Tag: poetry (Page 2 of 3)

Changes are coming

Let’s face it, the pandemic has been tough on all of us. We are all just hanging onto whatever shred of hope we can and we know it’s not over yet. But there is something we can do help the staff of our our little magazine. You all have been amazing with giving us many pieces to consider. So many that our staff can hardly keep up! Starting February 1st, we will close submissions for poetry and CNF. But there is a bigger plan!

  • Our Poetry Contest will now move to the month of February each year.
  • Flash CNF Contest will remain in November.
  • Poetry and CNF submissions will now be accepted April, May, June, and July ONLY.
  • Graphic Submissions will continue to be accepted year round.

Reducing the submission period we hope will allow our editors some respite and a faster response to our contributors. A win-win for all of us!

Thank you for your continued support and being a part of the Sweet family. We hope that you will find our changes favorable for everyone. Stay healthy, friends. Keep writing. Keep submitting.

Sweet Connections: Sara Henning

Thursdays are dedicated to connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Sara Henning
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: How to Pray Like a Girl
Issues: 5.2

Find Her:

FaceBook
Twitter

These days, Sara lives in Texas, teach at Stephen F. Austin State University, and serve as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

Find out more about Sara on her website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

So much has happened to me since “How to Pray Like a Girl” was published–personally, literarily, and existentially–but perhaps the coolest thing is that my collection of poetry, View From True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), won the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Adrian Matejka chose two winners that year–me and Monica Berlin. My book went on to win the 2019 High Plains Book Award Poetry and to be shortlisted for the 2018 Julie Suk Award. Diane Seuss blew my mind when wrote about my book, “Henning’s ravishing music is in revolt against the trauma of the book’s narrative, just as her sonnet sequences provide the ballast of history, of virtuosity. Sara Henning, a ‘trickster,’ ‘an heiress of disaster,’ has composed a radical masterpiece.”

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

Yes! I just finished up edits for my third book manuscript, Terra Incognita, a collection of poems focused around grief and the manner in which we pathologize the unknown. Latin for “unknown land,” Terra Incognita is a term used by cartographers to describe terrains that have been unmapped or otherwise undocumented. My objective for these poems is to explore and resolve the paradoxes of grief and its assimilation, weaving together my mother’s death from cancer, her mental illness, my husband’s hospitalizations, and re-occurrent miscarriage. Several poems from the collection won the 2019 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Who is your favorite author?

I love too many to narrow it down, but Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Mary Oliver are three poets very close to my heart.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

I have too many favorites to name, so I will share two with you. I love Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” particularly the question at the end: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Asking myself that question has helped me to escape a difficult childhood and to work on living my best life in small, beautiful ways. My second choice is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song.” I don’t believe in perfect poems, but I truly feel that this one is perfect in every way.

What inspires you to write?

I write to understand the world around me and the world inside of me.

What are you reading right now?

I’ve been re-reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. I’ve also been spending quite a bit of time with Jane Kenyon’s poems.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

I really love salt water taffy. I was born in Savannah, Georgia, and when I was a little girl, my mom would take us to River Street Sweets, the oldest candy store in the city, where I would watch the folks who worked there stretch it on a 100-year-old taffy machine! My childhood tastes like still-warm taffy, as if you took sugar and mixed it with the sea.

Oh, I have such fond memories of walking down Savannah’s Riverwalk just to go get taffy and pralines for my dad. Always worth the trip!

Thank you, Sara, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Sweet Connections: Jenny Ferguson

Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Jenny Ferguson
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: After the Trial, October 4th 2013
Issues: 6.2

Author head shot

Find Her:

Twitter

Jenny can be found in Gabrielino Tongva nation land. That’s L.A., folks. The Los Angeles Times has this super cool map that you can learn a little more or you can also check out this historical site.

Find out more about Jenny on her website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

Published my first novel with NeWest Press in 2016: Border Markers.

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

I’m revising a YA novel with my agent!

Who is your favorite author?

Haha. Impossible.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

Also impossible. But I’ll say that Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out On the Ground is still with me, daily, since I first read it a year ago.

What are you reading right now?

To survive the pandemic, lots and lots of feminist romance novels. And plenty of nonfiction about furthering my anti-racist work.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

Butter tarts with raisins. Oh my. Recipes exist galore.

A Canadian classic!

Thank you, Jenny, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Sweet Connections: Leah Browning

Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Leah Browning
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: Halfway Through the Biography of Anne Sexton
Issues: 4.1

Find Her:

Leah is a freelance writer and the editor of the Apple Valley Review. She currently lives in California.

