As a part of our ongoing effort to support writers impacted by COVID-19, Maya Williams reviews Teaching While Black by Matthew E. Henry:
Teaching While Black is a full collection of confessional poetry from black poet and educator Matthew E. Henry available through Main Street Rag Publishing Company. This book showcases the lack of respect Henry, as a Black teacher, often faces in the public school system and the amount of emotional labor he often carries for his students. It’s worth delving into and reading for yourself.
In his poem “my third grade teacher,” Henry recounts the experience of being a student when he was younger. It reminds the reader that before he was stigmatized in the profession he chose, he faced stigmatization as a Black student as well.
Because he is able to reflect on his past perspective as a student, it makes sense how Henry spends some of his time reflecting on the lives of the students he teaches and their struggles.
One may question whether or not he ought to share his students’ stories that involve their experiences around issues such as gender identity, suicide, and trauma. However, it is important for us as readers to learn from his students as Henry the author continues to learn; like a form of “muscle memory,” (Henry’s words) if you will.
In recent years, gun violence in schools has been a topic of conversation in the media. What I appreciate about Henry’s poems about gun violence, is that he not only empathizes with what his students go through, he gives space for himself and how it has affected him. One cannot talk about gun violence without talking about how race plays a huge role in it. When a white man has a gun and causes violence, not just in schools but any building, he is written as “mentally ill” and harmless. Henry does not carry a gun at school, but it doesn’t stop officials from seeing him as a threat as a Black man and turning a gun on him. Officials didn’t think Henry was the one teaching the classroom and keeping students as physically and emotionally safe as he can.
It’s fascinating too that the same white officials, educators, administrators, students even who may see the speaker as a threat also sees him as “uppity” for choosing the profession he chose. It’s a double-edged sword here in “the surprising thing”:
“i’ve only been called ‘nigger’ once by a student—at least in my presence—and that under his breath. i wonder if i’m doing something wrong, if it’s my fault it happened only that one time. i may need to make them more uncomfortable with my skin or centeredness, my uppity angry Black man way of calling spades, pots and kettles exactly what they are.”
I love that Henry bites back in “an imminent nonet” to a predominantly white school board in contrast from “the surprising thing”:
“…. ‘that’s doctor “uppity nigger” to you, and don’t mumble into the microphone…”
Another way he bites back is in my absolute favorite poem of the entire collection, “re: your aryan princess in my class,” a letter to parents who try to defend the poor behavior of their student— particularly in complaining about classwork for The House on Mango Street. The type of harm students like this “aryan princess” can cause to marginalized students can be draining to deal with, especially in the ongoing debate about safe spaces in schools, and particularly in the South. And what a beautiful and visceral rant to put on paper as a way to take care of himself: “i’m sorry to report/the white supremacy you have patiently sown,/watered and sunned, has fallen on fallow soil.”
I am not a teacher, but I am someone who works regularly with youth, and I have loved ones who are teachers. This book is not meant for white people to gain. This certainly isn’t to say that white people shouldn’t read for them; it’s to say that this book is a testimony for Black people who continuously carry emotional labor and secondary trauma in their work. It is for Black people who love their jobs for the sake of the people they are serving, and who also crave a space to constructively criticize the job they love. Finally, it is, obviously, for Black teachers simply and not so simply working their asses off for their students harder than any other teachers out there.
Maya Williams (she/they) is a Black and Mixed Race writer currently residing in Portland, ME. Maya has published poems in glitterMOB, The Portland Press Herald, Black Table Arts, Occulum, and more. She has also published essays and poetry book reviews in The Tempest, Black Girl Nerds, The Floor Mag, and more. They are a Best of the Net Nominee and a finalist in Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s chapbook contest in 2019. Maya will be starting Randolph College’s low residency MFA virtually in mid-June 2020.
As part of our ongoing commitment to providing a platform for marginalized voices, Sundress Publications‘ project, The Wardrobe, is accepting submissions of published collections in all genres by women and nonbinary authors that honor the following holidays:
June 27th, PTSD Awareness Day
June 28th – July 4th, Helen Keller Deaf-Blind Awareness Week
July 1st – July 7th, Clean Beaches Week or Plastic Free July
August 1st – August 7th, World Breastfeeding Week
August 9th, International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples
September 1st – September 30th, National Infant Mortality Awareness Month
September 6th – September 12th, National Suicide Prevention Week
We at Sundress hope to champion writers whose work highlights human struggle and challenges misconceptions. We are looking for that touch on the various topics encompassed above.
