of Black Maps

“Sybil Baker writes beautifully, with such keen honesty.”
—Patricia Henley, author of Hummingbird House

A graduate of Virginia Tech, Sybil Baker holds an MA in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has traveled extensively around the world, especially in Asia, and for twelve years lived and taught English in South Korea. She has been to more than thirty countries, including Mongolia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Indonesia, Peru, and Turkey. During her travels, she became increasingly interested in the allure and alienation of American travelers and expatriates, and this has heavily influenced her writing. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, and her novel, The Life Plan, was published by Casperian Books in 2009. Sybil is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she teaches creative writing. She and her husband, Rowan Johnson, live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Nadelson article published in December 2010 Writer’s Chronicle

2010-11-11T16:50:00.003-05:00

“What about the Suffering?: The Quiet Power of Minor Characters,” an essay by upstreet author Scott Nadelson, appears in the December 2010 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, a publication of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). Scott’s short story “Oslo” appeared in upstreet number six, and was listed as a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo.

Scott’s Chronicle essay discusses the importance of minor characters in fiction, both as examples of what a protagonist’s life might have been or might be in the future, and as catalysts who cause a protagonist to change his attitude or behavior in some way. To demonstrate this, he analyzes minor characters in two fictional works, the David Malouf short story “A Trip to the Grundelsee” and Anton Chekhov’s novella “Three Years.”

Scott Nadelson is the author of two story collections, The Cantor’s Daughter, recipient of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize and the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Fiction Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers, and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, American Literary Review, Arts & Letters, Puerto del Sol, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Salem, OR. “Oslo” will appear in Scott’s third story collection, Aftermath, which is due to be released by Hawthorne Books in the Fall of 2011.

Glover to read at Brooklyn Railtenth anniversary celebration

2010-10-13T17:56:00.005-04:00

upstreet author Douglas Glover will be one of fifteen poets and prose writers reading at the tenth anniversary celebration of The Brooklyn Rail, a print and online literary journal that features critical perspectives on arts, politics, and culture. The event, hosted by Brooklyn Rail Fiction Editor Donald Breckenridge, will take place Friday, October 22, at 8:30pm in the ISSUE Project Room, Old American Can Factory, 232 Third Street, Brooklyn. Admission is five dollars; advance tickets may be purchased online.

Glover, a Canadian who lives in upstate New York, is the author of five story collections, four novels, a book of essays, and a book about novel form. He won the 2006 Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award. His novel Elle won the 2003 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in English, and was a finalist for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His essay “Don Quixote, Rosemary’s Baby, Alien, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Meditations on the Ideology of Closure and the Comforting Lie” was published in upstreet number four, and another essay, “Before/After History and the Novel,” in upstreet number six. His stories have also appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories, and other anthologies. He has taught at Skidmore College, Colgate University, Davidson College, and SUNY/Albany, and is currently on the faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

upstreet nominates six for 2011 Pushcart

2010-10-10T00:02:00.001-04:00

The editors of upstreet have nominated six works appearing in the journal’s sixth issue for this year’s Pushcart Prize. The nominees are two short stories, “Depositions,” by David Jauss, and “The True Story of Yu Tien,” by Erik Wennermark; two creative nonfiction pieces, “That Furrowed Brow,” by Andrew D. Cohen, and “The Barest Shapes of Light,” by Nina Feng; and two poems, “The Ballad of Trash and Meat,” by Daniel Meltz, and “The Card Reader,” by Frances Richey.These six works were submitted to compete for inclusion in the 2011 issue of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, the only annual anthology to showcase work from America’s alternative, literary presses. This is the fifth year that upstreet has made Pushcart Prize nominations.

upstreet congratulates its nominees, and wishes them the best of luck in the competition.

Nadelson story cited as ‘Distinguished’by Best American Short Stories 2010

2010-10-04T13:15:00.000-04:00

“Oslo,” a story by Scott Nadelson in upstreet number five, has been listed as one of “100 Other Distinguished Stories” by the editors of Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo.

This is the fifth time an upstreet work has been mentioned in one of the prestigious annual Best American anthologies. Earlier this year, Phyllis Barber’s upstreet number five essay, “Sweetgrass,” was cited in Best American Essays 2010. Last year, Frank Tempone’s essay, “Everlasting,” was listed in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, and Katherine Lien Chariott’s “Vocabulary Lesson” and Michael Martone’s “Hermes Goes to College” were cited in Best American Essays 2009; all three essays were from the award-winning upstreet number four.

Scott Nadelson is the author of two story collections, The Cantor’s Daughter, recipient of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize and the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Fiction Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers, and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, American Literary Review, Arts & Letters, Puerto del Sol, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Salem, OR.

“Oslo” will appear in Scott’s third story collection, Aftermath, which is due to be released by Hawthorne Books in the Fall of 2011.

We congratulate Scott, and thank him for helping to make upstreet Distinguished.

Glover to judge 2010 FreeFall writing contest

2010-10-03T12:50:00.009-04:00

upstreet author Douglas Glover will be the judge and editor for this year's prose and poetry contest conducted by FreeFall, “Canada’s magazine of exquisite writing.” The contest is open to Canadians living in Canada or abroad. Prizes for the contest total $1,100, and winning entries will be published in Volume XXI, No. 1 of FreeFall. The entry fee is $20, and includes a one-year subscription to the magazine. For the contest rules and entry form, go here.

Glover, a Canadian who lives in upstate New York, is the author of five story collections, four novels, a book of essays, and a book about novel form. He won the 2006 Writers' Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award, and his novel Elle won the 2003 Governor-General's Award for Fiction in English, and was a finalist for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His essay “Don Quixote, Rosemary’s Baby, Alien, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Meditations on the Ideology of Closure and the Comforting Lie” was published in upstreet number four, and another essay, “Before/After History and the Novel,” in upstreet number six. He is currently on the faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

New Creative Nonfiction Editor

2010-09-26T15:10:00.001-04:00

Beginning with the upcoming seventh issue, Richard J. Farrell (above, with Maggie, 9, and Thomas, 5) of San Diego, CA, will be upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor. He replaces Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, who held this position for the previous four issues.

A 1991 graduate of the US Naval Academy, Rich earned an MA in Secondary Education from Webster University, St. Louis, MO. Following his career as a Naval aircraft pilot, he taught science, math, and history at Cathedral High School in San Diego. He is currently a candidate for an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, where he has worked with authors Jess Row, Ellen Lesser, Douglas Glover, and Philip Graham, among others. He has been a submission reader for the literary journal Hunger Mountain, and for its Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize, and is a Contributing Editor for Glover’s literary blog, Numéro Cinq.

Asked to comment on what he would look for in a creative nonfiction submission, Rich said: “Good writing allows a reader to explore different worlds, to inhabit different bodies, and to understand different minds, but in the end always takes us home to ourselves. For upstreet, I want to find that careful writer who crafts the mysterious mixture of thought, emotion, and soul. The creative nonfiction genre encompasses so much, but is unified by an attention to, and a love of, language. I don’t believe in boundaries. In the end, good writing always finds a way to transcend whatever restrictions hold it down.”

Submissions for upstreet number seven opened September 1, and will close March 1, 2011.

upstreet call for submissions featuredin Poets & Writers’ Literary MagNet

2010-09-01T01:45:00.008-04:00

upstreet is one of six journals appearing in the Literary MagNet column of the September/October issue of Poets & Writers magazine. The item reads: “upstreet (http://www.upstreet-mag.org/), the annual journal founded in 2005 by publisher and editor Vivian Dorsel and based in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is now open for submissions. Writers are invited to submit poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction for the seventh issue, due out in July 2001. Visit the Web site for complete guidelines.”

The upstreet Submission Manager went online at 1:30 this morning, and will take submissions for number seven until March 1, 2011. upstreet number six, which came out in June, contains an interview with memoirist Sue William Silverman, and work by David Jauss, Douglas Glover, Karen Chase, Mark Halliday, Jeffrey Harrison, and many other distinguished writers. The sixth issue received a record total of 3,681 submissions—1,331 stories, 1,952 poems, and 398 essays.

Ackerman poem chosen for Best New Poets 2010

2010-08-17T10:30:00.000-04:00

“A Small Obsession,” a poem by Stephen Ackerman in upstreet number five, has been chosen to appear in Best New Poets, an annual anthology of poems from emerging writers. The 2010 editor is Claudia Emerson, who selected 50 poems from nominations made by literary magazines and writing programs, and an open internet competition.

“A Small Obsession” was nominated for the anthology by upstreet Poetry Editor Jessica Greenbaum and Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel. Previous nominations of Steve Ackerman’s poems for Best New Poets were for “Magic Lantern” in upstreet number three and “How to Touch a Woman” in upstreet number four. All three poems, and “Strange How Trains” in upstreet number two, were also nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

Steve’s poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Lana Turner, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Salamander, and Seneca Review. He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MA from Johns Hopkins and a JD from Boston University School of Law. An attorney since 1989 in the Legal Counsel Division of the New York City Law Department, he lives in Beekman, NY, with his wife, Laurie, and their sons, Nick and Will.

upstreet is delighted to congratulate Steve. Here is his winning poem:

A Small Obsession
He could ride a bicycle backwards and when he did
“He thought he was the cat’s meow,” his wife said.
Thank you for my eyes, thank you for opening my eyes.
Thank you for my idyllic childhood, long summer days
Outdoors and food in the kitchen, your glove oiled
To dark chocolate, it folds like a book, old, soft leather first baseman’s
Mitt, foundered on a reef of grief when you died,
One extra large sob at your wake and several years
Of intermittent self-pity of which I am proud.
Thank you for adultery, it makes life vivid as when
I kicked the grill in the garage and one triangular leg
Impaled the sheet rock and there hung, waiting
For summer, for skewed suburban summer, for skewered
Idyllic summer. Oh, thank you for my eyes! Which weep,
Which are hazel like your wife’s eyes, which wear glasses
To read the fine print, which is where beauty is, in the text
And in the footnotes, in the woven sheets with the high
Thread count, in a firm handshake (for which I must thank you).
They are a foreign race to me, who shake hands diffidently.
Were their fathers not Marines? Did they have idyllic childhoods
With long summer days and fathers who worked
And came home from work and played catch and read
The paper, days so long the mail was delivered twice
And so long ago that actual letters arrived, morning and
Afternoon, punctuated by the dash of lunch
On the run, screen door slapping the frame.
You introduced the world to me, in all its
Famous complexity, but only after providing
The simplicity of long summer days,
Deep woods, slow currents, open fields, cobalt clouds.
This poem is a coffin, and a resurrection.
To mourn the dead is not a small obsession.
—Stephen Ackerman

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher launches online CNF journal

2010-07-28T09:07:00.014-04:00

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor for the past four years, has launched Shadowbox, “a biannual journal exclusively devoted to creative nonfiction of every shape, style, and incarnation.” Co-edited by John-Michael Rivera, each issue will include new writing, interviews, reviews of published work, interactive links, a gallery of visual/literary collaborations, and an archive of resurrected writings. The inaugural Spring 2010 issue features an interview with Brenda Miller, a word/image collaboration by Margo Klass and Frank Soos, and work by thirteen essayists, including upstreet number three author Karen Michelle Otero, upstreet number four author Daniel Hales, J. Michael Martinez, Kerry Muir, and Robert Vivian, and much more.

Fletcher’s work has appeared in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, New Letters, Fourth Genre, Water-Stone Review, Puerto del Sol, Palabra, and many other journals. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, PEN Center USA, and Bakeless Literary Prize, his recent honors include a New Letters best essay award and Pushcart Prize special mention. He just completed an essay collection, Man in a Box, and is writing a memoir. He teaches literary nonfiction at Regis University, the University of Denver, and Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop.

Rivera is Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he teaches cultural studies and literary nonfiction. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Palabra, Pilgrimage, sienwerden, Eclectica Magazine, American Literary History and Aztlan. An award-winning writer, he also curates writing exhibits for innovative writers of color in the US and abroad. He is working on a mixed-genre project titled amatl, an encyclopaedia in part(s), and Clock Works, a Diagram of Time.

upstreet sends Shadowbox its very best wishes for success.

upstreet Fiction Editor to read in Albany area

2010-07-26T09:22:00.004-04:00

upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira will appear in two New York State Capital Region locations on Monday, July 26, as part of the reading/signing tour for her novel, My Name is Mary Sutter (Viking Penguin, 2010). At 2pm, she will visit Pruyn House in Latham, NY, where she will read from the novel and talk about its Albany setting.

At 7pm, there will be a reading and book signing at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, where Robin will be introduced by upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel.