You can find out more about her on her website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

My second chapbook of short fiction, Orchard City, was published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2017. (The cover design is by Sarah Reck.) 

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

I’ve been working on a full-length collection of fiction.

Who is your favorite author?

There are so many! A few of my favorites are Ha Jin, Alice Munro, David Sedaris, Raymond Carver, Amy Bloom, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Per Petterson, Etgar Keret, Elena Ferrante, Haruki Murakami, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Domenico Starnone.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

This is even harder to narrow down. A few that really stand out for me are Waiting by Ha Jin; In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin; My Ántonia by Willa Cather; Come to Me: Stories by Amy Bloom; Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born); Baba Dunja’s Last Love by Alina Bronsky (translated from the German by Tim Mohr); and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers). 

What inspires you to write?

Everything in life, I think.

What are you reading right now?

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about being a young writer in Paris in the 1920s, and The Red Convertible, a collection of short stories by Louise Erdrich.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

Chocolate mousse! More traditional versions taste amazing, but the quick and easy recipes—especially when garnished with whipped cream and chocolate shavings—are no slouch, either.  

That looks so yummy!

Thank you, Leah, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Sweet Connections: Jen Karetnick

Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Jen Karetnick
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: It’s about the dog, but not really about the dog
Issues: 11.2

Find Her:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter

This past November, I moved from my home of nearly 20 years, a mango grove in Miami Shores, to another house in a bird sanctuary called El Portal. It’s only two miles away, but having traded mangoes for peacocks that wander the streets in flocks, it feels a world apart.

You can find out more about her on her website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

In 2019, I was a finalist for several poetry and manuscript prizes: The 2019 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters; 2019 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Contest from Tinderbox Poetry Journal; 2019 Construction Literary Magazine Poetry Contest; 2019 Jacar Press Full-Length Manuscript Competition; 2019 Gold Wake Press Open Reading Period. Both manuscripts were picked up and are forthcoming–one this August from David Robert Books, called the Burning Where Breath Used to Be and one in 2023 from Salmon Poetry, called Hunger Until It’s Pain.

I also recently learned that I won the 2020 Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry. The poem that won is a villanelle called “Birkat HaBayit: A Woman Is a Bird When.”

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

I’m currently a Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence for playwriting. I’m writing a play for middle school-age children set in the endangered ecosystems of South Florida.

Who is your favorite author?

Whoever I’m currently reading at the time. I read all the time, which makes this question even harder to answer.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

See above!

What inspires you to write?

The natural world, science and medicine, social issues.

What are you reading right now?

A variety of journals–the Cincinnati Review is open on my desk right now–and a novel, Call Me Zebra.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

I’m addicted to Gummi Bears. I’m unsuccessfully trying to cut down.

But they are fat and gluten free, so that makes them healthy, right?

Thank you, Jen, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Sweet Connections: Alyssa Quinn

Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Alyssa Quinn
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: On Murder
Issues: 8.3

Find Her:
Facebook
Instagram

You can find Alyssa in Salt Lake City, attending the creative writing PhD program at the University of Utah.

You can find out more about her on her website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

I graduated with my BA, then with my MFA, and am now 2 years into my PhD (all creative writing). I had a chapbook, Dante’s Cartography, published with The Cupboard Pamphlet in October 2019. I’m also currently working as a prose editor for the journal Quarterly West.

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

I recently completed my first novel manuscript. I’d describe it as a surrealist museum-scape obsessed with paleoanthropology, ghosts, colonial violence, historical palimpsest, human evolution, the origins of language, and disco music.

Who is your favorite author?

Ugh, rude question. I love Beckett and Calvino. I’m itching to rattle off a couple dozen more, but I’ll refrain.

Ha Ha. We get it. We have lots of favorites, too.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

Again: rude. I can’t answer that, but I will say I’ve had “Part of Eve’s Discussion” by Marie Howe in an open tab on my phone for probably six months and can’t bring myself to close it.

What inspires you to write?

The way light falls.

What are you reading right now?

Just finished the exceptional Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

My go-to these days is dark chocolate and bourbon. 🙂

We found a great place to learn about pairing boubon with chocolate! It’s edcuational, right?