Authors or publishers of books published in the past twelve months may submit to The Wardrobe. To do so, please forward an electronic copy of the book (PDFs preferred), author’ bio, photo of the cover, and a link to the publisher’s website to wardrobe@sundresspublications.com with the holiday of your choosing in the subject line. In addition, we request that one print copy be mailed to Sundress Academy for the Arts, ATTN: The Wardrobe, 195 Tobby Hollow Lane, Knoxville, TN 37931.
Submissions to The Wardrobe will remain eligible for our “Best Dressed” selection for one year. Hard copies will become a permanent part of the Sundress Academy for the Arts library and be made available to our residency and workshop participants.
Angela Narciso Torres’ chapbook, To the Bone, explores themes of motherhood, life, death, tradition, and culture. Torres writes with a rhythm and musicality all her own, playing with imagery and meaning in a manner that reminds one of the kaleidoscopic perspectives of the impressionists.
In this interview, Sundress intern Ada Wofford took some time to correspond with Torres about this chapbook and the concepts therein.
Ada Wofford: I noticed the repeated themes of food and eating, what can you tell me about the significance of those themes?
Angela Narciso Torres: The theme of food and eating recurs because cooking (and eating) was a valuable part of our family, especially on the maternal side. It was a metaphor for love, as is the case in many Filipino families. Where words failed, food came in to fill the gaps. Meals were not only for sustenance but for nourishing and strengthening family ties. Many of my best childhood memories revolved around the unforgettable meals we shared. And because this book is about love, and family, and loss—food naturally became one of the central tropes.
AW: The poem, “VIA NEGATIVA” eschews the use of question marks and uses a long space to emphasize a particular line. What is the role/function of punctuation and space in this poem and the book as a whole?
ANT: The negative space in the middle of this poem is used to enact, in a physical way, the poem’s subject. My use of punctuation, or the lack of it, is always deliberate in my poems. I view punctuation as a valuable tool for teaching the reader how to read the poem, and so it must be employed with great care and attention. Along with line breaks, they control the pacing of the poem, but also the tone. We can extend the pauses between sentences with punctuation; adding white space extends that pause even further.
AW: What is the significance of light and sunlight in these poems?
ANT: Growing up in the Philippines, light was either overabundant (during the dry season) or notably lacking (during rainy season). As a poet, I’ve always been aware of light as something that can influence the mood or tone surrounding a memory or a felt experience. When I moved to the United States and experienced the four seasons it deepened and expanded my appreciation for various qualities of light and how they can alter not only our moods but also the tone of an experience, when expressed in language. It is one of those devices we have at our disposal as poets to get at a feeling that we need to express in words and images.
AW: One poem is called, “Self-Portrait of a Rosary” and rosary beads are mentioned elsewhere as well. What is the significance of Catholicism in this collection?
ANT: Having been raised Catholic and having attended parochial schools growing up in the Philippines, the language of liturgy and scripture naturally found their way into my poems. The cadences of the psalms, prayers, the liturgy of the Word, and the ritual of the Mass were easily some of the first poetic language I’d learned. There’s a cadence embedded in this language that becomes hardwired in your memory when you hear them week after week. Some of it is really quite beautiful. Aside from Sunday Mass, my parents insisted on the family saying the rosary together at night.
While I am not as devout with this practice as my parents were, rosary beads have become a symbol or talisman for the strength and comfort of family and of faith in something larger than ourselves that the repetition of these incantatory prayers somehow invokes. To this day, I carry rosary beads in my pocket or purse for this very reason.
AW: Considering the references to music in your collection, what is the role of sound and rhythm in these poems?
ANT: Poetry is an art form that aspires toward music. I strive for musicality in my poems simply because I feel that poetry must be, among other things, as pleasurable to the ear as a piece of music. My parents played piano and violin together, and my father constantly played music as we were growing up: from classical to jazz, to Broadway musicals, to “golden oldies.” I begged my parents for piano lessons at the age of 5 and continued taking lessons up to my college years. For me, music was a direct, almost visceral path to the emotions, and the release music could provide was even more immediate than language itself.
So, to be able to express emotional experiences in language, music would clearly have to come into play. I will often read my poems aloud to “hear” the lines as musical phrases, noting whether the lines sound melodious or clunky and revising the phrasing, rhythm, or sound as I see fit.
AW: Can you talk about the recurring theme of your mother?
ANT: When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, it was a bewildering time for my family. She had always been at the center of our lives—the powerhouse that fueled our days, the keeper and teller of stories, the life of any gathering. She was also a well-loved doctor, a skilled pianist, and an exacting disciplinarian.
From her mother, she inherited a passion for cooking. In her family, food was the highest expression of love. Writing this book was, among other things, primarily a way of preserving what I could of the mother I knew, even as she began the slow decline into dementia.