My Name is Mary Sutter appeared in the July issue of O! The Oprah Magazine as the No. 7 selection on Oprah's Summer Reading List.

upstreet to be a sponsor of Berkshire WordFest

2010-07-21T22:18:00.003-04:00

upstreet will be one of the sponsors of the first annual Berkshire WordFest, a celebration of words and ideas that will take place July 23-25 at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, the historic home and gardens of Edith Wharton. This literary festival will bring together a varied collection of contemporary authors in an exciting array of events that will include talks, readings, panel discussions, interviews, and book signings. Featured authors will include Garrison Keillor, Francine Prose, Jim Shepard, Susan Orlean, and many others. For further information about the WordFest schedule, and to reserve tickets and day passes, call 413-551-5113 or visit http://berkshirewordfest.org/

Barber essay cited as ‘Notable’ by Best American Essays 2010

2010-07-03T11:12:00.004-04:00

“Sweetgrass,” an essay by Phyllis Barber in upstreet number five, has been listed as a Notable work by the editors of Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens. This is the fourth time a work appearing in upstreet has been mentioned in one of the prestigious annual Best American anthologies. The previous ones were Frank Tempone’s essay, “Everlasting,” in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, and the essays “Vocabulary Lesson,” by Katherine Lien Chariott, and “Hermes Goes to College,” by Michael Martone, in Best American Essays 2009—all from the award-winning issue, upstreet number four.

Phyllis Barber’s seventh book, Raw Edges (U. of Nevada), a coming-of-age-in-middle-age memoir, came out earlier this year. She is the author of the novel And the Desert Shall Blossom (U. of Utah), two books of short stories, The School of Love (U. of Utah) and Parting the Veil: Stories From a Mormon Imagination (Signature Books), and How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (U. of Georgia), for which she received the AWP Award Series prize in Creative Nonfiction in 1991. Phyllis has been on the prose faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was recently inducted into the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame. She lives in Denver.

We congratulate Phyllis, and thank her for helping to make upstreet Notable.

Robin Oliveira novel released May 15

2010-05-15T09:56:00.005-04:00

My Name is Mary Sutter, a novel by upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira, was released by Viking Penguin on May 15. Set in the mid-19th century, Robin’s novel follows the aspirations and difficulties of a brilliant, somewhat odd, yet remarkable young midwife from Albany, NY, whose lofty hope of becoming a surgeon far exceeds what her family and the physicians and medical schools of her time are willing to accept. She travels to Washington, DC, to work in the Civil War hospitals, only to find the challenges formidable and the pull of home unavoidable.

“A magnificent Civil War epic, a saga of female liberation, and a gorgeous love story. Mary is indomitable, fearless, and captivating—a riveting read.”—Douglas Glover, author of Elle

“My Name is Mary Sutter is a powerful debut—equally compelling for its portrayal of the horrors of surgery during the Civil War as it is for its human drama. Mary Sutter is unforgettable, not just because she’s quirky, odd, and persistent in her quest to be a surgeon, but also because she is alive inside anyone who knows what it is to dream.—Xu Xi, author of Habit of a Foreign Sky

“The subject matter—medicine and medical conditions during the Civil War—is thoroughly researched and compelling. The plot—the Union’s conduct of the war, intertwined with the wartime love story—moves quickly and inevitably. But, most important, the protagonist, Mary Sutter, takes hold of the readers on the first page and leads us, with confidence and determination, to the last.”—Vivian Dorsel, Editor/Publisher of upstreet

In 2007, Robin won the $10,000 15th annual James Jones First Novel Fellowship, awarded to an American author of a first-novel-in-progress by the James Jones Literary Society and Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA. Born in Albany, NY, in 1954, she earned a BA in Russian from the University of Montana and continued to study at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow, USSR. She became a Registered Nurse, and then worked as a bone marrow transplant and cardiac care nurse in Seattle before earning an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2006. She has been Fiction Editor for upstreet number three, four, five, and the upcoming six, which will appear in June of this year. Robin lives in Seattle with her husband, Andrew Oliveira, their daughter, Noelle, and their son, Miles.

Robin is represented by agent Marly Rusoff of Marly Rusoff & Associates (NA). For details of Robin’s book tour, go here.

Scholarship offered for Martone workshopat Postgraduate Writers’ Conference

2010-05-13T21:40:00.000-04:00

upstreet number four author Michael Martone will join the award-winning faculty at the 15th annual Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, August 9-15, at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. Designed for experienced writers with MFAs or equivalent backgrounds, the Conference features workshops limited to six participants, faculty and participant readings, craft classes, issues forums, and individual consultations with faculty, all within a vibrant, inclusive community atmosphere.

For fans of upstreet and Michael Martone, the Conference is pleased to offer a special scholarship opportunity to support participation in Martone’s Short Story workshop group. upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel, who has twice participated in Martone’s workshop, enthusiastically recommends it to fiction writers who would like a unique and inspiring learning experience. Interested writers should contact Conference Director Ellen Lesser at pgconference@vermontcollege.edu.

Visit www.vermontcollege.edu/post-graduate-writers-conference for full details about the conference.

Cooley poetry collection wins Kinereth Gensler Award

2010-05-06T22:37:00.004-04:00

Milk Dress, the fourth poetry collection by upstreet poet Nicole Cooley (“Hour of the Pink Flashlight,” upstreet number five) will be published in November by Alice James Books as co-winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award. This award, one of two competitions run by the publisher, is open to poets residing in New York, New Jersey, and New England. In addition to publication, winners of the award receive $2,000 and serve a three-year term on the Alice James Books Editorial Board.

“These are poems of birth and motherhood. They begin with a new life and end in a new self. They probe deep into the places where love extinguishes identity and yet renews awareness. What is so compelling here is that the arc of this journey is described with such music, craft and rigor in this wonderful collection.”—Eavan Boland

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans. Her third book of poems, Breach, about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, was published by LSU Press in April. Her first book, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book, The Afflicted Girls, was chosen as one of the best poetry books of 2004 by Library Journal. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY, and lives outside New York City with her husband and two young daughters.

Nicole was one of the featured readers in the upstreet number five offsite reading party during the April AWP Conference in Denver.

upstreet author Briccetti publishes memoir

2010-05-05T23:55:00.003-04:00

Blood Strangers, by Katherine A. Briccetti (“Slow Dancing to a Fast Song,” upstreet number three), was released by Heyday Books on May 1. Kathy describes her new book as “a memoir about searching for my place among the tangles of three generations of adoption and absent fathers in my family.” Excerpts from the memoir have been published in Dos Passos Review, San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine, Hip Mama, flashquake, Unbound Press, and in the anthologies The Maternal Is Political (Seal Press), Herstory (Adams Media) and Who's Your Mama (Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint). One excerpt was nominated for a 2007 Pushcart Prize. To see a video trailer for Blood Strangers, go here.

Kathy, whose work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2009. She earned a PhD in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley and an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program of the University of Southern Maine. She works as a school psychologist and writer/editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. She can be reached at kathybriccetti.com.

upstreet is having a party—and you’re invited

2010-04-03T00:23:00.005-04:00

upstreet will host an off-site party/reading during the 2010 AWP Conference, which will take place in Denver from April 7-10. Our party will be at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday 8 April at the 910Arts Eventgallery, 910 Santa Fe Drive. This event is free and open to the public. The readers, poets and prose writers from upstreet number five, will be Phyllis Barber, Matthew Burns, Nicole Cooley, Tiff Holland, Jay Kauffmann, and Xu Xi. upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel will emcee the festivities. Following the reading, there will be an opportunity for authors to sign copies of upstreet number five, or their own books, which will also be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be provided. Come help us celebrate AWP 2010 in Denver—and don’t forget to visit upstreet’s table (#K21) in the Bookfair.

upstreet poet Hostovsky publishes collection

2010-03-20T00:52:00.006-04:00

Dear Truth, a poetry collection by Paul Hostovsky, has been published by Main Street Rag. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in three issues of upstreet: “A Woman Taking off Her Shirt” (number four), “The Sadness of Dads” (number five), and “Frame” (number six). Paul’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from The Comstock Review, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, and the Frank Cat Press. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac and Best of the Net. His first full-length collection, Bending the Notes (2008) is also available from Main Street Rag. Paul works in Boston as a sign language interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Here is the book’s title poem:

Dear Truth
I do not love you.

I am running away
with my beloved
illusions. The sweet
nothings. Nothing
is what it seems.
I love what seems.
I am crazy in love with
the painfully obvious
transparent surface.
I am simply hungry.
You keep the house
and everything in it.
I am taking the dog.
And the windows.
—Paul Hostovsky

“Although the title poem is a sort of Dear John letter to Truth, the book itself is, in fact, dedicated to truth on a larger scale: the expansive and various truth of the imagination. In these touching, finely crafted, and often funny poems, Hostovsky remains true to his lively and inquisitive vision of the world, to beauty, joy, pain, and grief, always displaying a love of language that is contagious and invigorating.” —Jeffrey Harrison

Pushcart Board nominates two upstreet works

2010-02-24T16:52:00.003-05:00

In addition to the nominations sent in by independent publishers and literary magazines, Pushcart Press also considers works nominated by its own Board of Contributing Editors. For the third year in a row, the Pushcart Board has nominated two works from upstreet to be considered for inclusion in the next Pushcart Prize anthology, along with the six nominations made by our editors. They are a poem by Jeffrey Harrison, “Brief Note for April’s Departure,” and a short story by Xu Xi, “Anon.,” from upstreet number five.

It is a great compliment for upstreet to be singled out by this Board, which contains some very distinguished writers. Congratulations to both nominees, and best wishes to them in the competition.

upstreet is going to Bermuda

2010-02-14T09:58:00.005-05:00

The second Bermuda Writers’ Retreat, the brainchild of native Bermudian and upstreet author Kim Aubrey (“Notes,” upstreet number one), will be at the Rosedon Hotel, Pembroke, Bermuda, February 17-23, 2010. The retreat will take place during both Poetry Week and the Bermuda Arts Festival, and the schedule includes field trips to museums, galleries, plays and other cultural events, plus four two-hour generative morning workshops:

Postcards to the Edge, with Kim Aubrey
Character Development, with Elaine Batcher
At Home Abroad, with Nancy Anne Miller
The Fictional Environment, with Vivian Dorsel

Kim Aubrey is a Bermudian writer who lives in Toronto and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, in US and Canadian journals, and is forthcoming in The New Quarterly and Room magazine. She recently completed a memoir, The Girl in the Blue Leotard.

Kim hopes to develop the retreat into an annual event. For further information and to be placed on the mailing list for next year’s retreat, e-mail kaubrey@groupklement.com.

upstreet nominates six for 2010 Pushcart

2010-02-12T23:31:00.002-05:00

The editors of upstreet have nominated six works appearing in the journal’s fifth issue for this year’s Pushcart Prize. The nominees are two short stories, “Anon.,” by Xu Xi, and “On Seeing the Skeleton of a Whale in the Harvard Museum of Natural History,” by Maya Sonenberg; two creative nonfiction pieces, “This Place is Literally No Place,” by Jon Chopan, and “Left Behind,” by Wendy Ralph; and two poems, “A Small Obsession,” by Stephen Ackerman, and “The Sadness of Dads,” by Paul Hostovsky.

These six works were submitted to compete for inclusion in the 2010 issue of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, the only annual anthology to showcase work from America’s alternative, literary presses. This is the fourth year that upstreet has made Pushcart Prize nominations.

Chariott, Martone essays called “Notable”by Best American Essays 2009

2009-12-16T00:48:00.005-05:00

Two essays appearing in upstreet number four have been cited as Notable Works by Best American Essays 2009: “Vocabulary Lesson,” by Katherine Lien Chariott, and “Hermes Goes to College,” by Michael Martone.

Katherine Lien Chariott holds an MFA from Cornell University and a PhD from University of Nevada/Las Vegas, where she was a Schaeffer Fellow in fiction. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia, Hunger Mountain, Sonora Review, Concho River Review, 580 Split, and elsewhere. She lives in Shanghai, China.

Michael Martone, who was also the interview subject in upstreet’s fourth issue, teaches in the Program for Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Alive and Dead in Indiana, Michael Martone, and Racing in Place. He has edited nine other volumes, the most recent of which is Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover. His stories and essays have appeared in many magazines and journals, and he has received numerous fellowships, prizes, and awards.

upstreet number four won the Bronze Medal in the anthologies category of the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards. A third essay in that issue, “Everlasting,” by Frank Tempone, was cited as a Notable Work by Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009.

upstreet is delighted, and congratulates all of its Notable essayists.

Reiter chapbook available from Amsterdam Press

2009-12-15T22:11:00.007-05:00

upstreet poet Jendi Reiter’s poetry chapbook, Swallow, winner of the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize, can now be purchased from Amsterdam Press.

Jendi is the Vice President of WinningWriters.com, a monthly online newsletter dedicated to the finding and creation of resources for writers, which has been named one of Writer’s Digest’s “101 Best Websites for Writers” for the past five years. Jendi’s first poetry collection was A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point, 2003). Her poem “Poet’s Resume” was published in upstreet number one. Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry 1990, and in many journals, including Poetry, The New Criterion, Southern Poetry Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Pavement Saw, Hanging Loose, First Things, The Lyric, The Christian Century, The Saint Ann’s Review, Cider Press Review, A New Song, U.S. Catholic, The Rose & Thorn, About Such Things, Grasslands Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Clackamas Literary Review. She has won two awards from the Poetry Society.

You can visit Jendi at her website, Reiter’s Block.

Tempone essay cited as ‘Notable’ by Best American Nonrequired Reading

2009-10-05T09:15:00.001-04:00

“Everlasting,” an essay by Frank Tempone in upstreet number four, has been listed as a Notable work by the editors of Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009.

