Poets & Writers Magazine May/June 2021

Use our Writing Contests database to find detailed information about more than 375 grants and awards for poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and translators. Filter by genre, deadline, and entry fee to find the best opportunities for you and your work. Get the latest news about contest winners and upcoming deadlines, and read interviews with judges and prize administrators on G&A: The Contest Blog. Listen to original audio recordings of authors featured in Page One, including Lilly Dancyger, Morgan Jerkins, Donika Kelly, and Arthur Sze. Read exclusive excerpts from books mentioned in The Time Is Now: Jericho Brown’s afterword to The Essential June Jordan and John B. Thompson’s Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing. Check out expanded interviews with book critic Jennifer Szalai and author and podcaster Lara Ehrlich. Connect with others on…

SUBSCRIBERS MAY RECALL THAT THE COVER OF LAST YEAR’S May/June issue—the first to be published in the earliest and, for many of us, darkest days of the pandemic—featured the words writing contests planted in a bed of green grass. It was a design developed apropos of nothing, really, beyond a desire to elicit the appearance, and maybe even the feeling, of sitting on the grass. To sit in communion with the earth: such a humble act, beautiful in its simplicity, the significance of which only grew during the initial weeks of stay-at-home orders, when even the prospect of a morning spent in a park, reading a book under a tree, seemed painfully out of reach. I was reminded of the grass—and with it a memory of sitting in a field…

LETTERS Feedback from readers In response to “Pandemic Pen Pals” by Emma Hine (March/April 2021), I’m glad that more folks are getting interested in “old-fashioned” snail mail, pen-and-paper letter writing. For many, though, this is a practice that predates the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve belonged to more than a few letter-writing organizations for two years or longer. There are associations that have an online component used to connect those interested in sending snail mail letters, such as International Correspondence Writing Month (incowrimo.org). Then there’s the Letter Exchange (letter-exchange.com), which has been around since 1982 and publishes a printed magazine for letter writers three times per year. Although I e-mail and use modern accoutrements like a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone, taking time to sit and handwrite a thoughtful letter to my many…

Caitlin Gooch has always loved horses; she started riding when she was just three years old. When Gooch combined this passion with her deep love of reading, she found an unexpected way to affect the lives of the children in her hometown of Wendell, North Carolina. After Gooch learned that literacy rates in her state were low, she decided to use the horses that had always inspired her to change that. “Horses connect people and get kids excited,” Gooch says. “Why not use that energy to encourage kids to read?” In 2019 only 36 percent of North Carolina’s fourth-grade students were considered proficient at reading, down from their 2017 score of 39 percent, according to the Nation’s Report Card, a project of the Department of Education that monitors literacy rates. Meanwhile,…

ARRIEL VINSON is a Tin House YA Scholar and Hoosier who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. Her writing has appeared in Kweli, Catapult, Waxwing, the Rumpus, and other publications. THEA PRIETO is the author of From the Caves, winner of the 2019 Red Hen Novella Award, forthcoming in August from Red Hen Press. Her website is theaprieto.com. JENNIFER DE LEON is the author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (Simon & Schuster, 2020) and White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), winner of the Juniper Prize. Visit her at jenniferdeleonauthor.com. DANA ISOKAWA is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. SUSANNAH NEVISON is the author of the poetry collections Teratology (Persea Books, 2015), Lethal Theater (Ohio State University Press, 2019), and,…

“I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting, the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life.” Second Place (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2021) by Rachel Cusk. Fifteenth book, eleventh novel. Agent: Sarah Chalfant. Editor: Mitzi Angel. Publicist: Lottchen Shivers. “A is for Adulteress //But you knew that.” Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint Press, April 2021) by Gina Frangello. Fifth book, first memoir. Agent: Alice Tasman. Editor: Dan Smetanka. Publicists: Megan Fishmann and Lena Moses-Schmitt. “yes a famous mise-en-scène / ‘when I was just a little girl’” A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books, April…