Archive for the ‘Literary News’ Category

Our Contributors, Knocking It Out of the Park

Monday, May 6th, 2013

We’ve heard some good news this spring about our contributors!

Joshua Weiner (Issues 2.2 and 9.1) won a Guggenheim fellowship. You can read his commentary on the poem “Outrageous Fortune” here.

Jessica Hollander (Issue 8.1) won the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Her book, In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place, will be published by UNT Press in 2014. Katherine Dunn was the judge.

Dawn Lonsinger (Issue 5.2) won the 2012 Idaho Prize for Poetry for her book Whelm, which will be published by Lost Horse Press. (The judge for that contest was Nance Van Winckel, whose poems appeared in issues 6.2 and 8.2, and her art in 9.2.)

Christopher Merkner’s story “Last Cottage” appeared in Issue 7.1, as well as in Best American Mystery Stories 2011—and now it will appear in his first collection of stories, The Rise and Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic, available in January 2014 from Coffee House Press. Here’s our appreciation of the story.

We’re honored to have published these writers’ work!

Best of Cincinnati

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Thanks to CityBeat magazine! They named us Cincinnati’s Best Lit Mag in their annual round-up of the staff’s favorite arts and nightlife in the Best of Cincinnati edition. We’re honored to be in such good company: Some of the other categories included Best Way to Score Free Alcohol Without Unwanted Sexual Advances (Mayday’s monthly whiskey-soaked spelling bee), Best Way to Pretend You’re in a Band Without Having to Learn an Instrument (Sexy Time Live Band Karaoke at Northside Tavern) and Best Wall of Cheese Curls (that one went to Jerry’s Jug House in Newport. So close.)

We’re also glad to be part of such a vibrant literary community; in addition to the cheese-curl walls and karaoke, Cincinnati boasts the fantastic and innovative Forklift, Ohio (whose editor, Matt Hart, is headlining our Word Without End event next weekend) and staff members of Smartish Pace, as well as the fabulous literacy nonprofit WordPlay, which operates in the spirit of Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari’s 826 National tutoring centers.

Thanks, CityBeat! (You can read what they said about us here.)

Contributor Congrats

Friday, March 29th, 2013

We’d like to give a shout out to Cincinnati Review contributor Karina Borowicz. Her new collection, The Bees Are Waiting, was selected by Franz Wright for the Marick Press Poetry Prize and has just been named a Must-Read Book of 2013 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. The collection contains her poem “The Globe,” which was published in CR 6.1. Congrats, Karina!

News from Our Contributors

Saturday, February 16th, 2013

Congratulations to our contributors who’ve gotten good news lately!

Book News:

John A. Nieves (8.2) won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize for his first book, Curio, which will be published in early 2014.

Jon Pineda (9.2) won the 2013 Milkweed National Fiction Prize for his first novel, Apology, which will be published this summer.

Award News:

Brian Conn (9.2) won the 2013 Bard Fiction Prize for his novel, The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season (Fiction Collective 2, 2010). The prize includes $30,000 and a one-semester appointment as writer-in-residence at Bard College.

Rochelle Hurt (8.2) and Dana Koster (7.1) were awarded Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, and Rebecca Dunham (8.1) and K. A. Hays (3.2, 5.2) were named as honorable mentions.

Fellowship News:

Steve Kistulentz (9.1) received a $4,000 Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission.

Roger Reeves (9.2) and Jake Adam York (6.1) both won NEA fellowships in poetry.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to join the chorus of those mourning the loss of York, an excellent poet and member of the literary community.

Emerging Writers Festival at the University of Cincinnati

Friday, October 5th, 2012

Every other fall, the University of Cincinnati’s Department of English hosts an Emerging Writers Festival. The list this year features some names we know well!

Caitlyn Horrocks

We printed Caitlyn Horrocks’s story “Embodied” in Issue 3.1; it was her first published story and later appeared in her collection This Is Not Your City (Sarabande, 2011). Her stories have also appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories 2011, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, Pushcart Prize XXXV, and elsewhere, and she’s won awards including the Plimpton Prize and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship.

Ron Currie Jr.

Ron Currie Jr. has had stories in Issues 7.2 and 2.2—the latter story, “False Idols,” appeared in his collection God is Dead (Penguin, 2007). He is also the author of the novels Everything Matters (Viking, 2009) and the forthcoming Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (Viking, 2013). Currie has also received the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Willard L. Metcalf Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The festival also includes Danielle Evans and Ben Loory.

Danielle Evans. Photo by Nina Subin.

Evans is the winner of the 2011 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2010, and she is the author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead, 2010), a collection of stories.

Ben Loory. Photo by Heather Conley.

Loory’s fables and tales have appeared in the New Yorker, Gargoyle, and Antioch Review, as well as on NPR’s “This American Life,” and live at Selected Shorts. His book, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (Penguin, 2011), was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program and the Starbucks Coffee Bookish Reading Club.

Currie, Evans, Horrocks, and Loory will participate in two panels at 11 a.m. on Thursday, October 11(“The Writer as Reader”), and Friday, October 12 (“The State of the Art, The State of the Market”), in the Tangeman University Center, Room 425.

In addition, Horrocks and Loory will read at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 10, and Currie and Evans will read at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 11, both in Room 427 of the Engineering Research Center. The authors will be signing their books, which will be available for purchase.