This is the first time a work appearing in upstreet has been mentioned in one of the prestigious annual Best American anthologies. upstreet number four was the winner of the Bronze Medal in the Anthologies category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards. The editors of that issue nominated “Everlasting” for a 2008 Pushcart Prize and for Volume III of The Best Creative Nonfiction.

Frank Tempone holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. A fiction writer and essayist, he has been a secondary school teacher for fifteen years, and his work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 580 Split, and The Berkshire Review. Another one of his personal narratives, “Born Again,” appeared in upstreet number three, whose editors nominated it for a 2007 Pushcart Prize and for Volume II of The Best Creative Nonfiction. The founder and former director of Word Street, the drop-in tutoring and writing center in Pittsfield, MA, he now lives in Chicago, IL.

We are very happy to congratulate Frank, who was Fiction Editor for upstreet number one, and Prose Editor for number two, and conducted the author interview for both issues.

upstreet submissions up 21%

2009-10-01T09:26:00.009-04:00

During the first month of its submission period, upstreet number six recorded a total of 648 submissions (fiction 290, poetry 288, creative nonfiction 70), compared with 534 submissions (fiction 210, poetry 254, CNF 70) for upstreet number five during September of 2008. This represents an increase of 21 per cent.

This will be the second year that upstreet has used Submission Manager, the online submission system developed by Devin Emke of One Story magazine. The Submission Manager software is available for purchase by literary journals through the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

To have your work considered for upstreet number six, go to the website, click on Submit, read the guidelines, and follow the instructions. The submission period ends March 1, 2010.

Jean Valentine wins Wallace Stevens Award

2009-09-18T07:10:00.007-04:00

Jean Valentine, whose poem, “Who watches,” appears in upstreet number five, has won the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award, given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Established in 1994, the award now carries a stipend of $100,000 for the recipient. This year’s judges were Frank Bidart, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Galway Kinnell, Nathaniel Mackey, Sharon Olds, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Kay Ryan, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Susan Stewart, James Tate, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and C. K. Williams.

Past winners have included A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, Mark Strand, James Tate and Richard Wilbur.

Valentine, current New York State Poet, has lived most of her life in New York City. Her collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003, won the 2004 National Book Award. Her tenth collection is Little Boat (Wesleyan, 2007). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Poetry Society of America. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y, and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was one of six featured poets in the May 2009 upstreet reading at BookCourt in Brooklyn.

upstreet editor/publisher featured on “Write the Book”

2009-08-30T08:35:00.000-04:00

An interview with upstreet editor/publisher Vivian Dorsel will be featured on the August 31 broadcast of “Write the Book,” the radio show and podcast for writers and curious readers. Hosted by writer Shelagh Connor Shapiro, “Write the Book” features interviews with authors, poets, agents, editors, illustrators and other people who love—and live—books. Previous interviewees have included Margot Livesey, Richard Russo, Mary McGarry Morris, Michael Collier, David Jauss, Richard Jackson, Tim Brookes, Sue William Silverman, and upstreet number five authors Robin Behn, Phyllis Barber, and Robin Hemley, among others. The show airs every Monday (2-3 pm) on WOMM-LP, 105.9 FM, The Radiator, in Burlington, VT. To hear Monday’s broadcast, go to http://theradiator.org/, and follow the “Listen to live stream” instructions. A free podcast of the program will be available Tuesday, September 1, at http://writethebook.podbean.com/

“Write the Book” host Shelagh Shapiro is a graduate of Middlebury College and the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program. Her stories have been published in a number of literary journals, including North Dakota Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, Short Story, The Baltimore Review and Hot Off the Press, an Australian anthology published by the New South Wales Writers’ Center, at which she was a participant in 2005. She lives near Burlington, VT, with her husband and two sons.

upstreet 5 features Hemley interview

2009-07-08T17:09:00.005-04:00

upstreet number five, which is now on sale, features a 20-page interview with Robin Hemley, director of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, and author of the recently released memoir, Do-Over! In Which a Forty-Eight-Year-Old Father of Three Returns to Kindergarten, Summer Camp, the Prom, and other Embarrassments. Robin, currently in the Philippines on a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, also teaches in the MFA in writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

This year’s issue, at 224 pages, received the largest number of submissions in upstreet’s five-year history. It contains nine short stories, selected from 1,178 submitted; nine creative nonfiction pieces, chosen from 358 submitted; and 28 of the 2,053 submitted poems.

The 42 contributors to upstreet number five are located from Seattle, Washington, to Birmingham, Alabama, from Portland, Maine, to Kentfield, California, and outside the country in France, Sweden, Scotland, and Hong Kong. Their levels of experience range from a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame to an author whose first published story appears in this issue. upstreet is proud of the geographic and experiential diversity of its contributors. We hope we will continue to attract high-quality submissions, both from established authors and from the new voices whose discovery makes publishing a literary journal such an exciting and rewarding enterprise.

Marshall Jon Fisher publishes book on "the greatest tennis match ever played"

2009-06-23T14:17:00.009-04:00

upstreet number one poet Marshall Jon Fisher (“Cannibals”) has published A Terrible Splendor (Crown/Random House, 2009), an account of the 1937 match between the world’s No. 1 tennis player, American Don Budge, and No. 2, the German Baron Gottfried von Cramm. In this last match of the Davis Cup semifinal, held at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, more was at stake than national pride and a tennis trophy. That day, as the swastika, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes flew together over Wimbledon’s Centre Court, 22-year-old Budge was on his way to becoming a superstar, and 28-year-old von Cramm, who had refused to join the Nazi party, feared he was on his way to prison—or worse. This story of the gripping five-set contest between the world’s top two tennis players on the eve of World War II has been widely reviewed; here is a sample—

The San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 2009: Joel Drucker calls Splendor “enthralling,” “a gripping tale,” and writes, “Wedding the nuances of a sport to broader historical events is a challenge, but Fisher pulls the task off with supreme finesse, at once revealing the triumph and tragedy of a remarkable tennis match.”

The Washington Post, May 3, 2009: “Marshall Jon Fisher has gotten hold of some mighty themes: war and peace, love and death, sports and savagery. …As the match enters its final set, all the narrative pieces lock together, and A Terrible Splendor becomes as engrossing as the contest it portrays.”

Vanity Fair, May 2009 (”Hot Type” column): “For his smashing serve and spectacular rallies between sports history and political drama, game, set, and match go to Marshall Jon Fisher’s A Terrible Splendor.”

The New York Times Book Review, June 21, 2009: “Absorbing…puts readers at the edge of their seats…. [Fisher’s] nuanced portrait…shows how, with unflinching generosity, von Cramm stoically endured his tribulations.”

Marshall Jon Fisher played varsity tennis at Brandeis University and has worked as a sportswriter in Miami and a tennis pro in Munich. He holds an M.A. in English from City College of New York. A freelance writer and editor, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly on topics ranging from wooden tennis racquets to Internet fraud, and his work has also appeared in Harper’s, Discover, DoubleTake, and other publications, including Best American Essays 2003. His book The Ozone Layer (Chelsea House, 1992) was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the best books of 1993 for teenagers. His book (with his father, David E. Fisher) Tube: the Invention of Television was published by Counterpoint in 1996 and in paperback by Harcourt Brace in 1997. Their second book together, Strangers in the Night: a Brief History of Life on Other Worlds (Counterpoint, 1998), was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the twenty-five Books to Remember of 1998.

Marshall lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts with his wife, Mileta Roe (a professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock), and their two sons, Satchel and Bram. For more about A Terrible Splendor and its author, visit his website.

Four upstreet authors in newField Guide to Writing Flash Fiction

2009-06-14T09:35:00.005-04:00

Three of the 25 contributing authors to the new Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (Rose Metal, 2009) are upstreet authors: Randall Brown, Michael Martone, and Bruce Holland Rogers. Also, one of the sample flash fiction stories in the book is by Lydia Davis, who was the interview subject in upstreet number two and has a short story in number five.

upstreet welcomes submissions of flash, sudden, and/or quick fiction--otherwise known as the short-short story. For examples of fictions under 1,000 words that have appeared in upstreet, see number two (Linda Pierce, "Neighbors"), number three (Molly Ritvo, "Babysitting;" Katy J. Vopal, "Howled"), number four (Randall Brown, "Patterns;" Molly Ritvo, "April 4, 1968"), and the upcoming number five (Lydia Davis, "An Awkward Situation").

Creative nonfiction pieces (prose poems/lyric essays) of under 1,000 words have appeared in upstreet number one (Anna Viadero, "At the Table"), number three (Kathy Briccetti, "Slow Dancing to a Fast Song;" Lorene Delany-Ullman, "Filler;" Bruce Holland Rogers, "Something is in the Air;" Max Ruback, "Soldiers;" Kiki Smith, "Babycakes"), number four (Jen Bills, "The Stairs are Broken So I Took the Elevator Again;" Daniel Hales, "Run Story;" Tiff Holland, "Ooh Baby"), and number five (Chris Gordon, "You Were Always on My Mind;" Catherine Harnett, "Automat;" Tiff Holland, "Eidetic;" Joanna McNaney, "Learning How to Smoke").

Flashers of both genres are advised that the submission period for upstreet number six will be from September 1, 2009, to March 1, 2010. We'd be happy to hear from you.

upstreet poet Carvalho releases audiobook

2009-06-13T22:45:00.000-04:00

upstreet number one poet Edward J. Carvalho ("God Was Like an Endless Night") has released his first audiobook, Chants from the Seven Cities (Guerrilla Ignition, 2009), available in CD and MP3 from CDBaby.com and Amazon.com. The 17-track playlist was selected from Carvalho's full-length poetry collection, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (Fine Tooth Press, 2007), and new, previously unpublished work. The audiobook was recorded in a two-hour marathon session by producer, publisher and upstreet number one poet Synnika Lofton ("A Revolutionary Mood") in Norfolk, VA. The cover artwork is by Jason Beam.

Edward J. Carvalho holds an MFA from Goddard College. He is a PhD candidate in the Literature and Criticism program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he is a teaching associate in the English Department and received the 20th and 21st Annual IUP Doctoral Fellowships (2006, 2008). His work, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in Quay, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and other journals. He was guest editor of David B. Downing's Works and Days journal on "Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University" (Fall/Spring 2009), which features his interviews with Noam Chomsky, Martin Espada, and Cornel West, and was discussed on Stanley Fish's New York Times blog. His collection, "If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns": Songs of the American Hiroshima, is forthcoming from Six Bad Apples Press (2009).

Ten Fletcher essays selected for 2009 publication

2009-06-07T21:38:00.006-04:00

upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor is on a roll—or so it seems. Nine essays by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher have been selected for 2009 publication in five literary journals. They are:

“Inheritance,” New Ohio Review, Spring 2009.
“Windows,” “Monster,” and “Stray,” Grasslands Review, Summer 2009.
“Rings,” Dos Passos Review, Fall 2009.
“Relics,” Palabra, Fall 2009.
“Wreath,” “Brotherhood,” and “Ash,” Water~Stone Review, Fall 2009.

Also, Harrison’s essay, “The Beautiful City of Tirzah,” will appear in Sue William Silverman’s forthcoming book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir (U. of Georgia Press, June 2009), a textbook and anthology for beginning and experienced writers who want to craft compelling art out of personal experience. This is the essay that was selected by Michael Martone and Lex Williford for The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (Simon and Schuster, 2007), and by the Pushcart editors for a Special Mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology.

Nice going, Harrison.

upstreet fiction editor signs Viking Penguin novel contract

2009-06-03T14:00:00.006-04:00

upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira has signed a contract for her novel, My Name is Mary Sutter, with Kathryn Court at Viking Penguin. The contract, for an undisclosed sum, was described as “the deal of the week” by Publishers Marketplace, calling the deal “a pre-empt,” which is a situation in which a publisher especially eager to get a book offers a large enough advance to make an immediate deal.

Set in the mid-19th century, Robin’s novel follows the aspirations and difficulties of a brilliant, somewhat odd, yet remarkable young midwife from Albany, NY, whose lofty hope of becoming a surgeon far exceeds what her family and the physicians and medical schools of her time are willing to accept. She travels to Washington, DC, to work in the Civil War hospitals, only to find the challenges formidable and the pull of home unavoidable. A chapter of the novel, which is scheduled for June 2010 publication, appeared in the July 2008 issue of Provincetown Arts magazine.

