Dear Faithful Readers,
It’s been a wonderful four months since we first started blogging. We’ve featured interviews with poets and literary magazine editors, a guest post series on the small press and Asian American poetry, reviews of two recent collections, and countless Editors’ Picks, Weekly Prompts, and Events Roundups. The focus and scope of the LR blog (as well as our audience) have started to grow in really exciting ways, and in light of this, we’ve decided to announce a few changes, to be implemented beginning in the month of March.
Community Calendar
You might have noticed that there is a now new orange tab located in the top right hand corner of the blog’s layout. This is our new Community Calendar, which will serve as the successor to the weekly events roundups we’ve posted in the past. Instead of posting roundups once a week, we will now be making use of the new Community Calendar page as a space on which to post a consolidated list of events once a month. We’ll do mini-updates to each month’s calendar roughly every week and a half, adding new events that we learn about during the course of the month, and removing events that have already happened. We decided to implement this change not only to streamline the culling process for us (on the editorial end), but also to centralize the information so that it’s easier for you to find. This way, not only will we able to keep all information about events in one location, but you won’t have to scroll through reams of past posts in order to find the roundup for the week you’re looking for. If you have the chance, please do take the time to check it out! You’ll notice that for most of the cities listed (except for NYC) we’re a little sparse on details at the moment. If you know of interesting APA arts events going on in one of these cities (or one we haven’t listed), please do consider suggesting them in the comments.
Speaking of suggestions, we’re also adding a new Twitter events reporting method: to suggest a new event or a correction to an existing event’s information, you can now either leave a comment on the calendar page, or mention us in a Tweet (@LanternReview), using the hashtag #APAPoetryEvent.
March 2010 Theme: “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & the Visual Arts”
During the next few months, you’ll find that many our posts will be themed around a particular subject or issue. For the month of March, we’ve chosen the theme: “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & Visual Art.” Throughout the month, we’ll be posting Editors’ Picks, prompts, and hopefully a few interviews as well in which we’ll be looking at poets who engage the visual arts in their work, the visual aspects of poetry, and the poem (or book) as an object. Look out for a fuller explanation of our March theme later this week.
Upcoming this spring: Prompt Contest, AWP Coverage, Submissions
The AWP’s annual conference and National Poetry Month are both scheduled for April (next month), so be on the lookout for posts later in March relating to our plans to cover these events on the blog. We’ll be hosting a prompt contest towards the middle of March (with the winner and three runners up to have their prompts featured during National Poetry Month), so keep your eyes peeled for an announcement to that effect.
Secondly, the Lantern Review editorial staff plan to be at AWP, and it’s possible that we might be able to organize a meetup of some sort. If you’re planning to be at AWP, know something about venues in Denver, and would be interested in helping to coordinate an informal LR meetup, please do shoot us a quick email at editors [at] lanternreview (dot)com.
Finally, we’re still accepting submissions! (Don’t forget that we are also looking for visual art, in addition to poetry). Please do consider sending us your work; we would love to see it!
Thanks, and best,
Iris & Mia
Lantern Review Editorial Staff