BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Lorena Hernández Leonard
Estimados Solstice Readers, At the time of this writing I am recovering from COVID. In a household of four, three of us tested positive, suffering through the virus’s effects physically and emotionally. Ironically, just days before, on a lovely summer afternoon, my husband and I had been discussing with a friend how it felt that… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
We are both darkness and light. Is the inside dark and the outside light, or the reverse? Ying and yang, night and day. Body and soul. We need one to know the other. Poet and translator Red Pine writes in dancing with the dead, “Language is at the surface of the much deeper flux that is… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
First, I want to thank Grace Talusan, who judged our Michael Steinberg Nonfiction Prize. Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and went on to win the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction. The Body Papers was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Of… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
It’s a joy to present the selections for the 2023 Stephen Dunn Prize for poetry. The winning poem is “the Banjo Player Explains,” by Matthew E. Henry, selected by our poetry judge for this issue, A. Van Jordan. He writes: In one of the most assured ekphrastic poems I’ve read in some time, ‘the Banjo… Read more »
By Lee Hope and Ruth Mukwana
Dear SOLSTICE community, First of all, heartfelt thanks to Anjali Mitter Duva, distinguished novelist, who for the past two years served as our fiction co-editor. Anjali brought the combination of creativity, dedication and organizational expertise, which she is taking with her since she has co-founded an ambitious, author-oriented publishing venture Galiot Press. We will sincerely… Read more »
By Andrai Whitted and Jess Ruliffson
We are proud to offer our readers this amazing selection of submissions from our 3rd year of Graphic Lit (Comic Narrative) work. We are also extremely lucky to have had, Eisner-nominated cartoonist, Jess Ruliffson as a guest judge. Jess’ work includes her debut graphic novel, Invisible Wounds, nominated for an Online Journalism Award in 2023.… Read more »
By Lorena Hernández Leonard
Back in the fall when I was interviewing with Solstice’s Founding Editor Lee Hope and Founding Board Member Bill Betcher for the EIC role, it was evident how committed they were to the magazine’s mission of amplifying diverse voices. This point is worth highlighting. In my 20-year communications career, where I worked with small and… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
I wonder if anyone else has noticed the frequency with which the words transaction, transactive, transactional are becoming part of our current lexicon. I encounter them more and more frequently, not only in print but in conversation. I hope this means that we are catching on to the fact that slowly but surely we have all… Read more »
By Enzo Silon Surin
There is something to be said about transmitting information from one body to another, whether it be flesh, dust or ocean or the space between us, which, in itself, is time measured in distance. There is an infinite beauty in the way we change forms, at times seemingly intentional, and how we seamlessly move from… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
Thinking of William Carlos Williams’s famous quote “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet [people] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there” and Stanley Kunitz’s view that poetry makes revelation possible, we bring you features from the French, Russian and Polish that cultivate their inner vision by seeking… Read more »
By Lee Hope and Anjali Mitter Duva
What a collection of seemingly divergent yet paradoxically interrelated stories we offer you this spring! Pieces ranging from established authors to emerging voices, from the realistic to the more experimental. As editors, we seek such a variety of vital, culturally diverse fiction, of stories meant to challenge and entice you, the reader. To paraphrase Stanley… Read more »
By Andrai Whitted
In this issue of Solstice Graphic Lit we bring you a visual story by poet, writer, and visual artist Nance Van Winckel. Enter Iggy’s world through letters home to mom & dad from Jr. History Camp. Investigate what’s happening with Counselor Kyle and learn that “nothing here is awesome.” Nance’s artwork, a mix of erasure… Read more »
By Ilan Mochari
It’s with a superabundance of gratitude that Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices presents our annual print issue—our first since 2020, owing to last year’s pandemic-related hiatus. If you’re new to our literary journal, welcome: You’re about to enjoy a volume of words and images that reflect our values of championing marginalized voices and fighting… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
For the past three years i’ve spent the majority of my time on a hillside in Vermont, looking over an apple orchard out across the Connecticut River Valley. The trees came with the property, and when we moved in, we knew next to nothing about maintaining an orchard. The learning curve has been steep, but… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
There’s a rocky beach near my house where the other day—bright blue cloudless sky, some chop on the water—I saw a man in a fishing kayak. He seemed well equipped, wearing a vest with many pockets, a floppy canvas hat to shield him from the sun. Although he was some distance away, I could see… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
As the light gives way to earlier winter darkness, the landscape seems to sharpen, or is it just the earth growing more bare and spacious? Once again, we are on the cusp—the threshold of something else, some further existence, as what we encounter in poetry, striving to translate into language what it feels like to… Read more »
By Lee Hope and Anjali Mitter Duva
For fifteen years, solstice magazine has published fiction that embodies diversity of various types: country of origin, class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion and age. In this Winter Print issue, we range from the depths of racial injustice to the heights of lesbian love. Also, we offer styles varying from the experimental through the more traditional,… Read more »