In 2007, Robin won the $10,000 15th annual James Jones First Novel Fellowship, awarded to an American author of a first-novel-in-progress by the James Jones Literary Society and Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA. Born in Albany, NY, in 1954, she earned a BA in Russian from the University of Montana and continued to study at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow, USSR. She became a Registered Nurse, and then worked as a bone marrow transplant and cardiac care nurse in Seattle before earning an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2006. She has been Fiction Editor for upstreet three, four, and the upcoming five, which will be released in late June of this year. Robin lives in Seattle with her husband, Andrew Oliveira, their daughter, Noelle, and their son, Miles.

upstreet number four wins IPPY Bronze Medal

2009-05-15T23:15:00.012-04:00

upstreet number four has been named the Bronze Medal winner in the anthologies category of the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY). These awards, chosen from 3,380 entries in 65 national categories (there is no literary journals category), have been given annually for the past thirteen years in recognition of excellence in independent publishing.

upstreet number four, which was released in June of 2008, features a 24-page interview with Indiana-born author Michael Martone. The 36 poets and prose writers whose work appears in this issue include finalists for the 2007 National Book Award (David Kirby) and the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (Michael O’Brien), a winner of the World’s Greatest Short Story Contest (Michael Martone), a 2008 IPPY Bronze Medalist (Karen Chase), a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow (Bill Zavatsky), and the winner of the 2003 Governor General’s Award for English Fiction, Canada’s highest literary prize (Douglas Glover). Their work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and the Norton anthologies. Besides these accomplished authors, upstreet number four includes many whose publication careers are just beginning. We are very pleased about this, since upstreet was founded with the vision that it would ultimately be a mixture of established and emerging writers.

In the IPPY anthologies category, the 2009 Silver Medal winner is Listen to Me: Shared Secrets from WriteGirl, by Keren Taylor (WriteGirl), and the two books tied for the Gold Medal are A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, edited by Stacy Bierlein (Other Voices Books), and And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, edited by Muneeza Shamsie (The Feminist Press, CUNY). The medals will be presented at an awards ceremony and reception in New York City on Friday, May 29.

Our thanks and congratulations to everyone who has been a part of upstreet number four.

Ruback story to appear in war anthology

2009-05-13T23:18:00.006-04:00

Max Ruback, whose creative nonfiction piece, “Soldiers,” appeared in upstreet number three, will have a short story in Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform (Press 53), which will be released on Saturday, May 23. This anthology of war stories, edited by Jeffery Hess, also contains work by 23 other writers, including Tim O’Brien, James Salter, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tobias Wolff. A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to USA Cares, a nonprofit organization that assists post-9/11 members of the military and their families to cope with the financial burdens resulting from their service to America.

Max Ruback was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Mount Ida College. He teaches English and reading at John I. Leonard High School in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he also coaches the JV boys’ basketball team. He has recent or forth-coming work in Descant, Frostproof Review, Quick Fiction, Zing, Smokelong Quarterly, and other publications. He recently finished a collection titled The Kindest Light.

upstreet author elected VCFA Faculty Chair

2009-05-06T14:10:00.006-04:00

Author and editor Xu Xi, whose short story “Anon.” will appear in upstreet number five, has been elected to a three-year term as Faculty Chair of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. She has been a member of the program’s prose faculty for seven years, and advises both fiction and creative nonfiction students. As Faculty Chair, she will work in cooperation with the program’s administrative director and faculty advisory committee to provide oversight for the program on academic issues and matters having to do with faculty. She will also conduct the graduation exercises during each residency and respresent the program in broader literary forums such as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She will continue to conduct workshops, and will advise a reduced number of students each semester.

Xu Xi is the author or editor of ten books. Recent titles include Evanescent Isles (essays), Fifty-Fifty (ed., anthology), Overleaf Hong Kong (stories and essays) and The Unwalled City (novel). She inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website.

upstreet is happy to congratulate Xu Xi on her new position.

Two upstreet authors featured in Hunger Mountain auction

2009-05-02T07:12:00.001-04:00

Hunger Mountain, the semiannual arts journal published by Vermont College of Fine Arts, will hold its spring fundraising auction on ebay, beginning at noon EST on Saturday, May 2. Participants will have an opportunity to bid on manuscript critiques to be conducted by mail, e-mail or phone with notable authors and agents, two of whom will be upstreet authors Michael Martone and Xu Xi. Bidding will end at noon EST on Saturday, May 9th. Two other writers whose manuscript consultation services are being offered are David Jauss, who purchased the first copy of upstreet number one sold, and Philip Graham, upstreet’s first subscriber.

All auction purchases are tax deductible. Along with other items, the one-on-one critiques in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, writing for children and writing for the stage will be available at http://stores.shop.ebay.com/thehungermountainstore. Check it out.

upstreet wishes Hunger Mountain a successful auction.

Two upstreet authors published in2008 Best of the Net Anthology

2009-04-29T21:06:00.001-04:00

Two authors whose work has appeared in upstreet have had pieces that were published in online magazines chosen for the Best of the Net 2008 anthology. “His Wife,” a story by Barry Jay Kaplan that was published in Apple Valley Review, was one of five stories chosen, and “To a Motion Activated Paper Towel Dispenser,” a poem by Paul Hostovsky that was in Thick with Conviction, was one of the 17 poems selected.

Barry’s story, “His Brother Calls,” appeared in upstreet number three. His stories have also been in Descant, Bryant Literary Review, Central Park, Brink, Appearances, and the Northern New England Review. He has written the novels Black Orchid (with Nicholas Meyer), That Wilder Woman, and Biscayne. His book of interviews, Actors at Work (with Rosemarie Tichler) was published in August 2007. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Key West. Landscape of Desire, published by Smith and Krause, was the American representative to the 25th Australian National Playwrights Conference. He lives in New Haven, CT, and is currently working on a novel, The Body in Exile.

Paul’s poem, “A Woman Taking off Her Shirt,” was published in upstreet number four and another, “The Sadness of Dads,” will be in the upcoming number five. His poems have also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac, and have been published in Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, and many other journals and anthologies. He won the Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award for 2001 and the White Pelican Review’s Hollingsworth Prize in 2005. He has three chapbooks, Bird in the Hand (Grayson Books, 2006), Dusk Outside the Braille Press (Riverstone Press, 2006), and The Best Lunches (Frank Cat Press, 2008), as well as one full-length poetry collection, Bending the Notes, (Main Street Rag, 2008). Paul’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize 13 times; he has won once. He makes his living in Boston as an interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing where he specializes in working with the deaf-blind.

Two upstreet authors to teach at Postgraduate Writers’ Conference

2009-04-27T09:45:00.004-04:00

upstreet authors Michael Martone and Robin Behn will be on the faculty of the fourteenth annual Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, which will take place at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, from August 11-17, 2009. The Conference will offer fourteen workshops in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and young adult literature.

Michael Martone will facilitate a workshop on The Short Story, for the fifth consecutive year. His essay “Hermes Goes to College” appeared in upstreet number four, in which he was also the subject of the author interview. He is the author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Blue Guide to Indiana, Alive and Dead in Indiana, and Racing in Place. His 2005 book Michael Martone gathers fifty fictions in the form of “contributor’s notes,” and Double Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone was released in 2007. He co-edited The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. The Flatness and Other Landscapes, a collection of his own essays about the Midwest, won the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 1998. He teaches at the University of Alabama.

Robin Behn will lead a Poetry Manuscript workshop; this will be her third time teaching at the Conference. Her poem “Elegy and Lament” will appear in upstreet number five. She is the author of Paper Bird, which won the AWP Award Series in Poetry, The Red Hour, Horizon Note, which won the Brittingham Prize, and the chapbooks The Oboist and Naked Writing. She is also co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships, she teaches in the MFA programs at The University of Alabama and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

For more information about the program, including accommodations, fees, and how to apply, contact Conference Director Ellen Lesser at (802) 828-8835 or e-mail: pgconference@vermontcollege.edu

Eight upstreet poets publishedin Wom-Po listserv anthology

2009-04-25T23:40:00.000-04:00

Eight of the 259 poets, or one out of every 32 (3%) whose work appears in the new anthology of poems from the Women’s Poetry Listserv, have had or will have work published in one or more of the first five issues of upstreet. Wom-Po is an international listserv devoted to the discussion of Women’s Poetry. Membership is open to all individuals who are interested in discussing poetry written by women. The discussion covers women poets of all periods, aesthetics, countries, and ethnicities.

Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv, edited by Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, and Lesley Wheeler (Red Hen Press, 2008), contains the following work by upstreet poets:

—Jeanne Marie Beaumont (upstreet #4), “Home in the World,” p. 57
—Nicole Cooley (#5), “Grief As Is,” p. 98
—Lisken Van Pelt Dus (#1, 2, & 5), “Broken Things,” p. 131
—Eve Grubin (#5), “Modesty,” p. 174
—Marilyn Hacker (#5), “Ghazal: In Summer,” p. 180
—Maryanne Hannan (#1), “To You Who Speak of Audre Lorde,” p. 184
—Elaine Sexton (#3 & 4), “Public Transportation,” p. 338
—Yerra Sugarman (#4), “To Miklós Radnóti,” p. 354

The anthology also includes an introduction by D’Arcy Randall and a preface by Wom-Po founder Annie Finch. This one-of-a-kind international collection of 259 poets (258 women and one man) was shaped by consensus-based feminist collaboration over the internet.

Lisken Van Pelt Duspublishes poetry chapbook

2009-04-20T13:03:00.004-04:00

Everywhere at Once, a chapbook by upstreet poet Lisken Van Pelt Dus, has been published by Pudding House Press. It is a collection of twenty poems, unified by bird imagery. In poems that travel the globe, the book deals with themes of immanence, identity, the human condition, and, of course, love. The cover illustration is by the poet’s brother, John Van Pelt. The book is available in Berkshire County (MA) bookstores, from the publisher, or directly from the author.

Lisken’s poem “Barn” appeared in upstreet number one, “Entropy” was in number two, and “Light” will be included in number five, which will be released around the Fourth of July.

Lisken is a poet and martial artist who was raised in England, the U.S., and Mexico, and teaches English and other languages at Monument Mountain Regional High School, Great Barrington, MA. Her poetry can also be found in Conduit, Main Street Rag, The South Carolina Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and other journals, and has earned awards from The Comstock Review, Atlanta Review, and Writing the River: the 2004 Word Street Writing Contest. She lives in Pittsfield, MA, with her husband, Bob Dus.

Mark DeCarteret is named Portsmouth, NH Poet Laureate

2009-04-20T08:53:00.008-04:00

Mark DeCarteret, whose poem “Heir” appeared in upstreet number three, has been named seventh Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH. He will serve for the next two years as the public face of poetry in the community and create a project that supports the mission of the Poet Laureate Program, “building community through poetry.” The Poet Laureate is selected by a committee of seven local writers, community members, and city officials from nominations made by the public.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1960, Mark graduated from Emerson College in 1990 with a BFA in Creative Writing, and was Emerson’s representative at the 1990 Boston Inter-Collegiate Poetry Festival. Since graduating from the University of New Hampshire in 1993 with an MA in English, he has been a fixture in the New Hampshire/Southern Maine poetry scene as a reader, editor, performer and publishing poet. He lives in Stratham, NH, and teaches at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. Mark’s poetry has appeared in more than 150 literary reviews, including AGNI, Atlanta Review, Caliban, Chicago Review, Cream City Review, Gargoyle, Phoebe, Poetry East, Salt Hill, and Sonora Review, and in such anthologies as American Poetry: The Next Generation and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998. He is the author of three books: Over Easy, Review: A Book of Poems, and The Great Apology.

The Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program, established in 1997 by local arts organizers and writers, appoints and supports an outstanding local poet as Poet Laureate for the city, sponsoring events that feature area poets and authors from outside the New Hampshire Seacoast, and encouraging a love of poetry among people of all ages.

Amy Small-McKinney publishes chapbook

2009-04-09T22:34:00.006-04:00

The publication of Clear Moon, Frost, a poetry chapbook by Amy Small-McKinney, has been announced by Finishing Line Press, and is available for pre-ordering. Amy’s poem “Eddie and His Beagle” appeared in upstreet number one.

Amy’s first chapbook, Body of Surrender (Finishing Line, 2004) was showcased at Poet’s House in New York. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2004 and again in 2006. Her work has appeared in on-line and print journals such as Wild River Review, The Cortland Review, The Pedestal Magazine, ForPoetry, Elixir Press, Fox Chase Review, and Blue Fifth Review. She interviewed Pulitzer Prize poetry nominee Bruce Smith for the April 2006 issue of The Pedestal Magazine, and was guest editor for its June 2006 issue. Her poem “Nigeria 2002” was awarded third place in the 2007 Philadelphia Eco Poetry Project. Her essays have appeared in a number of publications, such as The Philadelphia Inquirer and Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal—University of Toronto, and other publications.

When not writing poetry, Amy works as a consulting counselor in local school districts, and facilitates community groups dealing with psychosocial issues. She will soon be joining a private practice as a therapist for children, young adults, and families. She feels that not having an MFA is both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that she writes, and educates herself, alone; the blessing is that she permits the poems to emerge without an internal censor or shame. She lives with her husband and daughter in Blue Bell, PA.

“Amy Small-McKinney writes with a commitment to inner life, inner depth, and inner truth.”—Molly Peacock

“Amy Small-McKinney…has secretly and quietly produced some of the most beautiful poems I have ever read.”—Franz Wright

Sirenland 2009 is a smash!

