In the meantime, we’ll be putting together the issue, and preparing to exhibit at this February’s AWP conference in Chicago, where we’ll be sharing a table with Kartika Review under the name “The Asian American Literary Collective.”  Planning on going to the conference this year?  Please let us know, or at least plan to stop by the table — we’d love to meet you in person!

Warm thoughts for a happy, healthy 2012,

Iris & Mia

All the best for a happy, safe, and peaceful holiday, and a wonderful New Year! See you in 2012.

Directory Listings

We are thrilled to announce that LR is now officially listed both in Poets & Writers‘ Literary Magazines Database and on New Pages!  Thank you very, very much to both P&W and the New Pages staff for reaching out to us and making this possible.

Reading Period for Issue 4 Closes on Dec. 21st

A reminder that our current reading period (for Issue 4) will close on December 21st.  We are still looking for original poems, translation work, and lots, and lots of art to feature in the issue, so please do consider sending something our way!  Our submission guidelines can be found here.  (Our submissions form proper can be accessed via the button at the bottom of the guidelines page).

Upcoming Holiday Hiatus

As usual, we will be taking a little break from the blog at the end of the year to celebrate the holidays with our families and to regroup as we work on Issue 4. We’ll officially begin our hiatus on December 21st, when the reading period closes, and will return in mid-January (our current hope is to have the issue out by the beginning of February).  Never fear, though—we won’t leave you high and dry with nothing to read!  As per tradition, will be running our annual staff picks post with a list of  recommended titles from 2011 just before we break:  we bet you’ll be so busy reading while we’re gone, you’ll barely even miss us.

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That’s it for now. We have a lot of exciting content planned for the next few weeks, including a couple of reviews and an interview with a special guest, so keep your eyes peeled as we head into the final stretch of posts for 2011.  In the meantime, please keep those submissions rolling in. We look forward to seeing what you’ve been writing!

Best,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Team

• Interviewer Wendy Chin-Tanner, who is new to our team this year, will be chronicling her conversations with different Asian American poets from month to month.
• Returning Staff Writer Henry W. Leung will be transitioning out of his previous role as a reviewer, and into a new position as a Columnist.  His new column, “Panax Ginseng,” will explore themes of transnationalism, multi-lingual blending, and hybridity in texts of both poetry and prose.
• Returning Staff Writer and Columnist Kelsay Myers will continue to reflect on her experiences in the M.F.A. program at Saint Mary’s College of California through her column “Becoming Realer,” and will also occasionally contribute other content (such as interviews).
• Reviewer Jai Arun Ravine, who is also new to our team this year, will be writing about different, recently-published books, chapbooks, and/or issues of literary journals each month.

We feel privileged to be able to welcome (or, in the case of our returning writers, welcome back) such a strong, cohesive team. We have an exciting lineup of posts planned for this fall, and are confident that you will enjoy the content that Wendy, Henry, Kelsay, and Jai will be contributing to the blog. To read more about each individual Staff Writer, please see their bios on the updated Blog Masthead. You’ll see the first of our staff-written posts for the year (an interview conducted by Wendy Chin-Tanner) appear later this week.

Cheers to the new year, and a warm welcome (once again) to our new team.

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff

“Northwest Poem” by W. Todd Kaneko

“Vestige” by Michelle Peñaloza

Both poems originally appeared in Lantern Review Issue 2 (Winter 2011).

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About the Nominated Poets

W. Todd Kaneko

W. Todd Kaneko is not cool enough to be a rock star, not tall enough to be a professional wrestler, and not virtuous enough to be a super-hero.* His stories and poems can be seen in Puerto Del Sol, Crab Creek Review, Fairy Tale Review, Portland Review, Southeast Review, Blackbird, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. He teaches in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with the writer Caitlin Horrocks.

*Editorial Disclaimer: Todd’s appraisal of himself; not ours.  We think he’s a lot cooler than he admits.

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Michelle Peñaloza (Photo: Janna Ireland)

Michelle Peñaloza grew up in Nashville, Tennessee and earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nashville Review, Lantern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review and Bellingham Review, among others. She received the 2011 Women Writers’ Literary Fellowship, awarded by Oregon Literary Arts, and currently serves as director of the Kidd Tutorials at the University of Oregon.

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Congratulations to Todd and Michelle.  We are honored to be represented by such fine work, and wish each of you the best of luck in the judging process!

