Due to unforeseen personal circumstances that have recently arisen for one of our editors, we have decided to tentatively extend our summer blog hiatus by two weeks.  We apologize for the delay, but look forward to returning full-force as soon as possible, and hope that we’ll be able to resume posting and introduce you to our wonderful new team members as early as the 20th of September.

In the meantime, however, please do take some time to peruse our brand-new blog theme and leave us some feedback about how it’s working for you.  We are excited about our new, clean look, and would love to hear your thoughts about how we might continue to improve our blog’s navigability.

Thank you so much for your patience.  We remain, as always, incredibly grateful for your continued support and encouragement.

Warmly,

The LR Editorial Staff.

]]> http://lanternreview.com/blog/2010/08/11/lr-news-late-summer-blog-hiatus-81110-9610/feed/ 1 http://lanternreview.com/blog/2010/08/02/lr-news-august-2010-updates/ http://lanternreview.com/blog/2010/08/02/lr-news-august-2010-updates/#comments Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:55:03 +0000 Iris http://lanternreview.com/blog/?p=2317 Happy August!  Here is our little news flash for the month:

Late Summer Blog Hiatus & LR Staff Changes

Our staff will be taking a blog hiatus from August 11th until September 6th.  During our hiatus, we’ll be updating the web site, fine-tuning our submissions policies in preparation for the next reading period, making final decisions about our staff search, and welcoming our new staff onto our team.   When we return in September, we’ll introduce our new team members and open submissions for Issue 2.

August Community Calendar Posted

In light of our upcoming blog hiatus, we’ve extended the range of our August Calendar to include events up through September 6th.  If you know of something going on or would like to note a correction to an existing listing, please email or message us to let us know (we will still be responding to email during the hiatus, even though we won’t be on Facebook or Twitter as regularly as usual).

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We’ll still be posting regularly up through August 10th, so in the meantime, keep on coming back for more poetry goodness.  Many thanks to you, as always, for all of your support — having such a dedicated and enthusiastic community of readers has made our first year an incredible joy.

Best,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff.

Screenshot of LR's Feature on DAILY s-PRESS

DAILY s-PRESS is a web site that “explores + celebrates the landscape of small+indie presses with daily book features.”  It is run by Dorothee Lang, the editor of BluePrintReview. Many thanks to Dorothee for this opportunity.  Click here to read the rest of the feature.

LR is looking for a handful of talented bloggers to add to its staff for next year. We seek strong writers with an interest in Asian American poetry and a knowledge of the contemporary literary scene. Prior blogging experience is not necessary, though it is a plus, as is experience with social media.

Positions Available

Book Reviewers: write short reviews of recent poetry collections. (Finding poetry reviewers is of a higher priority for us right now, but we are also open to considering reviewers who specialize in prose).

Columnists: choose a specialized topic of their choice to blog about on a monthly basis. Some topics we might be interested in exploring in the future include book arts, small press publishing, perspectives from students enrolled in creative writing programs, translation, poetry in the classroom, poetry and history — but we’re open to many more ideas, and if you have one that you think is good, pitch it to us!

Interviewers: conduct interviews with writers and editors; may also be asked to help coordinate guest post series (for example, see our “Process Profiles” series from May 2010).

Event Reporters: report on literary events of interest to readers. We’re especially interested in people who live in the vicinity of NYC, LA, and/or San Francisco for this position.

Requirements

• Bloggers commit to writing 1 post a month during our academic year term (Sept through June, not including blog hiatuses), with a draft submitted via WordPress at least a week in advance of the post date to allow time for revision and proofreading.
• Reliable, organized, responsible.
• Ability to write clear, incisive, and critically astute (but accessible!) posts.
• Familiarity with and ability to easily converse about issues of politics and poetics that are relevant to the Asian American poetry community.
• Prior experience with blogging a big plus.
• Familiarity with WordPress a plus, but definitely not necessary.
• As we’re focused mostly on US and North American poetry, we would prefer to work with bloggers who are familiar with the literary scene in the US/Canada. Though we will definitely consider those living in other locations, too!

To Apply

Please send the following to us at editors [at] lanternreview (dot) com by JULY 23rd:

• A cover letter introducing yourself and specifying the position(s) you are applying for (include in the body of your email). Tell us about yourself: where are you from, what is your area of training, what do you like to read, what have you written about in the past? As an LR staff blogger, what would you be interested in writing about? Pitch your ideas to us. Why would you be a good fit for us?
• Your resume, highlighting any past experience with blogging, journalism, past work on literary magazines, and any publications.
• A writing sample: 350-500 words of prose about poetry or Asian American issues — either from past article(s) or blog post(s), and/or from a scholarly essay.

Please note that as we are an all-volunteer operation, we regret that we cannot pay our bloggers, but we assure you that your experience on LR staff will be both professional and enriching, and will help you to gain both experience and exposure in the online literary scene.