2009-04-07T22:00:00.001-04:00

The consensus among the attendees of the 2009 Sirenland Writers’ Conference is that the gathering’s third year was a great success. Held at Le Sirenuse, a five-star hotel in Positano, Italy, it included a three-hour mixed-genre (fiction and memoir) workshop each morning and readings and talks in the evenings, with plenty of time in between to work, relax, or enjoy the sights, food, and shopping in and around this lovely little Amalfi Coast village. There were nine writers in each of three workshops, led by Peter Cameron, Dani Shapiro, and Jim Shepard, the author interviewed for upstreet number one. One of the highlights of the week was a dinner at the home of Carla and Antonio Sersale, owners of Le Sirenuse, which featured an open-mic reading for the workshop participants. For further information on Sirenland, including information on how to apply for next year's conference and a slideshow of photographs by conference co-organizer Michael Maren, go to the Sirenland website.

The photo above, taken by conference co-organizer and One Story founder/ editor Hannah Tinti, shows the members of one workshop: Allison Gehlhaus, Sylvia Mann, Mary Medlin, Kabi Hartman, Robin Maguire, Jim Shepard, upstreet editor/ publisher Vivian Dorsel, Jane Percy, Eric Grunwald, and Mary Mott.

Pushcart Board nominates two upstreet poems

2009-04-06T23:34:00.000-04:00

For the second year in a row, the Pushcart Board of Contributing Editors has nominated two works from upstreet to be considered for inclusion in the next Pushcart Prize anthology, along with the six nominations made by our editors. They are two poems by Alan Feldman, “Preparing for Class” and “The Grounding,” from upstreet number four.

It is a great compliment for upstreet to be singled out by this Board, which contains some very well known writers. Congratulations to Alan, and best wishes to him in the competition.

Casperian releases Sybil Baker novel

2009-03-10T23:30:00.001-04:00

The Life Plan, a novel by upstreet author Sybil Baker, has been released by Casperian Books. Sybil is the author of the short story “Cape of Good Hope,” which appeared in upstreet number four.

The Life Plan is the story of Kat, a modern-day woman who is on track to have everything she’s ever wanted—a satisfying career, a loving family, and a house of her own—until her husband decides to go to Thailand to become a massage therapist. To save their marriage, Kat tags along on his misguided spiritual quest and winds up in her own crazy misadventure. With the help of her new friends—a fun-loving Italian sexpot, an insane Frenchman, and an unexpected English heartthrob—Kat starts to wonder whether having it all is really all there is. A fast-paced romp through exotic Thailand, the novel has been called a “screwball comedy for the 21st century” and “the most original, no-holds-barred, well-informed and readable traveler’s guide to Thailand.” To find out more about The Life Plan, visit Casperian’s product page.

Sybil Baker taught for twelve years in South Korea before accepting a position as an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. She holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including The Bitter Oleander, Paper Street, and Alehouse. Her essay on American expatriate literature appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle in September 2005, and her short story, "Tempo," is forthcoming in Motif: Writing by Ear (Motes Books, April 2009), You may visit Sybil at her website or her blog.

Jim Shepard to teach at Sirenland

2009-02-24T23:30:00.003-05:00

Fiction writer Jim Shepard, subject of the author interview in upstreet number one, will be one of three workshop leaders at the 2009 Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy, from March 15-22. This is the third year for the conference, whose centerpiece is a mid-morning two-hour workshop. Workshops will be mixed-genre, fiction or memoir, with nine participants who were chosen based on their submitted manuscripts. Each of the 27 workshop participants will also have a private conference with Jim or one of the other workshop leaders—Peter Cameron and Dani Shapiro—over the course of the week. Evenings will be devoted to readings and discussions. upstreet editor/publisher Vivian Dorsel will be one of the workshop participants at this year’s conference.

Jim Shepard, the J. Leland Miller Professor of English at Williams College, is the author of six novels, the most recent of which is Project X (Knopf, 2004), and four short story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf, 2007), a National Book Award finalist and winner of the 2007 Story Prize. Five of his books have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. His essays and short stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Fiction, McSweeney’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories 1994 and 2002.

upstreet nominates Ackerman and Meltz for Best New Poets 2009

2009-02-23T09:29:00.007-05:00

The annual Best New Poets prize anthology allows eligible literary magazines to nominate two emerging poets (poets who have not published a book-length collection) each year. We have submitted two nominations from upstreet number four for the 2009 anthology: Stephen Ackerman, “How to Touch a Woman,” and Daniel Meltz, “Ode to the Xes.”

Stephen Ackerman works as a lawyer for the New York City Law Department. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Seneca Review, and upstreet. He lives in Dutchess County, NY, with his wife, Laurie, and their sons, Nicholas and William.

Daniel Meltz is a technical writer at Google who lives in New York City. His poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Mudfish, and Columbia Review. He is co-writing the book of a musical, titled “Too Hot for Hollywood,” about the 1934 Hays Code.

The guest editor for Best New Poets 2009 is Kim Addonizio, who will select 50 poems from nominations made by literary magazines and writing programs, as well as an open internet competition. The upstreet selections were made by Poetry Editor Jessica Greenbaum and Editor Vivian Dorsel. We wish both nominees the best of luck in the competition.

upstreet is having a party—and you're invited

2009-02-01T22:14:00.006-05:00

upstreet will host an off-site party/ reading during the 2009 AWP Conference, which will take place in Chicago from February 11-15. Our party will be held at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 North Lincoln, beginning at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday 12 February. This event is free and open to the public.

The readers, poets and prose writers from upstreet number four, will be Sybil Baker, Jennifer Barber, Jeanie Chung, Michael Martone, Elaine Sexton, and Kip Zegers. upstreet Editor/ Publisher Vivian Dorsel will emcee the festivities.

Some wine and other refreshments will be provided by upstreet, and after that runs out, plenty more will be available for purchase. Come help us celebrate AWP 2009 in Chicago—and don’t forget to visit upstreet’s table (#311) in the Bookfair.

Robin Oliveira lectures at Pacific residency

2009-01-20T11:57:00.011-05:00

upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira delivered a lecture on “Demystifying the Editorial Process” during the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program Winter Residency at Seaside, Oregon, on Saturday 17 January. Robin’s lecture began with an overview of upstreet’s history, policy and practices, including submission guidelines and the qualifications of the editorial staff. She described the submission-evaluation process, giving a brief statement about what each of the genre editors is looking for.

Regarding fiction, Robin emphasized her belief that character is desire. “If your characters don’t want something,” she said, “there is nothing for the reader to hold on to, and ultimately, no reason for the story. The conflict has to be up front, beginning with line one. A character wants something, and is up against some person, thing, or other obstacle that prevents him from obtaining it.” She went on to discuss various story elements such as scene, dialogue, subtext, time, and drama at the sentence level, citing Douglas Glover’s essay, “The Drama of Grammar,” in the Canadian journal The New Quarterly (No. 105, 2006).

Robin concluded by saying that she thought the biggest challenge for writing students is story structure. “When I’m reading a shortlisted story,” she said, “I discover that it is almost always the ending that fails. When you are editing your stories, check the through line. Boil down your story to its complication, action and resolution to see if it has the architecture to carry it through to a successful end. A successful story is a story in which a character comes to grips with his or her desire through a series of actions in which emotional change takes place that is of significance to the character, and therefore to the reader.” She went on to discuss three stories—Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point,” Tim O'Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”—reducing the stories to their architecture to illustrate successful resolutions.

Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing is a low-residency program in which each student creates a portfolio of fiction, nonfiction or poetry under the supervision of writer advisors. The Atlantic Monthly’s 2007/08 Fiction Issue rated the Pacific program as one of the nation’s top five low-residency MFA in Writing programs, along with the programs of Antioch University, Bennington College, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Warren Wilson College.

Robin Oliveira, who lives in Seattle, holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her novel-in-progress, The Last Beautiful Day, was awarded the 2007 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. An excerpt from the novel appears in the 2008 issue of Provincetown Arts Magazine. The upcoming upstreet number five is the third issue for which Robin has served as Fiction Editor.

Boisseau poetry collection available for pre-ordering

2009-01-15T19:52:00.003-05:00

A Sunday in God-Years (Arkansas, 2009), a poetry collection by Michelle Boisseau which will be released February 1, is now available for pre-ordering through Barnes & Noble, Borders, Target, and Amazon.com, and also by local independent booksellers and directly from the publisher. A poem from the book, “Recriminating Rags of Sunlight,” appears in upstreet number four (p. 75).

A winner of the 2009 University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series, A Sunday in God-Years takes its title from the notion that if we consider ourselves inside the long stretch of geologic time, human history happens in the blink of God’s eye as he rolls over during a Sunday nap. The book is centered on the long poem “A Reckoning,” made up of fifteen shorter sections (some of them documents like wills and runaway slave notices). This long poem tries to reckon and recognize the sticky webs that bind the heirs of those who were slave holders (like the Boisseaus) and of those who were held as slaves.

“In every line on every page of this beautiful and ambitious book, the present comprehends the past ‘the way the sidewalk burns hours after / the sun’s gone down.’ Unsentimental, stunningly alive in sound as well as sense, compassionate, unflinchingly honest, A Sunday in God-Years is a flat out wonderful book, one of the best I’ve read in years.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Old War: Poems

“Even a ‘ragged chunk of limestone’ opens up expanses of geological, historical, and familial time in the artful hands of Michelle Boisseau, who revisits her slave-owning ancestry for a reckoning. . . . Her poems are a unique blend of sensuality, rue, fresh insight, engaging candor, anguish, wicked humor, taut lyricism and a pungent dash of caustic.”—Eleanor Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

“The title of this splendid book reflects the tonal complexity of these richly layered poems. . . . Boisseau sounds like nobody else and her vision demands our attention.”—Mark Jarman, author of Epistles: Poems

Michelle Boisseau is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she also serves as associate editor of BkMk Press. She is the author of three books of poetry: No Private Life; Understory, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize; and Trembling Air, a PEN/USA finalist. She is also co-author (with Randall Mann and Robert Wallace) of the popular book Writing Poems (Longman, 2007), now in its seventh edition.

Greenbaum poem on Poetry Daily

2009-01-11T22:29:00.005-05:00

“Little White Truck,” a poem by upstreet Poetry Editor Jessica Greenbaum, will appear on Poetry Daily for Monday 12 January 2009. The poem, which was originally published in the Winter 2008/2009 issue of Salamander, appears below:

Little White Truck

Because the white truck traveling the span of the Williamsburg Bridge
could be the white fastener traveling the top of a zip-lock bag,
the East River and tugs might be contained without spilling
in today’s October light, along with this new spray of trees and
picnic tables which appeared when the industrial tide of Williamsburg
went out. If these could be contained, then likewise the two cyclists,
now dismounted and steadying their bikes as they kiss, and surely
it could hold the music they heard last night eddying again
around their thoughts, and the memory of their first idea of the future
loosed when he held her in a doorway lit by cobwebs of spring rain.

©2008 Jessica Greenbaum

Kauffmann essay in Writer’s Chronicle

2008-12-18T21:45:00.005-05:00

“Understated Prose: The Beauty of Conveying More with Less,” a writing craft essay by upstreet author Jay Kauffmann, appears in the December issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. The essay, a re-appreciation of literary minimalism, uses examples from Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Marguerite Duras, Kathryn Harrison and others to illustrate the techniques that characterize minimalist fiction. These techniques include the use of ordinary words, simple sentence patterns, a flat, clipped delivery, attention to surface detail, the absence of emotion, a narrow focus on sensation, and an overall tendency toward omission, compression, and economy of language.

Jay, a former international model and current writing teacher, holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He was a finalist for the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize and a nominee for Best New American Voices 2009. He currently lives in Paris with his wife and their two children, and will be the 2009 Writer-in-Residence at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. Jay’s short story, “In a German Garden,” will appear in the upcoming upstreet number five. We congratulate him on a fine piece of work and hope Fan Club members will take the time to enjoy this issue of the Chronicle.

Dispatches by Robin Hemley—from Manila to McSweeney’s

2008-11-16T18:00:00.001-05:00

Robin Hemley, Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and soon to be an upstreet author, is spending the year on a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Philippines with his family. During this time, he’ll be writing regular dispatches from Manila, which will appear as a column in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Robin’s wife, Margie, is from the Philippines, and he has spent considerable time there since 1998, when he was researching Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday (Nebraska, 2003).

Robin, who is also a faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program, will be the subject of the author interview in upstreet number five. His latest book, Do-Over!, will be released by Little, Brown in the spring of 2009.