By Ilan Mochari
It is a leap of faith to enter a writing contest. Believe me, I know. I’ve done it for years, always forking over a fee, always pondering the things a submitter is bound to ponder: Does my cover letter matter? Does this journal really read every entry? Do the editors truly consider all entries for… Read more »
By Ilan Mochari
In Jennifer Martelli’s recently released poetry collection The Queen of Queens, an epigraph from Sally Wen Mao’s “Nucleation” notes that women “wear the trauma of other creatures around their necks, in an attempt to put a pall on their own.” Which is to say, among other things, that one creature’s trauma can be another’s decoration.… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
I’m thrilled to present the winner of the Stephen Dunn Prize for 2022, “Polar Bear,” by Carol Hobbs, selected by our poetry judge for this issue, Tomás Q. Morín. He writes, “‘Polar Bear’ stopped me in my tracks. It slows down time to an achingly slow pace, the bear’s pace, which is to say the… Read more »
By Ewa Chrusciel and Barbara Siegel Carlson
What poems can one write after borders are brutally transgressed causing others, in turn, to cross to safety? To quote the Ukrainian poet, Kateryna Devdera in Ewa Chrusciel’s translation, “More than words, and orphaned poems, I desire to return to my motherland.” In times of war, one does not do verbal operations. One does not… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
Welcome to our Summer ’22 contest issue. First, I want to thank our judge, Alysia Abbott, author of the moving and memorable Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the best books of 2013 by The San Francisco Chronicle. A vivid, heartrending work of sustained truth-telling,… Read more »
By Anjali Mitter Duva and Lee Hope
Dear readers and friends of Solstice, We were thrilled with the number and quality of entries we received for this year’s fiction contest and heartened at how many young and emerging writers as well as established writers sent us their work. It was an honor to be entrusted with these fine stories. We thank our… Read more »
By Andrai Whitted
This is the second year Solstice has offered a Graphic Lit (Comics) category as part of our Summer Contest. We enjoyed reading all the imaginative and wide-ranging stories and styles that came in from across the globe. Our judge, Josh Neufeld, ultimately selected “Horses” by Robert James Russell, a deeply personal piece about the author’s… Read more »
By Ilan Mochari
The poet Natalka Bilotserkivets was an active participant in Ukraine’s Renaissance of the late-Soviet and early independence period. We’re fortunate at Solstice to count two translators of her work, Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, as members of our community. Ali and Dzvinia’s most recent book, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow: Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets… Read more »
By Ilan Mochari
Protesting is one thing when it is done by typing in a rectangular box on a social media platform. It’s quite another thing when it’s done in person. If you want to learn more about two poets well-versed the latter approach, you’d be hard pressed to find a better memoir than Mark Pawlak’s My Deniversity.… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
How do we counter the darkness, but with light—and the poems featured here come at a decisive and timely moment. Mariangela Gualtieri writes what we need is an embodiment of “real grief to birth,” to act out of an empathetic being with one another, to “hold hunger inside/for another’s hunger.” This transcendent power of connection… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
We were just putting finishing touches on this Spring 2022 issue of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices when Russian military forces invaded Ukraine. It’s hard to know what to do when it feels like tectonic social forces are coming unhinged around the globe, but we felt we could at least shine a small spotlight… Read more »
By Sam Cha
Look, I know I’m supposed to be the editor, and I know that as an editor I’m supposed to control myself, write something neutral and beige, with carefully picked quotes woven together into a perfectly acceptable and perfectly forgettable whole. But the truth is I adore these three writers: Mariya Deykute, MC Hyland, and Suzanna… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
In the broadest sense, the four essays collected in this issue are about identity — about how we situate ourselves in relation to the larger historical, economic, political, and cultural reality in which we find ourselves. In Zibiquah Denny’s “The Takeover,” for example, we see the inspiriting impact of adult courage on a young person… Read more »
By Anjali Mitter Duva
What a provocative, multi-faceted, gifted fiction collection for the Spring! For each issue, with suggestions from our fine readers, we collaborate on which pieces to accept. Then we edit and proof certain stories. This time, Lee introduces you to four riveting pieces, each coincidentally dealing with crime and its impact on the survivors, while Anjali… Read more »
By Lee Hope and Ilan Mochari
Transitions, a special note from Lee Hope, Founding Editor-in-Chief I am making a shift from Solstice Magazine, not an exit. I will continue to be president of the board of our Solstice Institute nonprofit and also serve as Fiction Co-editor. Transitions are passages in life, also grammatically between sentences; consequently, I am thrilled to present… Read more »
By Anjali Mitter Duva and Lee Hope
Each of the fiction pieces in this issue takes a moment, a decision point, and unspools for us the threads—emotional, physical, spiritual—that have led the main characters to it. In keeping with what we are noticing these days among many people around us, be they writers or not, these writers pulling in, diving deep into… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
I have been reflecting lately on the name of this journal, Solstice. Particularly in these late autumnal days here in New England, where afternoons accelerate into darkness sooner and sooner, and the morning light is meager and chill. Darkness is accumulating, and soon the winter solstice will be upon us, that nadir of our days.… Read more »