It was also a way of coming to terms with the impending loss, in part by being watchful for whatever connections we could still forge as she came under the grips of this terrible disease.
In writing these poems, I found myself sifting through the stories she repeated, the food she loved, the songs she played on the piano, her quirky rituals, her anxieties, and her various expressions of love, imperfect as they sometimes were. The most insistent of those found their way into this book.
AW: There are three poems titled as, “Self-Portrait of…” What is the significance of this act (the act of creating a portrait of oneself) in regard to this collection?
ANT: The three poems, “Self Portrait as Water,” “Self Portrait as Rosary Beads,” and “Self Portrait as Revision,” are meant to redirect the reader’s attention to the speaker of these poems, and to consider how this person is changed by the events in her life—her mother’s decline, her body changing as she grows older while fulfilling various roles as young daughter, wife, mother (of young and then older children), and daughter of aging parents.
In a way, these self-portraits are a thread that weave the poems together, being the voice or the sensibility behind these poems—ever-evolving, morphing, and changing as life necessitates when one is thrust into various transitions, losses, and beginnings that are part of the ebb and flow of human experience.
Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books, 2013) and What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books, 2021); and winner of the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize. Her recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, and PANK.
A graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She serves as the reviews editor for RHINO. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently lives in South Florida.
Ada Wofford is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Library and Information Science. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a BA in English Literature.
She is a Contributing Editor for The Blue Nib literary magazine, the Founding Editor of My Little Underground, and has been published by McSweeney’s, Fudoki Magazine, Burial Day Books, and more.
From August 2020 to January 2021, the Sundress Reading Series will be conducted online via Zoom. Applications to participate as a reader are available and the deadline to apply is June 30th.
The Sundress Reading Series is an award-winning literary reading series usually hosted on-ground in Knoxville, TN, just miles from the Great Smoky Mountains. An extension of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Sundress Reading Series features nationally recognized writers in all genres from around the US while also supporting local and regional nonprofits.
We are currently curating our fall reading series schedule on August 26, September 30, October 28, November 18, and December 30, and January 27. Our readings take place the last Wednesday of every month from 7-8PM EST through the online platform of Zoom.
We are currently seeking readers with books recently released–or to be released in 2020– with an emphasis on marginalized voices especially BIPOC writers, trans and nonbinary writers, and writers with disabilities. To apply to read for the fall, send 6-8 pages of poetry or 8-15 pages of prose, a 100-word bio, CV (optional), and preferred reading dates to sundresspublications@gmail.com. Please make sure the subject line reads “Reading Series Application + Your Name.”
We will make every effort possible to contact those chosen by July 15th. While we are currently unable to pay our readers, authors’s work will be promoted on the Sundress Academy for the Arts social media platforms both during and preceding the event.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! For this installment, JP Howard reads poems from Cheryl Clarke and talks about literary activism, the power of poetry, and the importance of black, lesbian voices in the community. Thank you for reading!
Erica Hoffmeister: Why did you choose to read these poems by Cheryl Clarke for Lyric Essentials?
JP Howard: I know that the Lyric Essentials series provides writers an opportunity to pay homage to poets that have guided us and transformed our work and Cheryl Clarke and her work have spoken to me for many decades. Her writing has consistently inspired my own poetry. I first discovered Clarke’s work when I was a freshman attending Barnard College. I’m pretty sure “Of Althea and Flaxie” was one of the very first poems of Clarke’s that I read. I loved that it was bold and that it celebrated an out-loud love between two women. The time period at the start of the poem (1943) lets the reader know from the start that this was a love that was not easily swayed by society or society’s expectations. Her entry into the poem is quite exquisite with her narrative description of the couple; she paints a portrait of a butch-femme couple who are proud of their relationship. This book was written in the early 80’s and I believe it was significant and empowering to note that Cheryl Clarke, like Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, all fierce black activist lesbian poets writing during that time period, wrote unapologetically about lesbian love. I choose this poem, in particular, because Clarke painted this couple so vividly on the page, that many years went by before I read the poem again, yet I clearly remembered Althea and Flaxie. It was as if I had actually met them at some point in my life. I also chose this poem to honor my 18 year old self. It’s a way of saying “JP you are still here. You are still living your life out loud too!” The poetry of Clarke, Lorde and Parker, all gave me the courage to come out to my own family, soon after discovering their work while at Barnard. Ultimately, this is a classic Clarke narrative poem that deserves to be both read and heard.