Lamb novel to be released November 11

2008-11-08T08:00:00.004-05:00

The Hour I First Believed (Harper, 2008), the third novel by best-selling author Wally Lamb, will appear in bookstores November 11, and is currently available for pre-ordering. Wally, whose earlier novels, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True, were both Oprah’s Book Club selections, was interviewed by Editor/ Publisher Vivian Dorsel for upstreet number three. Here’s what he said about how the idea for his new book came to him:

Lamb: …The Hour I First Believed, the novel I’m writing now, started not with a voice or an image, but with an anecdote that a cousin of mine told me. She and her family live in Paducah, Kentucky, the site of one of the school shootings; I think it was about a year and a half before Columbine. Her two younger daughters went to that school, and were friends with the sister of the kid who did the shooting and killing. His name was Michael Carneal, and my cousin’s daughters knew his older sister. So, my cousin was telling me this story about that day—the confusion, and the horror of what had just happened. I believe Michael had been apprehended and taken away, and the school was in chaos, and his older sister was walking in a daze down the corridor, just sobbing and saying, “But in four years here I’ve never even been absent, I’ve never been in trouble.” She was just moaning, at least in the version that I heard. And that was a couple, three, four years before I sat down to write this novel. Every time I remembered the story my cousin told me, tears would come to my eyes, and sometimes tears would fall, and my heart went out to that poor girl and everybody in the school, including this very disturbed kid who had brought the gun to school. I didn’t want to write about a school shooting, but it wouldn’t let go of me, so I started researching Columbine, just because there’s so much out there about Columbine, and lo and behold, that’s where the novel begins, in Littleton, Colorado, at Columbine High School. —“A Conversation with Wally Lamb,” upstreet number three, ©Copyright 2007 Vivian Dorsel

You can read Chapter One of The Hour I First Believed on Amazon.com. Here’s how it begins:

They were both working their final shift at Blackjack Pizza that night, although nobody but the two of them realized it was that. Give them this much: they were talented secret-keepers. Patient planners. They’d been planning it for a year, hiding their intentions in plain sight on paper, on videotape, over the Internet. In their junior year, one had written in the other’s yearbook, “God, I can’t wait till they die. I can taste the blood now.” And the other had answered, “Killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops! My wrath will be godlike!”

My wrath will be godlike: maybe that’s a clue. Maybe their ability to dupe everyone was their justification. If we could be fooled, then we were all fools; they were, therefore, superior, chaos theirs to inflict. But I don’t know. I’m just one more chaos theorist, as lost in the maze as everyone else.

It was Friday, April 16, 1999, four days before they opened fire. I’d stayed after school for a parent conference and a union meeting and, in between, had called Maureen to tell her I’d pick up takeout. Blackjack Pizza was between school and home. —The Hour I First Believed, ©Copyright 2008 Wally Lamb

Thanks to Chapters Bookstore—and to photographer Craig Swinson

2008-11-02T19:45:00.003-05:00

We’d like to thank Chapters Bookstore, 78 North Street, Pittsfield, MA, for making its wonderful events room available for two readings by a variety of authors from the first four issues of upstreet. These photographs, taken by Craig Swinson, show the second reading, featuring poets Lisken Van Pelt Dus and Aaron M. Beatty, and hosted by upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel, which took place on Thursday evening, October 30.

The earlier reading, on September 25, featured poets Michelle Gillett and Cynthia Saunders Quiñones, and creative nonfiction writer Frank Tempone. Chapters’ versatile reading/ writing/ events room was also used for two sessions of a fiction writing workshop, “The Reminiscent Narrator,” conducted by Vivian Dorsel in connection with Pittsfield’s community reading project, The Big Read: To Kill a Mockingbird, which took place during October.

Chapters welcomes members of the community who would like to use their room for reading, or for working on their own writing. Once again, we are pleased to have a bookstore in Pittsfield’s central business district—“upstreet,” to us.

Breiner Begins Blogging

2008-10-18T13:15:00.002-04:00

The chronically employed Sandy Breiner, Vermont College of Fine Arts alumna, memoirist, and (most important) upstreet author, has entered the blogosphere with The Serial Worker. Sandy is the author of the upstreet number one creative nonfiction piece “Fast Food Family,” an excerpt from her memoir, Tales of a Serial Worker: 63 Jobs and Counting. Those 63 jobs of a mere three years ago have now grown to 69, and the purpose of Sandy’s blog is to celebrate what has become a career in itself: continual vocational rebirth. In addition to listing Sandy’s 69 jobs (from Corn Detasseler to Assistant Historical Romance Editor) and posting narratives about them from time to time, The Serial Worker invites readers to enumerate their own serial careers, describe their worst job ever, and even asks whether they have ever worked with her—an obvious attempt to rival Facebook in the networking field. We congratulate Sandy on her energy, and wish her success with the blogification of her memoir (Job #70?).

Come join us in LowellColumbus Day weekend

2008-10-02T20:06:00.006-04:00

The first Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which is being promoted by its organizers as “An Epic Celebration,” will take place in Lowell on October 10-12, 2008. This new event will include workshops, readings, discussions, films, “Downtown Kerouac Places”—a guided tour of the locations that were important in the life of Lowell’s best known literary resident—and a Small Press Fair on Saturday, October 11, in which upstreet will be an exhibitor.

The Massachusetts festival is being compared with the biennial four-day Dodge Poetry Festival, “the largest poetry event in North America,” the most recent of which concluded on September 28, 2008, in Stanhope, NJ. It will have a long way to go to achieve that magnitude, but the possibility is there. Most of the events will be free, but tickets will be required for the featured readings, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon and evening. Festival sponsors include the Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and many Merrimack Valley and Lowell business, educational, and cultural organizations.

The Merrimack Valley was chosen because of its rich literary history, which in addition to Jack Kerouac includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau. Some have observed that Berkshire County’s literary heritage makes it an excellent location for a future Massachusetts festival—and not just for poets!

Come visit upstreet in Lowell. Maybe some year soon we’ll be greeting you in Pittsfield.

Hostovsky poem chosen for Pushcart anthology

2008-09-25T14:37:00.000-04:00

A poem by Paul Hostovsky, author of the upstreet number four poem “A Woman Taking off Her Shirt,” has been selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses (Pushcart Press, 2009). The poem chosen for the anthology is “Dream,” which appeared in Volume 28 of Blueline, a literary journal published by the State University of New York at Potsdam. This was the ninth of his poems to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize (including the one that appeared in upstreet number four), but the first to be chosen as a winner.

Paul Hostovsky’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and have been published in Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, and many other journals and anthologies. He won the Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award for 2001 and the White Pelican Review’s Hollingsworth Prize in 2005. He has two chapbooks, Bird in the Hand (2006), which won the Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition, and Dusk Outside the Braille Press (2006), winner of the Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Award. He makes his living in Boston as an interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, where he specializes in working with the deaf-blind. Both of his chapbooks are available for the blind through Bookshare.org.

Paul’s first full-length collection, Bending the Notes, is due out in January 2009 from Main Street Rag. About the collection, Jeffrey Harrison (also an upstreet poet) says: “This book kicks ass. … Equally adept with fixed or not-so-fixed forms as with free-wheeling free verse, Hostovsky shows us, over and over, in language that is always alive, what it is like to be alive.” You may visit Paul at his website.

upstreet author is editor of Teenagers from the Future

2008-09-17T19:17:00.010-04:00

Timothy Callahan, whose short story, “Polyphemos Erat Monstrum,” appeared in upstreet number two, is the editor of the newly released Teenagers from the Future: Essays on the Legion of Superheroes (Sequart, 2008). He will be available to sign his books from 6 to 8pm on September 18 at Chapters Bookstore, 78 North Street, Pittsfield, MA, as part of the city’s “Third Thursday” celebration. The book is also available at Amazon.com.

Teenagers from the Future, which includes a foreword by Matt Fraction and an afterword by Barry Lyga, is described by the publisher as follows: “For 50 years, the Legion of Superheroes has occupied its own, vital corner of the DC Universe—and comics fandom. The Legion’s expansive cast, bizarre characters, futuristic setting, extended storylines, and elaborate continuity all set it apart from other superhero comics. This essay collection, from fans and scholars alike, is as diverse as Legion history. Essays examine significant runs (by Jim Shooter, Paul Levitz, & Keith Giffen); the Legion’s science, architecture, and fashion; the role of women, homosexuality, and race; the early Legion’s classical adaptations, teenage cruelty, relation to the early Justice League, and resurrection of Lightning Lad; whether the Legion should be allowed to age; the Amethyst saga; the themes of the reboot Legion; and the so-called Threeboot’s relationship to adult adolescence and generational theory.”

Tim Callahan teaches English at Drury High School in North Adams, MA, where he has been voted Teacher of the Year twice. He is the author of Grant Morrison: The Early Years (Sequart, 2007), which explores the unifying themes of Morrison’s early work, providing a close analysis of stylistic and structural techniques. The new, revised edition of this book is available from the publisher. Tim also writes for Back Issue magazine and Comic Book Resources. He lives in Pittsfield with his wife, Judy, and their two children. You may visit him at his blog, geniusboyfiremelon.

upstreet 5 introduces online submissions

2008-09-02T22:20:00.000-04:00

Submission Manager, an automated system that enables writers to submit their work through the upstreet website, went online September 1, the first day of the upstreet number five reading period. Under the new system, we will no longer take submissions by e-mail (or surface mail), but only from authors who submit through the website. This system asks submitters to log in, fill out a form giving their contact information, add a comment if they wish, and then upload their submission files. The procedure is very simple, and many submitters have already used it with no problems. In the first 24 hours we received 69 submissions--25 fiction, 25 poetry, and 19 creative nonfiction.

The Submission Manager software was designed and developed by Devin Emke, webmaster for One Story magazine, and is available to other literary journals for a fee through the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). It is very flexible and can be customized to accommodate the ways in which individual journals deal with their submissions. It also keeps a database of all submissions received, which can be sorted and searched in various ways, and generates e-mail messages acknowledging receipt of submissions and notifying submitters whether their work has been accepted or declined.

upstreet is very pleased to be among the users of this time- and labor-saving system. To read our new guidelines, or to submit to upstreet number five, visit our Submission Manager here.

The personal in poetry:Frances Richey’s The Warrior

2008-08-17T16:55:00.003-04:00

This is a long-overdue post about a stellar poetry collection: The Warrior: a Mother’s Story of a Son at War, by Frances Richey. Two of the poems in this collection, “His Gun” and “He Tells Each Story,” first appeared in upstreet number two, and another, “The Power Lifter”—the poet’s favorite—was published in upstreet number three.

Fran Richey, who raised her son, Ben, as a single parent, began writing these poems when he, a West Point graduate and Green Beret, was deployed to Iraq in 2004. While they had long been at opposite ends of the political spectrum, they had always been able to discuss, and even argue about their differences openly, without damaging their relationship. On September 11, 2001, the very day that Ben was selected for Special Forces training, the likelihood of his eventually going into combat became a certainty. From then on, their differing attitudes toward the war developed a stronger personal relevance, the channels of communication between Fran and Ben started closing up, and Fran began to feel as if she were losing her son. She wrote the poems as a way of coping with her own feelings and saying the things she could not say to him directly, and doing so made her feel closer to him. While she didn’t show him the poems until he returned from overseas, she did tell him she was writing them. “But don’t worry,” she said. “No one reads poems.”

In hindsight, this statement is ironic. Fran’s agent put the manuscript out for auction, and four or five publishers bid on it. This in itself is unusual for a poetry collection. The winning publisher, Viking, gave the book national publicity and sent the author on a reading/signing tour of nine major cities from New York to San Francisco. The book tour was preceded by appearances at Fort Bragg and West Point with Ben, a 34-year-old Special Forces Major who has returned home safely after two tours of duty in Iraq.

Besides the coverage of Fran Richey’s book tour that appeared in local papers across the country, The Warrior has been written and talked about in places where it is unusual to find poems or discussions of poetry. It was featured, and one of its poems reprinted, in the November 2007 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, and that article has been included in a book of the best articles that appeared in the magazine in 2007. Another poem—the first poem ever—was featured on the “Lives” page of the March 2, 2008 New York Times Magazine, which is usually devoted to a personal essay. The book was discussed in Anna Quindlen’s April 14, 2008 Newsweek column, in a June 2007 New York Times op-ed column by Nicholas Kristof, during a Mother’s Day appearance on “The News Hour” (PBS, May 9, 2008), and in appearances on NPR’s “The Story with Dick Gordon” (May 22, 2008) and “All Things Considered” (May 25, 2008).

This upstreet Fan Club post was partly prompted by a full-page review by David Orr that appeared in the Sunday, July 20 New York Times Book Review. Most of that review was devoted not to the book itself, but to a discussion of the personal element, or the story behind the poems, with the suggestion that this, rather than the poetry, is what Viking had paid such a (presumably) large sum for. Although he does grant that “Frances Richey is a poet, fortunately…,” and that she “is an actual writer, and she knows how to put together a clean, solid contemporary poem,” there remains the clear implication that poems about the poet’s personal experience are somehow less adequate than detached lyrics about Greek gods or Celtic myths. (Fran Richey, by the way, was an award-winning poet before she wrote The Warrior; her prior collection, The Burning Point, won the 2004 White Pine Press Poetry Prize.) As William Wordsworth defined it, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” My own belief is that, were it not for “the personal,” very few poems—indeed, very few essays, stories, plays, or novels—would ever be written.

I dislike political art; that is my bias. Others believe that all art is political; that is their bias. Inevitably there will be those who use others’ work to grind their own political axes, on one side or the other of any issue. But as Fran Richey says herself, these are not political poems—and her son does not feel them as political, but as his mother’s expression of the effect his being placed in harm’s way had on her. He also sees the poems as her effort to cope with the growing rift between them, and believes, as she does, that her work has had a healing influence on their relationship, enabling them both to recognize that love is more important than political differences.