We’ll see you there!

Awarding the Pulitzer

Friday, September 14th, 2012

When the Pulitzer Prize board decided not to award a prize in fiction last April, you were confused. Was this a bum year for the American imagination? An artistic recession for representing imaginary people with words? Had our writers, like our politicians and parents, let us down? But if you’d been reading with any diligence in 2011, you knew there was no lack of deserving books. So your confusion quickly morphed into anger, maybe rage. What’s wrong with these judges? How could they do this to us? Don’t they know we have families? Inner lives? Should we take to the streets? Send strongly-worded letters studded with exclamation points?!!

Usually, CR seeks to incite civil and literary unrest, but in our upcoming issue, we wish to quell it. In issue 9.2 (forthcoming in November) we’ve asked four intelligent reviewers to make a case for the most Pulitzer Prize-deserving book of 2011.

Alissa Nutting chose Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang. She writes, “The Family Fang explores exactly what it takes . . . for anyone to be well: how to reasonably formulate the molecular structure of happiness when life is an imperfect and volatile laboratory.”

Jensen Beach selects Alan Heathcock’s short story collection, Volt, about which he says, “Here’s a book that collects a town’s past and its present together into a single frame and presents us with the shared identity of these people so that it might say something about us and to us.”

Suzanne Warren selects Edith Pearlman’s short story collection, Binocular Vision. She says, “Read in succession, these thirty-four stories gain depth and intensity, as if each were a coat of red lacquer applied atop the last.”

Peter Grimes selects Justin Torres’s novel-in-stories, We the Animals. He says, “Any great work of literature . . . replies to works of the past, recontexualizing age-old themes as human culture diversifies and changes. We the Animals does both in the zoos and wildernesses of twenty-first century America.”

Hopefully, these insightful and sound judgments will calm your anger, or at least make you grab our upcoming issue and these great prize-deserving books.

Contributors to Crow About

Monday, September 10th, 2012

Congratulations to our talented contributors, who keep racking up the laurels!

Fellowship News

Ari Banias (Issue 5.1) is the recipient of the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was awarded a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Sara Gelston (9.1) is the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Joshua Rivkin (7.1) is a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Joshua Weiner (2.2, 9.1) won the 2012–2013 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship.

Book News

Seth Abramson (3.1, 6.1) was awarded the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize for his collection Thievery, which was chosen by Dara Wier.

Tarfia Faizullah (8.1) won the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book contest for her collection SEAM, chosen by Chad Davidson.

Brian Russell (9.2) won the 2012 Bakeless Literary Publication Prize in poetry for his collection The Year of What Now, chosen by Tom Sleigh.

Kudos to all!

Congratulations!

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Congratulations to members of the Cincinnati Review family on their recent literary success:

Editorial Assistant Katherine Zlabek won an AWP Intro Journals Award for her story “Hunting the Rut.” Her story will appear in Artful Dodge next year. Zlabek’s stories have also appeared in Madison Review, JMWW, Oxford Magazine, SAGA, The Rectangle, and the anthology World Lives, Prairie Living.

Contributor Jason Sommer, whose poems have appeared in Issues 6.1 and 8.2 (including a poem we blogged about last fall), won the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition for his book, The Laughter of Adam and Eve. He has three previous poetry collections: Lifting the Stone, Other People’s Troubles, and The Man Who Sleeps in My Office, and he has translated, with Hongling Zhang, three novellas by Wang Xiabobo.

Congratulations to Katherine and Jason!

Congratulations to Edith Pearlman!

Monday, March 12th, 2012

Our heartiest congratulations to contributor Edith Pearlman, who won the National Book Critics Circle award last week for her story collection Binocular Vision (Lookout Books, 2011), which was also a nominee for the National Book Award (the only fiction nominee to be on both lists) and won the PEN/Malamud prize for short fiction. Pearlman is the author of three other story collections, and she’s published more than 250 pieces of prose. Her award is long overdue.

We’re honored to have published her work five times, most recently “Life Lessons” in our latest issue, 8.2. We posted a sneak preview of that story here, and you can see her comments on it here.

In honor of her win, we wanted to repost comments Pearlman sent us when we asked about her story “Hearts and Flowers” in Issue 7.1 (Summer 2010):

“I would like to promote writing as an amateur enterprise. There are very few artistic endeavors and sports that do not have an amateur component—think of painting, singing, theatricals; think of tennis and soccer and baseball. There are opera companies that are  largely amateur; there are amateur architects. Writing as a hobby can be taken up as seriously as writing as a profession. The craft can be studied, practiced, and mastered for the pleasure of only a few readers, just as the amateur pianist has only a household audience and the tennis player no audience at all. A few readers? I am happy with one—that is to say, all my writing is directed toward a single ideal reader, literate, leisured, interested in being interested. When I think I have satisfied him, I myself am satisfied.”

It looks like she’s found many of those ideal readers! Congratulations, Edith!

Interview with Jamie Quatro

Monday, March 5th, 2012

One of CR’s contributors, Jamie Quatro, was interviewed by a Chattanooga radio station about her forthcoming book from Grove/Atlantic. To listen, click HERE. Jamie’s excellent story “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” (included in the collection) appeared in CR volume 6, number 2.