Announcing Pushcart Prize Nominees

January 14, 2020

We’re excited to announce our nominees for the Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses Anthology. Congratulations to these contributors!

Poems

What We Did After We Stopped the Boats
Yiwei Chai

Necessity
Matthew Spireng

Habitat
Michael Schermerhorn

The Consolations
Matthew Sumpter

Fiction

Lent
Naomi Elegant

Saturnalia
James Smart

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December 21, 2020

On Writing: An Interview With Mark Galarrita

December 21, 2020

James Kuang: Can you talk about your journey as a writer. When did you start writing creatively and when did you know that you wanted to be a writer professionally?

Mark Galarrita: I tried to become a comedian after high school and that didn’t pan out because I didn’t like the hustle. Writing was cheaper and you didn’t have to socialize with so many people to get anywhere. So, I stuck with that. I mean, it’s a similar hustle, but at least with writing—compared to stand-up or improv—the work is all on me. People can give me advice or critique my stuff but if I’m not going to take the time to write, revise, edit, read, cheer on or help other writers, and send my stuff out there in solitude, it’s not going to work out. It’s difficult, sure, but this is easy compared to what my family did to get to this country and make a life here. I think about that all the time. I think, regardless of the art form, you need luck, perseverance, a strong support system, and stamina to keep going. Or you can just have rich parents or a bread-winning partner who is willing to pay your portion of the rent while you mess around with words and Writer Twitter. I don’t have that kind of support system so I’m a fool for this one.

JK: You’re quite active on Twitter. Your Twitter handle starts with “Writer in Residence at Panda Express.” Why?

MG: I want Panda Express to give me money and call it a writing fellowship.

December 21, 2020

September 26, 2020

Kelly Grace Thomas: Boat Burned

September 26, 2020

Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Next nominee. She currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Education and Pedagogy Advisor for Get Lit-Words Ignite, and as an active screenwriter and young adult author. Boat Burned is her first full-length collection of poetry, released in January 2020.

In this interview, Kelly Grace Thomas talks with Hannah Lazar about how she got into writing poetry, her writing process, the aspects of her life that influenced her poetry, the ways poetry intersects with other mediums of storytelling, and what she hopes to accomplish with her latest collection.

H: I noticed that you’ve done other writing (namely screenwriting and an upcoming YA novel), so is there anything about poetry that particularly attracts you to it?

K: So, I initially wrote some really horrible poems when I was in high school, as an angsty emo teen, and then stopped at the time. Though, I’ve always had the mindset that I wanted to be a professional writer, because there’s nothing cooler than to be paid for doing the thing I love. So, I went to Emerson College in Boston and studied for a degree in Literature and Publishing. There, I learned how to write fiction, journalism, and memoir, and I took one poetry class. I was really into fiction and thought I would do that and worked as a journalist for a number of years after college, for a local San Diego newspaper group. The job was great, but I found I didn’t have any energy to write for myself when I got home at the end of the day. So, I quit and decided to get my teaching credential, and I eventually taught at Triumph Charter High School in Los Angeles. When I was there, the principal encouraged me to use the curriculum of a poetry non-profit called “Get Lit: Words Ignite.” Through the program, you teach it for three months and then take a group of kids to a poetry competition. I had always wanted to do that with my students, so I was like, “Yeah, I’m in 100%!”

This ended up being my first real introduction to poetry!

September 26, 2020

March 30, 2020

Annelyse Gelman: About Repulsion

March 30, 2020

Annelyse Gelman is the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone (2014). She was the inaugural poet-in-residence at UCSD’s Brain Observatory in 2012, the 2013 Lavinia Winter Fellow at New Pacific Studio, and a 2016 Fulbright recipient in Berlin for her work with the intersection of poetry, music, and film.

Her poetry-films have been screened in Germany’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, the FilmPoem Festival in Antwerp, dotdotdot in Vienna, Arcanum Video & Animation Festival in Slovenia, and the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Her work appears in TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, the PEN Poetry Series, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.

About Repulsion is a collaborative EP between Annelyse Gelman and programmer Jason Grier, exploring vulnerability and intimacy through samples from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Max Ritvo, and Carl Phillips, and rigorous production mechanisms from overloaded CPU chips to rattled ice. Through this EP, Annelyse and Jason explore the meaningful intertwining and intersecting of word and sound.

In this interview, Annelyse Gelman talks with Margaret Zhang about obtaining spontaneous field recordings, meeting Jason in Berlin, writing for an EP rather than for the page, and building Midst, a digital platform for writers and readers to share their authentic creative processes.

MZ: What does the record name About Repulsion mean to you?

AG: The record is thematically concerned with intimacy and violence. Risk and vulnerability are at the heart of any close relationship, but there’s also an inherent paradox in the tension between wanting to know others and to be known by them. If someone comes to understand you, it can become more difficult to change because, in changing, you will become something that they don’t understand anymore. So there’s this tug between attraction and repulsion—people wanting to know each other without that knowing becoming a kind of trap.

March 30, 2020

January 14, 2020

Announcing Pushcart Prize Nominees

January 14, 2020

October 2, 2019

Best of the Net Nominees

October 2, 2019

May 12, 2018

An Interview with Yiyun Li

May 12, 2018

“There is a clear-cut: old life, that’s old country, and here there’s new life, new country. it is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there’s always that ambivalence—where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.”

May 12, 2018

April 28, 2018

An Interview with Lisa Zou

April 28, 2018

Lisa Zou has been recognized by The Poetry Society of UK, National YoungArts Foundation, Johns Hopkins University, and the Poetry Society of Virginia, among others. Her work recently won The Lindenwood Review Lyric Essay Contest and Honorable Mention for The Atlantis Award. A native of Arizona, Lisa currently studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and her poem “Prodigy” appeared in Penn Review’s Issue 49.2.

Q: When did you start writing and why? What role does writing currently play in your life, and how has it changed over time?

I was introduced to poetry at a young age and memorized many Chinese poetry pieces. My writing was first published back in my city newspaper in elementary school; the poem was about happiness and probably the most cringe-inducing piece of work I have ever written or read. The newspaper awarded me a gift card, and I was hooked; from there, I started winning writing competitions in middle school, but they were all pretty local.

I spent some time in boarding school in China and had to take English Second Language classes when I moved to California. My English was awful and I was actually teased for my accent. Because I did not have the ability to vocalize my thoughts, I wrote everything down instead.

April 28, 2018