Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Lee Hope
The reading period for our Annual Literary Contest opens this Saturday (Feb 20th), and we couldn’t be more excited about this year’s judges! Richard Blanco will be the judge for the Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, Celeste Ng will be the judge for our Fiction Prize, and Michael Steinberg will be the judge for our… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
Skin Music by Dennis Hinrichsen Winner of the 2014 Michael Weaver Poetry Prize Southern Indiana Review Press, 2015 74 pp., $14.95 One of the great pleasures of Dennis Hinrichsen’s award winning poetry collection, Skin Music, is watching the poet consider large questions and concepts while paying careful attention to the specific details of… Read more »
By Lee Hope
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the… Read more »
By Danielle Legros Georges
Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music. She is the author of the poetry volumes I Went Looking for You (BlazeVOX, 2009), Morphology with photographer Rusty Crump (BlazeVOX, 2008), Dreaming in Color (Alice James Books, 1980), and editor of Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (University of Illinois Press, 2004). A… Read more »
By Mary Buchinger
Irene Koronas is a multi-media artist, painter, poet and editor of Wilderness House Literary Review. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, self portrait drawn from many (Ibbettson Street Press, 2007), Pentakomo Cyprus (Cervena Barva Press, 2009), turtle grass (Muddy River Books, 2014) and many chapbooks. Her visual art has been shown in… Read more »
By Danielle Legros Georges
Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, librettist, and a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts MFA in Creative Writing. He is the author of three volumes of poetry, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014), The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), Fear, Some (Red Hen Press, 2006) and several chapbooks. He was interviewed by Danielle… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
An interview with Richard Hoffman on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary Edition of his memoir Half the House, with a foreword by Louise DeSalvo. An excerpt of Half the House is available here How did the process of writing Half the House differ from your second book, Love & Fury? Do you see Love & Fury as a… Read more »
By Margaret Elysia Garcia
Yay! Congratulations your book is out! What will you do next? Now comes the uncomfortable part of art for many of us: commerce. After all that’s a huge aspect of the book—to get people to BUY it. In a world with literally millions of books that’s not an easy task. I recently completed a second… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
My parents loved Sinatra. I recall many Saturday evenings in the mid-1980’s sitting in the backseat of my father’s Buick Regal as we drove slowly around what was called ‘the big circle’ listening to the radio program “Saturdays with Sinatra.” Both my parents sang along as I cringed, a teenager trapped in her parent’s back… Read more »
By Wendy Pierman Mitzel
Wendy: Why did you decide to submit “Calligraphy,” your winning piece, to the contest? Did you see it as a good fit for Solsticelitmag and our diverse voices theme? Shanyn: “Calligraphy” is one piece from a collection of related stories that I’m currently writing. The collection focuses on the four Yu daughters as they grow… Read more »
By David Fox
David: At one point in your contest-winning essay “A Fable for Our Times”, you write, “The call for change did not die, but its message often seemed lost amid the static roar of greed and violence that filled the next forty years, until new leaders again stirred the conscience of the nation.” As someone who… Read more »
By Ben Berman
You are currently pursuing a PhD in linguistics at Yale. In what ways do you see overlap between your work as a linguist and as a poet? In what ways do you see these as distinctly separate fields? My linguistic work and my poetic career are both sourced in the same love of language. I… Read more »
By Celeste Mohammed
And on the first day, God made snow. Day one of my MFA program at Lesley University got cancelled because of a blizzard. So much for auspicious beginnings. And on the second day, I took selfies. In my hotel room. In the cab on the way to campus. In front of the Lesley University sign.… Read more »
By Danielle DeTiberus
At 5:30AM on the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, I woke up to three post-midnight text messages from friends who have the luxury of staying up late. Had I heard about the controversy regarding one of the contributors to Best American Poetry 2015? Did I read the recent blog post by this year’s guest editor,… Read more »
By Wendy Pierman Mitzel
I like to tell people who ask about my graduate schoolwork that I gave up the lucrative field of journalism to take up the more practical work of creative writing. Sometimes my audience gets the joke. Graduate MFA students are keenly aware the odds are stacked against us. Very few, we are told, will go… Read more »
By Danielle Legros Georges
Martha Collins is a poet, translator, the editor-at-large for Field Magazine, and an editor at Oberlin College Press. She is the author of the poetry volumes, Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014), White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), Some Things Words Can Do (Sheep Meadow, 1998), A History of a Small Life on a Windy Planet (University of Georgia, 1993), The Arrangement of Space (Gibbs Smith,… Read more »
By Maggie Kast
When Fomite Press accepted my first novel, A Free, Unsullied Land, a conversation began. Marc Estrin (editing) and Donna Bister (production) run Fomite along with a couple of interns, and the press is actively engaged with their authors every step of the way. Marc liked my characters and their story, but wanted more about the… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