Thank you, Alyssa, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Sweet Connections: Sheila Squillante

Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Sheila Squillante
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: You Would Become,” “It Takes Strength to Be Gentle and Kind“, & “Meat Ragu
Issues: 5.1 & 7.2

Find Her:
Instagram
Twitter

You can find Sheila in Pittsburg, PA at Chatham University where she edits The Fourth Rivera journal of nature and place-based writing. She also edits  Barrelhouse online.

Check out her website!

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

I’ve become the director of Chatham University’s MFA program

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

My second collection of poetry, MOSTLY HUMAN, won the Wicked Woman Book Prize with Brick House Books and will be out in October, 2020.

Forthcoming October 2020

Who is your favorite author?

Anne Carson, Diane Seuss, Todd Kaneko, Camille Dungy, Natalie Diaz, Paisley Rekdal, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Sei Shonagon

What inspires you to write?

Memory, confusion, disorientation, grief, my children, the unlikely resilience of the natural world

What are you reading right now?

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, by Diane Seuss, Splinters are Children of Wood, by Leia Wilson.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

Salted caramel gelato.

We found an awesome rescipe from The Spruce Eats tempts our tastebuds!

Sea Salt Caramel Gelato

Thank you, Sheila, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Sweet Lit Poetry Contest 2020 Results

Thanks so much to all the wonderful poets who entered our contest this year! It was a very strong group, and both the editors and the judge remarked on how difficult it was to make final decisions.

WINNER:

KT Herr, “Improv”

KT Herr (she/her) is a queer poet, songwriter, and curious person with work published or forthcoming in Dream Pop, Small Orange, Frontier, Quarter After Eight, and others. KT earned her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the 2019-20 Thomas Lux Scholar and co-director of the 2020 Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. KT was awarded a 2019 Pabst Fellowship from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and was a semifinalist in the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Her ghost ship is currently anchored in Oak Bluffs, MA, where she teaches poetry workshops and interns for Black Lawrence Press.

RUNNERS UP:

Amy Miller, “Meteor, April 2020” and “Baby”

Leila Sinclaire, “What I Mean”

FINALISTS:

Marcia Alrich, “The Dahlia”

Shevaun Brannigan, “The Men”

Rebekah Miron, “Bird Heart”

Dayna Patterson, “Pied Beauty Redux”

V.S. Ramstack, “a crow living with regret”

Sherre Vernon, “A Descriptive Linguistics of Isolation”

JUDGE: Paige Lewis is the author of Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019). Their poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2017, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Paige currently lives and teaches in Indiana.

PROCESS: Poetry editors at Sweet Lit narrowed down the submissions to 10 finalist poems, which the judge received stripped of identifying information. The winning poem and some of the finalists will be published in Sweet Lit in the September 2020 and future issues.

Best of Net 2020 Nominations

Sweet Lit is proud to have nominated the following for this year’s Best of Net:

Poetry

And That Darkness” By Douglas Cole

MS Nocturne with Fuse, Crosshairs, and Irreparable Fissure” by Emily Rose Cole

Unison” by Justin Runge

The Taste of Blueberries” by Sandra Yannone

What do I do about the nightmares” by Janet MacFadyen

Joy” by Hannah Marshall

Essays

Brown Girl Learns Her Body” by Loré Yessuff

Autopsy Report” by Peggy Shumaker

Good luck to you all and congratulations for being Sweet’s Best of Net Nominations!

Sweet Connections: Joy Ladin

Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Joy Ladin
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: A Little Bit of Ocean,” “August,” “Afterward,” “Letter to Poetry”
Issues: 6.2

Find Her:
Facebook
Twitter

You can find Joy in Hadley, MA, where she is the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. She is also a poet and a nationally known speaker on transgendered issues. You can watch her TED talk, “Ain’t I A Woman?” for more.

Check out her website!

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

I have published two books of poetry, “The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems” and “Fireworks in the Graveyard,” and one book of creative non-fiction, “The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective,” and was chosen as one of 19 poets commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic to contribute new works to Project 19, a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote, among other cool things!

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

I’m in the midst of a book of poems called Shekhinah Speaks, in the voice of the Shekhinah, who, in Jewish tradition, is the immanent, female aspect of the Divine.

Who is your favorite author?

Emily Dickinson

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

Too many to choose!

What inspires you to write?

If I don’t write, I start to feel like I’m dead.

What are you reading right now?

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

Alas, I have developed an allergy to sugar, so everyone else, please enjoy for me!

That makes us so sad, but there are lots of alternatives out there these days. Here’s one worth checking out!

Thank you, Joy, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

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