“i come to the city” wasn’t a poem of Clarke’s that I was familiar with, yet it had a strong New York energy that drew me into the poem. It reminds me of the vibe of New York lesbian clubs and bars, that once were in abundance, but sadly, no longer are. This poem, while concise, effectively captures all the promise and sensuality of women making connections in a big city, like New York or San Francisco. It is also infused with Clarke’s acerbic wit and determination in the ending lines “I been in love/six times in the last six months/and ain’t done trying yet.” I think it’s a poem of lesbian desire/longing that many can relate to—also the ending and the speaker’s determination “ain’t done trying yet” makes the reader chuckle to herself!
EH: Has Clarke’s work influenced your own work as a writer or educator?
JPH: Clarke’s work has influenced me tremendously, both as writer and educator. She continues to speak her truth. I love that she is a black lesbian activist poet speaking her truth through generations and to new generations. She proudly refers to herself as a “queer black troublemaker” and I love that description! It’s so on point. Her poems are honest, incredibly sexy, consistency political and often challenge the reader to think about all the intersections in our lives. She makes the reader work and I love her poems for doing that. Her work has and continues to challenge me to speak my truth and also to consistently teach her work, along with other black lesbian activist poets, so that writers of all generations can be exposed to Clarke’s early work and her current work. Much of my own poetry is political and deals with the intersections of being a black lesbian activist poet in America—I try to always bring my full self to the page, the stage and to the classrooms and/or to writing workshops that I facilitate.
Much of my writing and how I move through the world as an activist poet, I owe to Clarke. Discovering her work at a young age made me realize I too can speak my truth and maybe someone will read my work one day, the way I was reading and being influenced by her work. I’m fortunate to now also call Cheryl Clarke friend. During this past April during National Poetry Month (NaPoMo), we were in a small online writing group, Elma’s Heart Circle, founded by another dynamic black lesbian poet, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. Our small group of women poets exchanged poems daily. Cheryl Clarke’s new poems were political, unwavering in their directness, and often gut-wrenching in their ability to shine a light on painful Her/Histories. She continues to speak her truth and inspire me as a writer and as a friend.
EH: Clarke’s life’s work is an example of the power of poetry—how important do you think it is to share and highlight the work of such influential activists like her?
JPH: I think it is absolutely crucial to share and highlight the work of influential activists like Cheryl Clarke. Her poetry, her essays, her political activism, her current work as co-founder, with her sister Breena Clarke, of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers, are all models of literary activism. She not only speaks her truth, but each year brings hundreds of women writers together to share their stories and their words at this annual women writer’s festival that centers and celebrates women writers. I think it is important to also highlight when poets and writers are giving back to our writing communities—literary activism is crucial and inspiring.
EH: Is there anything you are currently working on that you’d like to share with readers?
JPH: I’m delighted that one of my praise poems was recently selected by Tracy K. Smith, former Poet Laureate of the U.S. for The Slowdown, Smith’s daily weekday podcast series. I’m not sure what day it will be arriving in peoples inboxes, but folks can subscribe on Apple and Google podcasts. I’m working on completing edits for two poetry manuscripts, one full length and the other a chapbook. I’m excited for my second full length collection to find a home. I’m the proud curator and nurturer of Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, a monthly literary series that usually meets in New York. Since March, I’ve been busy reimagining and bringing the Salon & Open Mic series online during this current pandemic while many of us are sheltering-in. The responses to the online iteration have been incredible. While our online gatherings confirm my belief in the healing power of poetry and community, I still fiercely miss our monthly in-person gatherings.
Cheryl Clarke is a widely recognized black lesbian poet, essayist, educator and community activist who grew up during the Civil Rights Movement in Washington D.C. Her work is known for its significant cultural impact in black, lesbian, and feminist communities, and has been anthologized and featured in various journals such as The Black Scholar, The Kenyon Review, The World in Us: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Poetry, and many others. She is the author of five poetry books, including her most recent, By My Precise Haircut (2016); her book Experimental Love (Firebrand Books, 1993) wasnominated for a 1994 Lambda Literary Award. She holds a B.A. from Howard University and an M.A., M.S.W., and Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and she works as the Director of the Office of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian-Gay Concerns at Rutgers, and co-organizer of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Hobart, New York with her life partner.
JP Howard is an author, educator, literary activist, curator and community builder. She curates Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, in New York and herdebut poetry collection, SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System), was a 2016 Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is also the author of bury your love poems here (Belladonna*) and co-editor of Sinister Wisdom Journal Black Lesbians—We Are the Revolution! JP is a 2020 featured author in Lambda Literary’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools program and was a Split this Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism finalist. She is also featured in the Lesbian Poet Trading Card Series from Headmistress Press and was the recipient of Lambda Literary’s Judith A. Markowitz Emerging Writer Award. JP’s work is widely anthologized and poetry and essays have appeared (or forthcoming) in The Academy of American Poets poem-a-day series,The Slowdown podcast,Anomaly, Apogee Journal, The Feminist Wire, Split this Rock, Muzzle Magazine, The Best American Poetry Blog, Nepantla: A Journal for Queer Poets of Color, Talking Writing, Connotation Press and others. JP is the Editor-at-Large at Mom Egg Review VOX online and holds a BA from Barnard College, an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York and a JD from Brooklyn Law School.