How did you come to poetry? I wrote animal stories as a child. In seventh and eighth grade classes, I’d read Tennyson and Poe, but then my friend Catherine Patterson sent me Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Poems not in a textbook—and by a woman! I was hooked. In college at the University of Virginia, I took… Read more »
By Lisa Friedlander
Yesterday in Brooklyn, NY I saw young mothers strolling their own children, and Jamaican women strolling other women’s children. Mothers and nannies walked, did errands, negotiated cease fires between siblings, bartered lollipops for patience, tickled and explained the teaming stimuli of the surround. I thought of the ease with which people, beginning as strangers to… Read more »
By Jennifer Jean
For over two years I’ve been researching and writing a poetry collection about sex-trafficking and objectification issues in America. When I give poetry readings there is always at least one person, if not more, from the audience who comes up to me and asks: “Why are you writing about this issue?” What I’ve discovered is,… Read more »
By Christine Hale
In the days since the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, I’ve been mostly silent, watching my mouth, and my mind, while others speak. I’ve felt the need to speak, because I certainly have feelings about what happened: rage and despair about the virulence of racism in this country. But I’ve had to think… Read more »
By Danielle Monroe
I feel for Rachel Dolezal. I really do. When the strange saga broke and blanketed the news I couldn’t help but identify with her a little. It’s the story of a woman who craves acceptance from a community she doesn’t belong to, goes to extremes to find it, and inevitably goes too far. It’s a… Read more »
By January Gill O'Neil
June was quite a month for race relations in the United States. Hard to believe at the beginning of the month we were talking about the pool party in McKinney, Texas, where officers were called to a scene that quickly intensified and turned into chaos. Next, we talked (at length) about Rachel Dolezal, the woman… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
KA: First, congratulations on winning the 2015 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. I know you’ve won several other awards as well. How does getting this kind of recognition affect your writing or sense of yourself as a poet? BS: This is an interesting question because certainly winning an award is a boost to confidence, and… Read more »
By David Fox
DF: In your craft essay “One Story, Two Narrators” included in the anthology SolLit Selects, you talk about how many personal essays and memoirs fall short, because they fail to create an internal narrative to accompany the surface-level events. Why do you think that so many aspiring nonfiction writers struggle with this? Also, you give some examples… Read more »
By Mariya Taher
MT: Your story “0=1” was the Fiction First Runner-up for SolLit Magazine’s Annual Lit Contest in 2013. Now the story appears in SolLit Selects: Diverse Voices, the magazine’s first print anthology. Congratulations! Could you tell us what inspired you to write this story? EG: The story was inspired by experience, and in fact is so close to… Read more »
By Mariya Taher
MT: Your short story “The Edge” is included in SolLit Selects: Diverse Voices, the magazine’s first print anthology. Congratulations! Could you tell us what inspired you to write this story? JS: I’m fairly sure Russell Banks’s “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” was the initial inspiration for “The Edge.” It’s been many years since… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Your essay “The Coverless Book” won our nonfiction contest last year and is also included in SolLit Selects: Diverse Voices –our first print anthology. It’s a beautifully crafted essay in which you explore your brother Daniel’s death, which followed a number of suicide attempts, by using excerpts from a notebook of his you found after… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Your Guide to All Things SolLit at #AWP15! Visit us at booth 409 at the bookfair with our friends from Talking Writing! We’ll be selling copies of our brand new anthology SolLit Selects:Diverse Voices. Thursday April 9 4 to 6pm Kiernan’s Irish Pub Poet’s Corner, 85 6th Street New Rivers Press Book Launch & Readings Come hear… Read more »
By Kristyn Bacon
Since I’ve started traveling and living abroad, I’ve developed a growing appreciation for foreign words in English text. While I enjoy the occasional italicized vocabulary, I love reading sentences and dialogue in a foreign language, even one that I don’t understand. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway practiced this regularly in their work. Both lived and… Read more »
By Lee Hope
The following is a conversation between SolLit Editor in Chief Lee Hope and Nonfiction Editor Richard Hoffman. Richard is author of the Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, and Emblem. A fiction… Read more »
By Laura Eppinger
2015: My Year of Re-Reads Every year I try to read 52 books in 52 weeks. This has been my New Year’s Resolution for more than a decade, and most years, I’ve kept it. I love to devour fiction and poetry, and so far, I have read something new each week. This year, however, I… Read more »
By Mariya Taher
There is a belief that writing is a solitary act and in moments, I don’t disagree that it is. There are many times, as a writer, where I have had to shut myself off from the rest of the world and delve deep inside my mind to pull out the words that were bouncing around… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is doomed,” -Czesław Miłosz I write a lot about family, my father in particular. You might say I’m obsessed with him. Not in the way I was obsessed with him as a child, when I was a daddy’s girl. Then he was simply larger… Read more »