Issue 4 Reading Period

Our reading period for Issue 4 is now open. We urge you to consider sending some work our way, and to help spread the word however you can!  As always, we’re interested in original, well-crafted poetry that takes a fresh, unusual approach to the notion of “Asian American poetry”—but please don’t forget that we are also interested in visual art, new translations, collaborative pieces, and (critically relevant) essays on poetics!   For those of you who have submitted before, please note that there has been a slight change to our previous set of guidelines: whereas previously, we asked that bio’s be 2-3 sentences in length, we are now requesting that they be no more than 1-2 sentences long.

Friday Prompts

This year on the LR Blog, the posts that were formerly known as “Weekly Prompts” will now be categorized as “Friday Prompts,” in order to allow for greater variety and flexibility in our weekly schedule.  If you take a look at the categories in the sidebar, you’ll notice that we’ve changed the “Weekly Prompts” slug to “Friday Prompts” accordingly.  Not to worry, though, if you’ve previously linked to one of our prompts—the permalinks for all past Weekly Prompt posts will remain the same, so there’s no need to update your links.

Teaser: Best of the Net Nominations, New Staff Writers, and more

As October deepens into mid-Fall, we’ll be rolling out many more new developments.  Next week, we’ll be announcing our 2011 Best of the Net Nominees, and the following week, we will introduce our team of staff writers for the 2011-2012 academic year.  We also have plenty of exciting new reviews and interviews and a brand new column planned for the fall, so please continue to keep your eyes peeled in the weeks to come!

LR Issue 3

It is with great pleasure that we announce the arrival of Issue Three of Lantern Review!

This stunning new volume, which features Julie Kim’s haunting black and white photograph “Still” on its cover, contains 52 pages of poetry and visual art as well as a powerful “Community Voices” section featuring work by poets from the Hmong American Writers’ Circle.  The issue also includes two selections (contributed by Rachelle Cruz and Kathleen Hellen, respectively) from our 2011 post-AWP Postcard Project, as well as a beautiful visual poem by digital artist and Kundiman poet Monica Ong. For the first time, we’ve also incorporated a tool that allows you to explore these visual poems more closely by clicking and zooming in on them. (This tool requires that Javascript be enabled in order to work, so if necessary, please take a moment to turn it on before entering the issue. Details about how to navigate the “zoom” tool are provided on the issue’s masthead).

Our stellar lineup of contributors also includes: poets Jen Y. Cheng, Wendy Chin-Tanner, Shayok (Misha) Chowdhury, Oliver de la Paz, Clara Changxin Fang, Kim Koga, Eugenia Leigh, Kim-An Lieberman, Vikas K. Menon, Pos L. Moua, Hong-Thao Nguyen, Melissa R. Sipin, Mai Der Vang, Andre Yang, and Sandra M. Yee, as well as visual artists Joseph Marconi Calindas, Michelle Chandra, and Natalia Ricotta.

To enter the issue, click here, or on the cover image at the top of this post.

We hope that you enjoy the issue, and would love to hear your feedback on both its content and its technical navigability—simply send us an email at editors [at] lanternreview(dot) com.  In the meantime, we are heading off on a late-summer Blog Hiatus (during which time we’ll be taking a break from posting to the blog, but will still be contactable via other means, like email and Facebook), and wish you all the best until we return on October 3rd.

Many thanks, as always, for your continued support of LR,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Board

It’s that time of year again: we are once more looking for a handful of talented bloggers to add to our staff for next year.  Interested in writing for us?  Apply by August 5th at 11:59 EST. Please see our opportunities page for full details and application instructions.

Positions Available

Book Reviewers: write short reviews of recent poetry collections and anthologies (lists of books are generally pre-specified, but reviewers also have flexibility to choose their own).

Literary Magazine Reviewers: review poetry from recent issues of literary journals such as The Asian American Literary Review, Kartika Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Doveglion Press.

Interviewers: conduct interviews with poets, artists, and editors; may also be asked to help coordinate guest post series (e.g. our May “Process Profiles” series).

Columnists: We are interested in applications for columnists on a more limited basis (filling Reviewer and Interviewer positions is of a higher priority for us at the moment). Columnists choose a specialized topic to blog about on a monthly basis (e.g. performance poetry, profiles of digital and multimedia poets/their work, small press publishing, poetry in the classroom, etc.). We’re open to many ideas for columns (the more focused the better). If you are interested in a columnist position, please take a look at past successful columns (including Kelsay Myers’ “Becoming Realer” column and Simone Jacobson’s “Sulu Spotlight” column) and include a pitch in your cover letter that summarizes your idea for a column, proposes a title, and suggests one or two sample post topics.

