Asian American Poetry Unbound
As of today, the LR Blog staff is on a short hiatus for the winter holidays. We will return with more new content and with news about Issue 4 on January 17th.
All the best for a happy, safe, and peaceful holiday, and a wonderful New Year! See you in 2012.
As late fall begins to deepen into winter, we at LR have been rolling up our sleeves and starting to make preparations for Issue 4. Here are a few announcements to let you know what else we’ve been up to recently, and what we are planning for the next few weeks:
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
Today, the LR Blog is pleased to officially welcome our new team of Staff Writers for the 2011-2012 school year:
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
The Lantern Review editorial board is pleased to announce that we have selected two poems to nominate for Sundress Publications’ 2011 Best of the Net Anthology. They are, in order of appearance in our magazine:
“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 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 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!
Welcome back to a new academic year at Lantern Review! Along with the return of the blog, this Fall brings with it a number of exciting developments—some of which we will reveal incrementally as the season progresses, but a few of which we are delighted to be able to share with you today. Read on for a couple of important announcements, as well as a teaser of what is yet to come.
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!
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!
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.
We had the privilege of speaking with Kushlani de Soyza of Oregon’s APA Compass Radio back in February (at AWP), and we’re happy to announce that our conversation with her will be airing on their regular program this morning at 9 am Pacific Time (12 noon EST). If you live in the vicinity of Portland, tune in at 90.7 FM (100.7 FM for Corvallis, 91.9 FM for Hood River); otherwise, you can listen live at KBOO Community Radio’s web site.
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.
Just a quick reminder that our current submissions period closes today. We’re still on the lookout for great original poetry and visual art to include in Issue 3, so please do consider sending something our way!
Click here to read our Submissions Guidelines.
The form will close tonight at midnight EST.
Good luck! We look forward to reading your work.
Best,
Iris & Mia