By Brenda Sparks Prescott
This issue features an interview and a review about non-fiction books that reach across class and racial divides and witness the complications and consequences of inequality in America. We also offer a review of a poetry collection that crosses time and geography to explore the cultures and circumstances observed by a travelling poet. In Poetry… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
Adonis writes, “Poetry and the other arts seek a kind of progress that affirms difference, elation, movement and variety in life.” We can see this at play with spark and verve in the poets and translators we are delighted to bring to our pages: Małgorzata Lebda, Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese Astrid Cabral, Alexis Levitan and Boris Novak.… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
Dear readers, As befits this moment deep in the pandemic, vulnerability and mortality loom large in the selection of essays here from across a wide spectrum of contemporary essayists. The writers here remind us that history need not dictate the future, whether it be the history of divisions among the African Diaspora or the God-addled,… Read more »
By Andrai Whitted
I’m grateful for the overwhelmingly positive response to our introduction of this genre in 2019 and continued growth in quantity and quality of submissions, including the amazing work featured in our 2021 Summer Contest Issue. Graphic Lit is such a versatile genre, and I get excited by the possibilities that the comic form allows. That’s… Read more »
By Lee Hope
To Stephen Dunn, In Memoriam We dedicate this Summer Contest Issue to Stephen Dunn, whose life on our earth ended on June 24, 2021. As many know, Stephen was a man of great gifts. His oeuvre includes twenty-one poetry collections and two essay collections, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and countless other deserved accolades. In… Read more »
By Anjali Mitter Duva and Lee Hope
We are thrilled to announce guest judge Whitney Scharer’s choice of a Winner and a Runner-Up for the Solstice Magazine annual contest. We received at least one third more entries than in each of the last thirteen years, and we carefully read each piece before we sent six finalists to Whitney. The Winner is The… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
Congratulations to Herb Harris, M.D., who has won the Michael Steinberg Award for Nonfiction, selected by judge David Mura. Of Harris’ essay Mura writes, “Portrait of an Artist as a Black Man” explores the complexities that arise when the author attempts a literal drawing of himself. When the drawing does not seem to render a… Read more »
By Kaylin Wu
In this issue, we present interviews and book reviews. Our two interviews—with Co-Editor-in-Chief Brenda Sparks Prescott about her debut novel, Home Front Lines, and with Dariel Suarez about his novel, The Playwright’s House—portray race, class and BIPOC immigrant culture, integrate politics with fiction. In a previous interview, Dariel Suarez identified the separation of politics from
By Robbie Gamble
Before celebrating the results of the 2021 poetry contest, I need to acknowledge that the wonderful poetry in this summer issue is presented against a sad backdrop. As we were reading through incoming manuscripts, we learned of the passing of Stephen Dunn, a major figure in contemporary poetry, but in particular a long-time friend and… Read more »
By Andrai Whitted
Dear readers, Whether you are new to comics, an avid fan, or anywhere in between, we have something for you in our first ever contest issue featuring Graphic Lit. We were pleasantly surprised to have entries spanning the globe, some from as far as Australia! Besides that, the range of styles, subjects, and points of… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson
What Heather McHugh says of Bulgarian poet Blaga Dmitrova’s work in her introduction to Because the Sea is Black (1989) might apply to the poems in translation featured here as they display “reverence for the brave and solitary human gesture […] and, throughout faith in a transcendent understanding.” While there remains much disconnection, division and
By Lee Hope
Dear Valued Readers, We are immersed in a split, fragmented time. As we receive vaccines and emerge from our burrows into the spring air, we see mass shootings, AAPI racism, systemic racism and voter suppression. Yet we will continue to protest, in writing and action, against oppression and in support of diverse people and causes.… Read more »
By Amy Yelin, Deidra Dallas and Lee Hope
This issue we bring you a poetry review and two interviews. Lo Galluccio aptly reviews the new poetry collection I Wish My Father by Lesléa Newman. The poetry takes a funny and poignant look at the relationship between a daughter and a father at the end of his life. The first interview, conducted by Alex… Read more »
By Oliver de la Paz
You can see the red buds on the oaks that line my street. And what had been a long and dreadful winter looks to be thawing now. A sheet of ice that was once our patio is now pocked with holes and the rust of the brick is now visible under the light sheen. I’m… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
My neighbor constructed a bridge of two beams allowing us to cross a flowing channel, so that we can walk along the miles of bog behind our houses. Crossing this homemade bridge the other day, I was reminded of the way literature and translation serve to connect us to each other as much as they… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
These days, like many of us, I find myself wondering two things over and over: when will we emerge from the half-life of this pandemic? And what will it take to not only “build back better” as the current administration promises, but to truly build a multiracial, polylingual, multicultural, antiracist democracy? I don’t know the… Read more »
Poetry Editor’s Note
Graphic Lit Editor’s Note
Poetry in Translation
Editor’s Note
Note from the Editor-in-Chief
Reviews & Interviews Editors’ Note
Guest Poetry Editor’s Note
Poetry in Translation Editor’s Note
Nonfiction Editor’s Note
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