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Bloggers commit to writing one post per month during our academic year term (Sept through June, not including blog hiatuses). More details and application instructions are available on our opportunities page.

We’re also still looking for an intern—so if think that you or someone you know would make a good candidate, please refer to that listing on opportunities page, as well!

LR Editor Iris interviewed in SAPLING #78

I am thrilled (and a little flabbergasted) to announce that an interview that Diane Goettel, Executive Editor of Black Lawrence Press, conducted with me about Lantern Review earlier this spring  has been published as the Feature Article in the 78th issue of Sapling, Black Lawrence’s electronic small press newsletter.  Diane has very kindly given me permission to share an excerpt of the interview here on the LR Blog this week.

Here is part of my response to her question, “How do you think Lantern Review adds to or informs the ongoing conversation about Asian American literature?”

. . . we’re constantly reframing and redefining our relationship to that which we call “Asian American poetry.” But it’s that very struggle, I think, that defines what we strive to be. Asian American literature is a complex and slippery entity: it grows and contracts, twists and turns, according to what creative work is being produced and which writers are being featured in publications. We realize that, even though we’re a tiny digital magazine, we hold a heavy responsibility, because we’re invested in the act of curation. What we choose to draw attention to . . . is what other people will read, and consequently, what they will converse about. But we hope never to be an entity that attempts to put fences around what “Asian American poetry” is or is not (to do so would be foolish). Rather, we’d like to try to be fluid in our approach to that conversation, and to be as widely representative as we can while still continuing to maintain a high standard of quality with the content that we publish. That’s one of the reasons that we have the blog. The journal is a place to curate small collections of fresh work, and we envision the blog as a place to discuss and to contextualize some of that work. We are also interested in helping to curate a sense of online community amongst writers & readers of Asian American poetry, and to highlight (through both our Community Voices feature and the blog) ways that different arts organizations and working collectives of artists are already doing some of that community-building work locally. We would like to promote a view of Asian American literature that is, at its heart, dynamic, fluid, inclusive, and collaborative. To answer your question more directly, we hope to contribute to the existing conversation by showcasing Asian American voices, by pushing existing definitions of what “Asian American poetry” is, or can be, and by providing spaces in which we can invite critical discussion and creative response.

And—because we’re currently in submissions-reading mode for Issue 3 and we are often asked what sort of poems we look for when putting together an issue—here are my responses to a couple of her shorter questions relating to our editorial process:

S: What is the first thing that you look for in a submission?

IAL: Solid craft, most of all. We like poems that surprise us, that sing or groove, that pop off the page, that resonate, that trick us, that haunt us. We like poems that feel finished (as opposed to “polished”—we realize that while some finished poems feel beautifully polished, others are not meant to feel polished at all). We also consider whether the poet has addressed their subject in a way that feels new, relevant, and appropriately complex (we’ve turned away poems that have felt too essentializing—or worse, orientalizing). We do like to feature a wide variety of aesthetics and perspectives under the umbrella of “Asian American poetry.” We do not consider a poet’s ethnic heritage or geographical location as one of our selection criteria (we are more interested in whether their work is engaging with relevant critical questions in a thoughtful, intelligent, and aesthetically brave, complex and powerful way). We like it when poets surprise us with their take on “Asian American poetry.”

S: What advice would you offer to poets and artists who are interested in submitting their work to Lantern Review?

IAL: Submit your best, most interesting work. Submit more than one poem in your manuscript, but don’t submit more than the guidelines recommend. If your poems have unusual formatting that you wish us to retain, submit in .pdf format, rather than as an MS Word document. Consider submitting collaborative pieces or translations (we are very interested in these, too, but haven’t yet seen many of them in our submissions pools for the last two issues). For visual artists, consider submitting pieces that you think might work well if the text of a poem were overlaid on it (we often like to pair images with text). Also, please do read our submissions guidelines carefully and follow them. It makes things easier for all parties involved.

To read the rest of Sapling #78 (available for a limited time as a sample issue) or to purchase a subscription , please visit Black Lawrence’s web site. Our thanks to Diane; it was a privilege and a joy to be able to converse with her about LR, and we are grateful to her for this amazing opportunity.

Not able to listen in today?  No problem:  Kushlani informs me that today’s show will eventually also be posted as a podcast version on APA Compass’s site (we will update you again when that occurs).

We’re very excited to have had the chance to appear on the radio (!), and hope that you enjoy listening to our conversation with Kushlani.  Thank you so much to her, and to APA Compass, for this wonderful opportunity.