By Lee Hope
In celebration of Black History Month, we are honored to share the work of many celebrated African American and Black authors who have contributed to our magazine over the years. We thank you for your voice, your work, and your willingness to share your pieces with us. Contributors to Solstice (alphabetical order by first… Read more »
By Mariya Taher
There is no denial that for a writer, words are the strongest tool in our possession. We have a kinship with language and the words we use to describe our feelings and thoughts. We understand the weight of words, the difference, sometimes subtle, between similar words such as hit and strike, or lean and thin.… Read more »
By Theri Pickens
Diana Abu-Jaber’s has been heralded as a writer that “gets it just right” and whose work “leaves readers breathless” (DianaAbuJaber.com). This well-deserved praise comes as the result of her award-winning style, captured in one food memoir, The Language Of Baklava (2007), and four novels: Arabian Jazz (1993), Crescent (2003), Origin (2007), and Birds of Paradise… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Margaret Elysia Garcia lives in the northern Sierra Nevadas with her family in exile from her Los Angeles roots. A contributing editor for Hip Mama Magazine, she also writes a comic zine called “The Adventures of Sadgirl the Superheroine,” illustrated by her daughter, Paloma. In 2014, she wrote, co-directed and co-produced the play “Before… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Whenever we can, we like to bring you news of helpful resources for writers, and here’s an innovative resource we just learned about: Writer’s Infusion is an internet show designed to bring the experience and support of a writer’s group to the writing community, for free. It’s the the brainchild of Susan Zall (that’s her… Read more »
By Leonard Kress
Who but the Maenads, repentant, clothed, and in their right minds. (from Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion) For a long time I’ve been searching for a way to describe my own poetic process that also explains what takes place inside me when I read certain poems. As far as… Read more »
By Cassandra Capewell
Being an English major combines many of the things in life that I enjoy deep down to my core: I love reading, which is nice because most of my assignments are lengthy portions of text. I love writing, both creatively and academically, so hunkering down to bang out an eight-page paper, if I have enough… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Yesterday I got a letter from AWP attempting to win me back as a Writer’s Chronicle subscriber (I have no excuse except that I forgot to renew). Inside the envelope was a solicitation letter. And this bookmark: My first thought upon reading this bookmark was: Right on Joan! Potential bottomless pit of potential humiliation!… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Marianne Leone’s essay “The Official Story” is a Featured Nonfiction piece in the fall issue. She is an actress, screenwriter, and essayist. Her essays and op-ed pieces have appeared in the Boston Globe, The Bark magazine, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog. She had a recurring role on HBO’s The Sopranos and has appeared in films by John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Nancy Savoca, Michael… Read more »
By Cassandra Capewell
The Writers’ Workshop is one of the most important lessons in writing. Workshops are designed to offer writers an array of critiques in order to improve a specific piece. Most college programs, to some extent, incorporate a workshop aspect. As I mentioned in my first blog post, when I initially walked into a class called… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
I recently read that Judith Kitchen passed away from cancer. I didn’t know Judith personally; we’d never even met. I discovered her via the flash nonfiction anthologies she created and edited, with the aptly named titles: In Short, In Brief and Short Takes. I fell hard for the flash nonfiction form when my friend Janet introduced me… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Once upon a time, when I was a young twenty-something server at a restaurant just outside of Boston, my manager called me into his office. “Amy,” he said solemnly. “I need to tell you something. You’re not the stronger waiter.” “Um, I’m not a waiter,” I corrected him. “I’m a waitress.” Looking back, however, if… Read more »
By Leonard Kress
I was driving to work a few weeks ago, listening closely to a news report about the survivalist Eric Frein, who had just murdered a Pennsylvania State Trooper and managed to evade capture by hiding out in the dense forests of the Pocono Mountains. Although hundreds of people were engaged in a desperate and dramatic… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Don’t miss this November 5th 24-hour offer to download two new eBooks from SolsticeLit Books for FREE Why are we giving away our books? As a valued reader of Solstice Lit Mag, we know you appreciate artful writing that can probe at the spots we all tend to tuck away. We want to encourage you to… Read more »
By Cassandra Capewell
I have a theory about all of those happy writers sitting in coffee shops. All of those happy writers sitting in coffee shops are only happy because they’re doing it wrong. I observed these happy writers often from a long Starbucks line at 8:00am through my yawning eyes, and I never once thought I could… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
I am! As the new Managing Editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, I’m thrilled to be running the SolLit Blog. Each week my aim is to inform, engage and inspire you with good reads about writing craft, writing process, trends in writing and/or literature, author interviews, and perhaps the occasional mini-rant. You can… Read more »
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