The strength of The Warrior, in addition to the obvious timeliness of its subject matter, lies in its memoir-like personal narrative quality and its accessibility to a larger audience than the usual readers of poetry collections. Most important, however, is the ability of its author to make the reader feel what it would be like to have a son who is risking his life, by his own choice, in the service of his country.

He Tells Each Story
with his hands, all the lines
in his palms deeply creased.
When he makes his right
a gun, it is a gun;
the third and index fingers
fused, extended;
the thumb bent sharp
at the knuckle. Sometimes
his left hand hovers
over his chest,
as if he still wears armor,
as if his heart must be
protected from his touch.

From The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War, by Frances Richey (Viking, 2008). Reprinted by permission.

upstreet 4 features Martone interview

2008-07-24T00:55:00.001-04:00

upstreet number four, which is now on sale, features a 24-page interview with Michael Martone, the Indiana-born author of Michael Martone, Racing in Place, and many other works of experimental fiction and nonfiction.

This year’s issue, at 232 pages, is the longest one to date, and received the largest number of submitted works in its four-year history. It contains eight short stories, selected from 584 submitted; nine creative nonfiction pieces, chosen from 153 submitted; and 23 of the 1,174 submitted poems.

Its contributors hail from all areas of the U.S., and even from Shanghai, China. The 36 authors whose work appears in upstreet number four include finalists for the 2007 National Book Award (David Kirby) and the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (Michael O’Brien), a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow (Bill Zavatsky), and the winner of the 2003 Governor General’s Award for English Fiction, Canada’s highest literary prize (Douglas Glover). Their work has appeared in such journals and anthologies as The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and the Norton anthologies.

Besides these accomplished authors, upstreet number four includes many whose publication careers are just beginning. We hope this will always be true, since upstreet was founded with the vision that it would ultimately be a mixture of established and emerging writers. In the end, the truly rewarding part of publishing a literary journal is discovering new talent--and there is plenty of that in upstreet number four.

upstreet poet wins prize in Times Square competition

2008-06-19T22:06:00.000-04:00

upstreet poet Gretchen Fletcher has been named a winner in the first-ever national contest for poetry inspired by Times Square, “Bright Lights/ Big Verse: Poems of Times Square,” and will read her winning poem, “Two Giant Men in New York,” in Times Square on June 23. This competition, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and the Times Square Alliance, selected five winners from a pool of close to 700 entrants. Besides the trip to New York to read their poems, each winner will receive a prize of $1,000. A poem by Gretchen, “Recitation in Clover,” appeared in upstreet number three.

Gretchen Fletcher lives in Fort Lauderdale and leads writing workshops for Florida Center for the Book. Her poetry has appeared in journals, including The Chattahoochee Review, Pacific Coast Journal, Northeast Corridor, and Inkwell, and in anthologies, including Sincerely, Elvis; The Cancer Poetry Project, and Poetic Voices Without Borders. She received the grand prize in San Francisco’s Artists Embassy International Dancing Poetry Festival, and first honorable mention in Canada’s lichen literary journal Serial Poet competition. She was a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and a juried poet at the Houston Poetry Fest. Her poetry chapbook, That Severed Cord, will be published by Finishing Line Press on June 27. You may visit Gretchen on the web at Open Art Space.

Karen Chase wins Bronze IPPYfor Land of Stone

2008-06-09T13:45:00.003-04:00

Land of Stone: Breaking Silence through Poetry (Wayne State, 2007), a nonfiction book by upstreet author Karen Chase, was named a Bronze Medal winner in the category of psychology/mental health by the judges of the 2008 Independent Publishers Book Awards (“IPPY”). The award-winning book is an account of Karen’s ten years as poet-in-residence at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, where she taught poetry writing to severely disturbed psychiatric patients. The book focuses on her work with Ben, a handsome, formerly popular and athletic young man who had given up speaking and had withdrawn from social interaction. One day a week for two years, she and Ben passed a pad of paper back and forth, taking turns writing one line of poetry each, a process that ultimately produced 180 poems.

The purpose of the IPPY Awards is to recognize the best independently published books of the past year in 64 national categories. This year’s contest drew 3,175 entries. Karen has traveled all over the country giving readings and talks about Land of Stone, which is in its second printing and has also been named a Best Book of 2007 by Chronogram.

“Karen Chase’s Land of Stone is a poignantly eloquent narrative of the therapeutic relationship between an admirably humane, gifted poet and a schizophrenic young man.”—Harold Bloom

Karen Chase’s poems have appeared in all four issues of upstreet; two poems from her newly released second poetry collection, BEAR (CavanKerry, 2008), will be included in the upcoming upstreet number four. She founded and ran the Camel River Writing Center in Lenox, MA, from 1991 to 2004. She has taught at The Frost Place and has been a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow. Her work has appeared in the Norton anthologies, Billy Collins’s Poetry 180, The New Yorker, The Gettysburg Review, and The Yale Review. Her first book of poems, Kazimierz Square (CavanKerry, 2000), was shortlisted by ForeWord Magazine as Best Indie Poetry Book of 2000. Karen lives in Lenox with her husband, painter Paul Graubard.

Evison novel available for pre-sale

2008-06-03T21:06:00.001-04:00

All About Lulu (Soft Skull, July 2008), a novel by upstreet author Jonathan Evison, is now available for pre-sale on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, borders.com, and powells.com. The publisher describes it as “A freakishly charming tale of star-crossed, would-be step-sibling love in a family of failed bodybuilders in suburban Los Angeles.” The film rights for the book have been optioned by Crossroads Films, which is developing the project. Here are a couple of samples of the advance praise the novel has been receiving:

“All About Lulu is an exhilarating, wholly original and brave novel about obsession, love and becoming. With Will Miller, Evison has created a thoroughly modern protagonist steeped in Dickensian complexity, pure yet conflicted, lost yet driven to find truth in the dysfunctional American abyss.”—James P. Othmer, author of The Futurist

“All About Lulu is a novel of tremendous energy and heartbreaking, hilarious insight, a novel with a heart of gold. In a manner that is both breathless and effortless, Evison reminds us of life’s beautiful oddity. A remarkable debut.”—Brad Listi, author of Attention Deficit Disorder

Evison, who lives on an island in Puget Sound, is the author of “Static,” a short story that appeared in upstreet number three. His stories have also been published in Portland Review, Orchid, Knock, Red Wheelbarrow, Quick Fiction, Stringtown, and other journals. An excerpt from All About Lulu, titled “Big Bill Down Under” (estimated reading time 15:02), appeared in Opium Five.

upstreet nominates Ackerman and Rian for Best New Poets 2008

2008-05-30T21:25:00.004-04:00

The annual Best New Poets prize anthology allows eligible literary magazines to nominate two emerging poets (poets who have not published a book-length collection) each year. We have submitted two nominations from upstreet number three for the 2008 anthology: Stephen Ackerman, “Magic Lantern,” and Kirsten Rian, “The Dark Blue Swath Flies Like a Kite.”

Stephen Ackerman works as a lawyer for the New York City Law Department. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Seneca Review, and upstreet. He lives in Dutchess County, NY, with his wife, Laurie, and their sons, Nicholas and William.

Kirsten Rian is a poet and educator, and a freelance grant writer and editor. She was a finalist in the last Glimmer Train Poetry Open, and her work has appeared in the literary journal Rhino and in Raising Our Voices, an anthology of Oregon poets against the war. She is a writer in residence through the Writers in the Schools Program in Portland.

The guest editor for Best New Poets 2008 is Mark Strand, who will select 50 poems from nominations made by literary magazines and writing programs, as well as an open internet competition. The upstreet selections were made by Poetry Editor Jessica Greenbaum and Editor Vivian Dorsel. We wish both nominees the best of luck in the competition.

upstreet poet wins Prairie Schooner Award

2008-05-28T19:15:00.004-04:00

Yerra Sugarman, whose poem, “We Were a Boat,” will appear in the upcoming upstreet number four, has won a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for an excerpt from “Journal: Rai’ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv-Yaffo, July 2003,” which appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Prairie Schooner.

Yerra Sugarman received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first book, Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow, 2002). Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, was published in January of this year, also by Sheep Meadow. She has received a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the George Bogin and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards of the Poetry Society of America and, most recently, a 2008 Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers.

Yerra’s poems, translations and articles have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Nation, ACM, Cimarron Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She was born in Toronto and now lives in New York City, where she has taught creative writing in undergraduate and MFA programs. She currently teaches poetry at Rutgers University and is Writer in Residence at Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts. You may visit Yerra at her blog.

upstreet nominates three for The Best Creative Nonfiction

2008-05-27T18:20:00.001-04:00

The journal Creative Nonfiction is currently taking submissions for the third volume of its anthology, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and we have nominated three pieces from upstreet number four: “Run Story,” by Daniel Hales, “Tools of the Trade,” by A. J. Naslund, and “Everlasting,” by Frank Tempone.

Daniel Hales lives in Greenfield, MA, and teaches English to residential Special Ed high school students, and to honors students at UMass/Amherst. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit, Quarter After Eight, Slipstream, Cranky, Bateau, and Opus 42.

A. J. Naslund lives in Louisville, KY. He holds a BA and an MA from the University of Montana/Missoula, and a PhD from the University of Louisville. He was a university English teacher for several years in the US, Japan, and Korea. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Abiko Annual (Japan), Lips, Ceramics Monthly, RagTimes, Kentucky Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Caesura, and others. His poetry collection, Silk Weather (1999), was published by Fleur-de-Lis Press, Spalding University.

Frank Tempone, director of Word Street, holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. A fiction writer and essayist, he has been teaching for fourteen years, and his work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 580 Split, and The Berkshire Review. He lives in Dalton, MA.

The selections were made by Creative Nonfiction Editor Harrison Candelaria Fletcher and Editor Vivian Dorsel. We wish all three candidates the best of luck in the competition. upstreet number four will be available for sale by early July.

upstreet author publishes Nerds book

2008-05-20T18:32:00.000-04:00

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them (Penguin, 2007), by David Anderegg, PhD, is now available in bookstores, and online from Amazon.com. Anderegg, a Lenox, MA, family psychotherapist who teaches psychology at Bennington College, also writes fiction under the pseudonym “Ed Anthony.” His short stories have appeared in The Berkshire Review and in upstreet number one (“Dejeuner Sur L’Herb,” p. 189) and number two (“Heretics,” p. 11). He was nominated by upstreet’s editors for a 2007 Pushcart Prize.

Nerds is a lively, thought-provoking book that focuses on how anti-intellectualism is bad for our children and our country. It asks why children are so terrified to be called “nerds,” and what this anti-intellectualism costs both our children and our society. In his book, Anderegg examines why science and engineering have become socially poisonous disciplines, why adults ignore the derision of “nerdy” kids, and what we can do to prepare our children to succeed in an increasingly high-tech world. Using education research, psychological theory, and interviews with both nerdy and non-nerdy kids, Nerds argues that we need to change our society’s anti-intellectual attitudes and prepare rising generations to compete in the global marketplace.

David Anderegg was born and grew up in Wisconsin, graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received his PhD in psychology from Clark University, Worcester, MA. He and his wife, Kelley DeLorenzo, have two grown-up children: Francesca, a doctoral student in violin at Juilliard, and Peter Lorenzo, a cellist in the Phoenix Symphony. For more information about Anderegg and his work, including selected book reviews and “The Last Nerd Self-Test You’ll Ever Need,” visit the author’s website.

Finishing Line to publish Coté chapbook

2008-05-05T00:20:00.001-04:00

Flying for the Window, a poetry chapbook by Charles Coté, has been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press. The manuscript includes “Seeing the Oncologist,” which will appear in upstreet number four, and other poems about the poet’s son Charlie, who died of a malignant melanoma in 2005 at the age of 18, when he was still a high-school student and the frontman for a popular Rochester-area band, Fivestar Riot. The chapbook takes its title from one of the entries in the journal Charlie left behind:

Certainty is the cage that keeps us
safe from curiosity. I’ve been released
from the cage. I am the songbird
and I am flying for the window.
I know it’s closed but I plan on
breaking through.

Charles Coté was born in North Adams, MA, and lives in Rochester, NY, where he practices as a clinical social worker. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Blueline, Free Lunch, Identity Theory, Modern Haiku, Connecticut River Review, Adagio Verse Quarterly, and HazMat Review. To read his interview with Boston Literary Magazine on the poems he wrote about his son, go here: http://www.bostonliterarymagazine.com/win08interview.html

upstreet poet wins Rosenberg Award

2008-05-03T19:03:00.000-04:00

“God Doesn’t Speak in the Psalms,” a poem by Jennifer Barber, received the $1,000 first prize in the 21st annual Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for poems on the Jewish experience. A reading and awards ceremony was held on 27 April at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center.

Jennifer’s work appeared in upstreet number three and will appear in the upcoming upstreet number four. Her book, Rigging the Wind, 2003, received the Kore Press First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Field, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She attended Colby College in Maine, studied medieval literature in England as a Rhodes Scholar, and received her MFA from Columbia University. She teaches at Suffolk University in Boston and edits the literary journal Salamander.

