LR News: We’re Back! September 2010 Updates.

Dear LR Friends and Fans,

At long last, we are back from hiatus!  Here are some lovely new changes that we have implemented during the course of our absence:

Reading Period for Issue 2 is Now Open

That’s right; we’re now accepting submissions for our second issue, to appear sometime during the winter.  Please take some time to review our updated guidelines first, as we have changed a number of policies since our last reading period.  Here’s the link.  Our new submissions deadline is November 29th.

* * *

New Staff Bloggers

LR welcomes five brand new staff bloggers to its team this fall:

Reviewer Henry W. Leung will be giving us the scoop on new books and issues of literary journals.

Columnist Simone Jacobson will cover the monthly Sulu DC series and will keep us up to date on the spoken word circuit in her column, Sulu Spotlight.

Graduate Student Correspondent Kelsay Myers will be chronicling her experiences in the M.F.A. program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Staff Writers Kevin Minh Allen and Monica Mody will be treating us to a variety of different kinds of content, including reviews, interviews, posts about recent chapbooks, coverage of events in the Seattle area, and investigations of avant-garde and experimental work.

LR Blog veteran Mrigaa Sethi also returns to revive her column, Writing Home.

Please see the updated Blog Masthead for their bios.

Though we will miss the members of our team who have decided to move on to other things, we are extremely excited about to welcome Henry, Simone, Kelsay, Kevin, and Monica on board this fall.  We have an exciting lineup of posts planned for the next few months.  Look for them starting later this week.

* * *

A New Look for the Blog

We mentioned it earlier, but we’ve given the LR Blog a bit of a facelift, in order to make it cleaner and easier to navigate.  What do you think?  Leave us a comment to let us know.

* * *

Main Site Under Construction, Where’s the Community Calendar?, and Thanks.

You might have noticed that, among other wonky inconsistencies, some of the information on the Main Site is a little out of date and the Community Calendar is currently offline.  Not to worry; we are in the midst of updating the site, and the Calendar will return soon (as early as October, hopefully).  Our editorial team is still working under a few temporary role readjustments in the wake of some unexpected changes to our personal lives.  Though we are running a little farther behind schedule than we had originally anticipated, please rest assured that we are doing our best to get everything back in working order as soon as possible.  Thank you for the grace you showed us during the extension of our hiatus; we are commensurately grateful for your continued patience with us during this time.

Always,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff

LR News: August 2010 Updates

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).

* * *

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.

LR News: July 2010 Updates

We’re a few days late in getting this July update posted, but it’s officially full-swing summer for us at LR, and we’ve been pleased as punch (flabbergasted, more accurately) at the response to Issue 1 so far!  Thank you so much to all of you who have helped to spread the word.

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 News: May 2010 Updates

Happy APIA Heritage Month!  Here is our first of the month news update:

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.

LR News: April Updates

The cruelest month?  We hope not — at least, not this year!  Lots of exciting things are going on this April for LR.  Here’s a quick rundown of our news for the month:

National Poetry Month Prompt Contest (Deadline EXTENDED)

We’ve had a modest response to our National Poetry Month Prompt Contest so far, but we’d like to give more people the chance to enter, so we’re extending the deadline to Thursday, April 8th. The same rules will apply (we’ll announce the third runner-up on Friday the 9th).  Please do take the time to submit a prompt if you haven’t already done so — it only takes five minutes, and if you win, you’ll not only have the opportunity to see your prompt featured on our blog, but will also receive a signed copy of Monica Youn’s Ignatz.

Lantern Review at AWP 2010

As we mentioned in last month’s update, the LR editors (Mia and Iris) will both be in Denver for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference next week, April 7-10.  If you’re going to be there, please come look us up around the Kundiman/Alice James Book table, or at one of the Kundiman events, and say hello!  We’ve been working really hard on some nifty promotional materials to distribute, so if you visit Kundiman’s table, you’ll also be able to pick up  bookmark and one of a series of handmade mini-books we’ve produced to featuring selections of our blog content.  Of you follow us on Twitter or are a Facebook fan, you’ve already seen some sneak peeks.  We’ll post photos of the finished products and a list of Asian American poetry events taking place at AWP on the blog early next week. (We’ll also do an event coverage post about AWP after we return from Denver).

April Community Calendar Updated

We’ve updated our Community Calendar page for the month of April.  As always, please continue to let us know about events we haven’t included.  We’ll continue to add to and update the list as the month goes on.

End of Reading Period for Issue 1

Our submissions period for Issue 1 will close on April 15th (tax day!) If you haven’t yet sent in your work, we want to see it!  You can find our submissions guidelines here. (Many thanks to those who have already submitted).

* * *

Happy Passover or Holy Week to those of you who are celebrating!

Best,

Iris & Mia
Lantern Review Editorial Board

LR News: March Blog Changes

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