Here’s are some things that you can expect to see on the blog this month:

July Community Calendar Updated—Your Feedback Wanted

This month, we’ve added two cities: Portland and San Antonio.  As always, we would love your help in posting any updates or additions: simply leave us a comment or send us an email.  Please note that we will be trying out a new policy: for this month, any updates to the calendar will be made on the 15th, so let us know of anything you want us to add before then.  We’d also like to have your feedback on another proposed change: hitherto, our goal has been to post each month’s new ComCal on the 1st of the month (or, in cases in which the 1st falls over a weekend, the Monday immediately following).  We’ve discovered that updating a few days after the first of the month makes it easier for us to compile a more detailed calendar (since most literary newsletters come out on the 1st of the month, and arts organizations tend to update their event calendars on the first or second).   Should we start putting up our Community Calendar updates on, say—the 3rd or 4th of the month—or do you think we would be better off sticking to our old plan?  Please leave us a comment to let us know what you think.

Summer Reads, Indivisible Series Continue

We’ve had lots of responses from our Issue 1 contributors, and so we’ll be continuing to post the summer reading lists they’ve sent to us periodically throughout July.  LR Staff Writer Supriya Misra will also be finishing up her two-part series about the Indivisible anthology, so look out for her post towards the end of the month.

LR Blog Staff Search

One of our goals for the next year is to grow our blog, which means that we will soon be looking to fill new positions on our team of staff writers! Please keep your eyes peeled: we’ll be putting up a post with details about how to apply very soon.

LR Issue 1

At long last, the inaugural issue of Lantern Review is now live on our web site!

We’re thrilled to be able to present a volume of more than 30 extraordinary pieces, in a wide range of styles, and by poets of multiple generations.  Contributors to this issue include Eileen Tabios, Jon Pineda, Barbara Jane Reyes, Luisa Igloria, Angela Veronica Wong, Changming Yuan, Melissa Roxas, Sankar Roy, Subhashini Kaligotla, Vanni Taing, Rachelle Cruz, Jai Arun Ravine, Craig Santos Perez, as well as many others.  The issue also includes a special feature devoted to work created in the context of Kundiman’s vibrant community, in the form of our Community Voices section.  Before entering the issue, you might want to take a moment to check out our recommendations for optimum viewing, located here.  If you want to proceed to the issue right away, click here or on the cover image at the top left of this post.

We are still very much learners when it comes to producing and supporting a web-hosted magazine, so we’d appreciate any feedback or questions you might have about readability and navigation issues. (Feel free to drop us a line via email).

Thank you so much to all of you for your continued support, enthusiasm, and patience as we’ve wrestled with the process of making our dream become a reality.  We are honored to have the opportunity to present such a stellar body of work in our very first issue, and hope that you will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

Many thanks again,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Board

Other features to look forward to include poetry by Luisa Igloria, Barbara Jane Reyes, Eileen Tabios, Jai Arun Ravine (as well as many, many more), a special feature highlighting collaborative work from Kundiman, and a book review by Craig Santos Perez.

May Community Calendar is Now Live

We’ve updated our community calendar page for May.  As always, we’d love to have your input in making our event coverage more accurate and thorough: leave a comment to suggest any additions and/or corrections.

APIA History Month on the LR Blog

During May, we’ll be running two blog series to celebrate National APIA Heritage Month.  The first, “Poetry in History,” will appear each Friday in lieu of our regular Editors’ Picks / Weekly Prompt posts, and will feature poems written during and/or about a particular period in Asian American History and an accompanying (linked) prompt.  Our “Process Portraits” series will begin during the second week of May, and will spotlight the work being done – and the history being made right now – by six young contemporary Asian American poets.  Finally, we’ll also be running interviews, book reviews, and occasional editorial posts during May that have to do with questions of historicity and historical engagement in Asian American poetry.

Issue 1 Submissions Period Closed

Thank you so much to those of you who submitted work during our very first reading period!  The Editors are currently making final decisions about what will go into the magazine, and if you haven’t heard back from us already, you should within the next few weeks.  If all goes as planned, Issue 1 will launch in early June.  Look out for an announcement about the exact launch date later this month.

Thanks once again for all of your continued support in reading and helping to promote the content we put on the LR Blog.  We could not run this gig without you!

Sincerely,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff.

Here’s a slightly paraphrased version of his winning prompt.

Writes Kenji: “This one is not mine originally, but it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever tried. It comes by way of poet Suheir Hammad.”

Prompt:

Close your eyes and think about a time in your life that was extremely difficult.  Imagine the scene in as much detail as possible. Now, holding that moment of difficulty in your mind, search the scene and find one aspect of the situation or your environment that was beautiful. It could be environment and sensory – a sound, color, texture, lighting – or it could be an insight, perspective or emotion that existed at the same time as the difficulty.

Write about that beautiful aspect of this scene of difficulty for 15 minutes.

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We liked the creative possibilities of the paradoxical tension that this prompt asks the writer to explore: not beauty in spite of difficulty, nor a romanticized celebration of difficulty, but the strangeness by which a moment of difficulty can take on aspects of the beautiful.  Exploring this sort of tension in a poem may have the potential to open up an image or brief narrative moment to strange, surprising, and ever more complex associations.

Kenji will be receiving a signed copy of Monica Youn’s Ignatz.  Congratulations to him, and many thanks to all who participated!