Zavatsky awarded MacDowell Fellowship

2008-04-29T22:10:00.001-04:00

upstreet poet Bill Zavatsky has been awarded a Fellowship by the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH, for the second summer in a row. He will spend five weeks during June and July at MacDowell, which is the oldest artists’colony in the United States.

Bill Zavatsky’s work appeared in the second and third issues of upstreet and will appear in the upcoming fourth issue. He holds BA and MFA degrees from Columbia University and has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose, 2006). A poem that appears in that collection and also in upstreet number two, “Live at the Village Vanguard,” received a Special Mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology. A longtime jazz pianist, he has written poems for CDs by Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He has also published translations of several French poets, including (with Ron Padgett) The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth, by Valery Larbaud, which will be reissued this year by Black Widow Press of Boston. Bill lives in New York City and teaches English at The Trinity School. Earlier this year he was named a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

Harrison is runner-up for Poets’ Prize

2008-04-27T20:30:00.000-04:00

upstreet poet Jeffrey Harrison's fourth collection, Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way, 2006), is one of two runners-up for the Poets’ Prize, awarded annually by a peer jury of poets and administered by the West Chester University Poetry Center. The 2008 prize was won by A.E. Stallings for Hapax, and the other finalist was The Queen’s Desertion, by Carol Frost. Jeffrey will read from his work at the awards ceremony, which will take place at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York City, on Thursday 22 May at 7pm.

Two of Jeffrey Harrison’s poems, “Temporary Blindness” and “Bed Trouble,” are in upstreet number three. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, The New Republic, Poets of the New Century, and many other magazines and anthologies. His previous published collections are The Singing Underneath (selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, 1988), Signs of Arrival (1996), Feeding the Fire (Sarabande, 2001), and The Names of Things (Waywiser, 2006). His chapbook, An Undertaking, was published by Haven Street Press in 2005. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Jeffrey has taught at several universities and schools, including George Washington University, Phillips Academy, where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence, and College of the Holy Cross. He is currently on the Faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine.

Sexton poems in O! Magazine, Poetry Daily

2008-04-25T10:27:00.003-04:00

“Night. Fire,” a poem from Causeway (New Issues), the new poetry collection by Elaine Sexton, will be featured on Poetry Daily April 27. Another poem from Causeway, “Heaven,” appears in the May issue of O! the Oprah Magazine. Elaine’s book is described this way by Eamon Grennan: “Lodged in various locales, whether urban or rural, earthbound or on the open sea, answering a landscape, a family memory, or the vagaries of love, the poems of Causeway are always informed by an honest buoyancy of spirit.”

Two of Elaine’s poems were in upstreet number three: “What He Carried,” which appears in Causeway, and “Seaside Pastoral.” A third poem, “Tack,” will appear in upstreet number four. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, ARTnews, Art in America, Bloom, Hunger Mountain, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and the Lambda Book Report. She teaches a poetry workshop with a special focus on the chapbook for The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and a few years ago started the website chapbookfinder.com. Elaine is the author of an earlier poetry collection, Sleuth (New Issues, 2003). She lives in New York City, where she works as a publisher of special-interest magazines.

Elaine will read her work on May 4 (along with upstreet Poetry Editor Jessica Greenbaum and others) in the Bellevue Hospital Rotunda, New York, on May 14 at Bird & Beckett Books in San Francisco, on May 27 at Bluestockings in New York , and on June 6 at RiverRun in Portsmouth, NH.

Randall Brown wins chapbook contest

2008-04-23T22:23:00.000-04:00

Randall Brown, whose (very) short story, “Patterns,” will appear in upstreet number four, has won the 2007 chapbook contest conducted by Flume Press, a small press affiliated with the literary editing and creative writing programs at California State University, Chico. His short-short story collection, Mad to Live, will become the latest book in the Flume Chapbook Series, and will be released in August or September of this year.

The aim of Flume Press is to give newer writers exposure that can help them achieve deserved recognition. They publish one book a year, with a print run of 500 copies, and try to get the book to reviewers, literary magazine and small press editors, and other readers interested in contemporary poetry and fiction. Flume began in 1984 as an independent poetry publisher, and since then has released 18 poetry chapbooks. In 2003, they launched their first fiction chapbook contest, the winner of which was Sherrie Flick’s I Call This Flirting, which Randall says was “…a big influence on my writing short shorts.”

Randall Brown teaches at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He holds a BA from Tufts and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he studied with authors such as Nance Van Winckel, Abby Frucht, Pamela Painter, and Douglas Glover. He was formerly an editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, an online literary magazine dedicated to flash fiction. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Evansville Review, The Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, and others. You may visit Randall at his blog.

Poem-A-Day to feature Karen Chase poem

2008-04-09T11:33:00.002-04:00

To celebrate National Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets will send out one new poem each day in April to those who subscribe to its Poem-A-Day e-mail service. Poems have been selected from new books published this spring. The poem for Sunday, April 13, will be “Jam,” from BEAR, the forthcoming book by Karen Chase, which will be out in May. Two poems from BEAR, “The Hint” and “Ursa Major,” will be in upstreet number four.

upstreet poet is Guggenheim Fellow

2008-04-03T21:51:00.002-04:00

Poet Bill Zavatsky, whose work has appeared in the second and third issues of upstreet and will appear in the upcoming fourth issue, has been awarded a 2008 Fellowship in Poetry by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded, on a competitive basis, to enable advanced professionals in the sciences, humanities, and creative arts to pursue research or creative work of their choice.

Bill Zavatsky grew up in Bridgeport, CT, and holds BA and MFA degrees from Columbia University. He has worked as a journalist and published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose, 2006). A poem that appears in that collection and also in upstreet number two, "Live at the Village Vanguard," received a Special Mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology. A longtime jazz pianist, he has written poems for CDs by Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He has also published translations of several French poets, including (with Ron Padgett) The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth, by Valery Larbaud, which will be reissued this year by Black Widow Press of Boston. He lives in New York City and teaches English at The Trinity School.

Photo by Margaretta K. Mitchell

Pamela Erens is L.A. Times Book Prize finalist

2008-03-16T21:37:00.001-04:00

The Los Angeles Times has announced the finalists for its 2008 Book Prize, and one of the five contenders for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction is The Understory (Ironweed, 2007), a novel by Pamela Erens, author of "Sebastian," a short story in upstreet number three (p. 145). The Understory won the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize.

Pamela's short fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Boston Review, The Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Skidrow Penthouse, and Redivider. Her work will be featured in the short-story anthology Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008). A resident of New Jersey, she is the recipient of two New Jersey State Council for the Arts fellowships in fiction, most recently for 2007. Pamela has also published poetry, literary essays, articles and book reviews in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, New York Newsday, Glamour, O: The Oprah Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, Ms., and Mother Jones. A longtime editor at magazines including Glamour and 7 Days, she has won national awards for both her editing and her journalism.

upstreet wishes Pamela the best of luck in the competition. The Understory is available from several online sources, including Pamela's website.

Fletcher essay in Writer's Chronicle

2008-03-15T22:37:00.001-04:00

"Writing a Shadowbox: Joseph Cornell and the Lyric Essayists," a writing craft essay by upstreet Creative Nonfiction Editor Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, appears in the March/April issue of The Writer's Chronicle. The essay, based on Fletcher's 2006 Vermont College of Fine Arts graduation lecture, is a sensitive and compelling exploration of the similarities between the lyric essay form and the intricate constructions of late Brooklyn visual artist Cornell. upstreet congratulates Harrison Fletcher on a fine piece of work, and hopes Fan Club members will take the time to enjoy this issue of the Chronicle.

Jim Shepard wins Story Prize

2008-03-06T16:15:00.002-05:00

Fiction writer Jim Shepard, who was the subject of upstreet's first author interview, has been awarded this year's Story Prize for his short-story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf, 2007). The book, a collection of eleven first-person stories covering subjects ranging from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to a town's obsession with high-school football in contemporary Texas, was also one of five finalists for this year's National Book Award. Shepard, a 49-year-old English professor at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, was awarded $20,000, the largest first prize for any fiction contest in the country.

For those who live in the Berkshires and surrounding area, Shepard will read from his prize-winning work at 7:00 p.m. tonight (Thursday 6 March), at Gallery 51 in North Adams. Copies of his books will be available for purchase at the event, as will upstreet number one, which contains the interview with Shepard conducted by Frank Tempone in 2005.

Celebrating New Yorker Poetry

2008-02-29T09:02:00.016-05:00

On Thursday evening, February 21, an illustrious collection of poets gathered to honor the retirement of The New Yorker's longtime Poetry Editor, with a reading and celebration at The New School's Theresa Lang Center: "Alice Quinn: Twenty Years of Poetry at The New Yorker." The event was co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the New School Graduate Writing Program, and Poets House. The New Yorker poets chosen to toast Alice Quinn included Henri Cole, Deborah Garrison, Eamon Grennan, Major Jackson, D. Nurkse, Sharon Olds, Vijay Seshadri, C.K. Williams, Matthew Zapruder, recently named New York State Poet Jean Valentine—and upstreet's own Poetry Editor, Jessica Greenbaum. Each poet was asked to read a poem of his/her own that Quinn had published, then one or two by other people that she had published. Jessica read Jack Gilbert's "A Brief for the Defense," Wislawa Szymborska's "A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth," and her own poem, "The Yellow Star that Goes with Me," which was requested by Alice Quinn. Here it is:

THE YELLOW STAR THAT GOES WITH ME

Sometimes when I'm thirsty, I mean really dying of thirst
For five minutes
Sometimes when I board a train
Sometimes in December when I'm absolutely freezing

For five minutes
Sometimes when I take a shower
Sometimes in December when I'm absolutely freezing
Sometimes when I reach from steam to towel, when the bed has

soft blue sheets

Sometimes when I take a shower
For twenty minutes, the white tiles dripping with water
Sometimes when I reach from steam to towel, when the bed has

soft blue sheets
Sometimes when I split an apple, or when I'm hungry, painfully

hungry

For twenty minutes, the white tiles dripping with water
As the train passes Chambers Street. We’re all crammed in like laundry
Sometimes when I split an apple, or when I'm hungry, painfully

hungry
For half an hour, sometimes when I’m on a train

As it passes Chambers Street. We’re all crammed in like laundry
It’s August. The only thing to breathe is everybody’s stains
For half an hour. Sometimes when I’m on a train
Or just stand along the empty platform

It’s August. The only thing to breathe is everybody’s stains
Sometimes when I board a train
Or just stand along the empty platform—
Sometimes when I'm thirsty, I mean really dying of thirst

—From Inventing Difficulty, by Jessica Greenbaum (Silverfish, 2000)

Wish you had all been there

2008-02-27T13:54:00.009-05:00

Monday night was our night downstairs at the Cornelia Street Cafe in the Village, where the audience enjoyed readings by two creative nonfiction writers from upstreet number three, followed by a short musical program by one of the readers. Frank Tempone read his upstreet story, "Born Again," and Karen D. Taylor a personal narrative, "Not Tina in This Country: Remembering the Things My Grandmother Told Me." Karen, also a jazz vocalist, then performed five musical numbers, beginning with an a cappella rendition of "Dindi." For the subsequent four songs, Karen was accompanied by Marcus Persiani, piano, Andy McCloud, bass, and Jimmy Delgado, percussion. Those numbers were "People Make the World Go Round," "Work Song," "My Favorite Things," and "Angel Eyes." Poet Bill Zavatsky and I were the guest hosts. This was a treat, and I hope we have an opportunity to do something like it again.

More Pushcart nominations

2008-02-20T18:39:00.005-05:00

The works in the annual Pushcart Prize anthology are chosen not only from the six nominations allotted to each independent press and literary magazine, but also from nominations by Pushcart's Board of Contributing Editors, a group of 230 distinguished writers and editors. We have just been notified that this Board has nominated three pieces from upstreet number three for inclusion in the 33rd edition of the Pushcart anthology, which will be released in November. The nominated works are two poems by Karen Chase, "The Angel of Lost Things" (p. 22) and "Dusk in the South" (p. 23), and a short story by Lindsay Anne Sproul, "Chariot" (p. 83). We will be notified by May if any of upstreet's nine nominees are chosen for the anthology. Meanwhile, we congratulate Karen and Lindsay, and we are keeping our fingers crossed.

And, yes...we are very, very pleased at the literary community's continuing recognition of upstreet and its authors.

upstreet @ Cornelia Street

2008-02-07T07:14:00.002-05:00

Please join us for the final reading in the upstreet number three road tour, at the Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia Street, New York City, from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. on Monday, February 25. The Cornelia Street Cafe is the award-winning Greenwich Village restaurant and jazz club, also well known for its literary readings, which has been called "a culinary as well as a cultural landmark." The hosts for this event will be New York City poet Bill Zavatsky and upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel. The readers, both creative nonfiction writers, will be Frank Tempone ("Born Again," p. 11) and Karen D. Taylor ("The Space between Lucidity and Madness," p. 133). Karen, a professional jazz vocalist, will also give a musical performance, accompanied by Marcus Persiani, piano; Andy McCloud, bass; and Jeff Haynes, percussion.

Stop by and say hello, and enjoy the delicious food and drink, excellent music, and outstanding writing.