Learn to Talk in Beggars’ Cant. Jorie Graham wins Forward Prize. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham has become the first American woman ever to win one of the U.K.’s most prestigious poetry accolades, the Forward Prize for best collection. She will receive an award of 10,000 pounds. Graham is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in the English Department at Harvard. The Forward judges expressed their hope that Graham’s win for her 12th collection, “Place,” would find her “startling, powerful” poetry a wider readership in the U.K. The judges, headed by the poet Leonie Rushforth, called Graham’s collection “powerful, never predictable” and “a joy” to read, showing off her “huge confidence” and original use of form. “The energy, intelligence, and breadth of the poems … reflect a heightened perception and a philosophical exploration of the discomfort of living,” said Rushforth and her fellow judges, a panel of the poets Ian McMillan and Alice Oswald and the literary critics Emma Hogan and Megan Walsh.
A Little Ode to the Little Magazines and their Very Big Work | TMR Blog. (*today’s post comes to us via the wonderful Latanya McQueen.) I remember how in college, before there were resources like Newpages or Duotrope, to find out about literary journals one had to either order them or go to the bookstore and look at them.
Weekends during my senior year my best friend and I would frequent all the independent bookstores that we could find. One, in particular, was Harvard Bookstore, a small independent bookstore situated in the heart of Cambridge, and because of the location it can get crowded on the weekends. My friend and I would sit on the floor clustered together near the back, the journals in our laps. Browsers would have to shuffle over us as they made their way around the aisles or tried to look at the shelves nearby. We wanted to be writers and we wanted to publish, and in order to do any of that it was suggested by our professors that we look at the markets we hoped to be in.
I was twenty-one and had never even heard of Tin House before.
Everything in Writing and Life is Fiction. I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either. Writers are asked, particularly when we’ve got a book coming out, to write about writing. To give interviews and explain how we did this thing that we appear to have done. We even teach, as I have recently, students who want to know how to approach the peculiar occupation of fiction writing.
I tell them at the beginning—I’ve got nothing for you. I don’t know. I’ve written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. Something, obviously, is going on. I do no research. And I mean that—everything is fiction. So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Related: Read Keith Ridgway’s interview with Cressida Leyshon about his short story “Goo Book,” which appeared in the April 11, 2011, issue of the magazine. Illustration by Richard McGuire. Top 50 Literary Magazines. Find a complete listing of literary magazines here. Our criteria for this list has changed and we feel the literary magazines on this list are much better ranked than our previous list. It's always hard to build this list, but we looked about close to 20 data points in coming up with this list.
The most important criteria we used this time was date of founding, number of national anthologies publications (and we looked at a lot of them), and the quality of work of and names of passed greats published in the magazines. The purpose of this list is to help writers find a place to publish their writing that will get them some recognition. We feel when a magazine is published over a long period of time and is recognized nationally we feel it gives the authors more opportunity for exposure. This list also includes BOLD type where literary magazines take online submissions. Top 50 Literary Magazine New Yorker The best of the best.
Ploughshares The Atlantic Harper's Magazine Tin House Paris Review Agni.