Further reading:
Subscribe to The Slowdown to listen to Howard’s feature on the podcast with Tracy K. Smith. Purchase Howard’s latest collection, SAY/MIRROR. Learn more about JP Howard and keep up with her work at her personal website.
Erica Hoffmeister is originally from Southern California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. Currently in Denver, she teaches college writing and is an editor for the Denver-based literary journal South Broadway Ghost Society. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019). A cross-genre writer, she has several works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, articles and critical essays published in various outlets. Learn more about her at http://ericahoffmeister.com/
The book, Everything Turns Into Something Else (Grayson Books, 2020) hits readers directly in their heart center. This collection of brutal poetry spans animals to touch; covers glass to the heaviness of being while lodging teeth inside lungs, leaving organs lopsided. Jeanne Wagner takes us on a ride that fills our entire heart-centers. From speaking about the gaze of dogs to discussing emotional turns historical characters make, Wagner allows us access into a special world where the minutia of everything comes alive, and where readers can lean into spaces that challenge and inspire them to think in new and non-binary ways.
In the opening poem, “Dogs That Look Like Wolves,” Wagner interrogates the symbolism between wolf and dog, how the two echo one another. The speaker of this poem asserts, “I’ve always loved dogs that look like wolves, / loved stories of wolves: the alphas, the bullies, the bachelors.” Wagner helps readers explore the ways in which dogs are compared to other things, how they occupy and change space.
Each of Wagner’s poems explores a motif of noticing. Whether Wagner is exploring the way things feel, how things resonate in the world, or simply how things transform and turn into “something else,” the writing is stunning, evocative, and perplexing. Wagner invites us into thinking about how we participate in our humanity alongside other living and breathing entities. Each poem operates as a separate entity, inside of a container, and spans its own lifetime. Wagner illustrates the extent of their emotional deftness, how their images give life to a myriad of feelings including sadness, hunger, pain, and love. Wagner is bold in the assertion of urgency and in how they conjure a sense of things that happens outside of the page completely.
Wagner’s writing encourages readers to lean into their own minds, to melt into their bodies as the words are being read. Readers are challenged to see beyond the lens of the words, to see beyond the worlds in which the stanzas live. Wagner forces us to bend as the poetry, too, bends, as we are implored to continue looking further. The beauty of Wagner’s writing is that it keeps us dreaming, it keeps us balancing reality and the space we go right before we fall asleep. Wagner doesn’t let us forget for one second the sharpness of the tongue that is used, how Wagner vividly describes to us the very heart and essence of what is happening before us. Wagner’s writing cuts us open and halves us—it forces us to sit with our humanity in new and confronting ways.
The hallmark of this poetry collection is centered around the usage of the everyday riddled with the fantastical, how a single thought is expanded into a micro-story. The hallmark of Wagner’s poetry takes to places where the entities of the poems are journeys and destinations contained inside themselves. Wagner does not give us the privilege of a quiet read; we are forced to reckon with parts of our humanity that might be hurt. We are forced to lap up the darkness, to submerge ourselves in the parts of us that might not be congruent with who we want to be.
Wagner begs us all to occupy a different perspective, to see things through a new lens. Wagner invites us into worlds completely new and fascinating, and allows us to move through its time at our own pace. This collection is raw. These collections make us emotionally bleed. These collections are not here to make us comfortable, but rather to help us confront the reality of ourselves. Wagner supports us in letting ourselves dare to dream, and to consider things beyond the scope of what we are used to.
The best part of this book is how Wagner keeps us hanging on every word until the end. There is no shortage of shock or electricity throughout this collection. Readers are hooked onto every line, are immersed in the world of topics. There is diversity and such innovative language used in this piece—it never fails to put things for us right in our faces. The speaker in the poem, “A Personal History of Glass” speaks about how ice forms its own relationship with the body, changing it and putting it through its own unique chemical process.
These poems require our attention, they exist on the page and inside of us as well. Wagner does what so many brilliant writers do, makes something live on inside of us long after we have read it on the page. Wagner allows all of us to exist in a space within and outside of ourselves. These pieces bring us closer to our individual selves and our collective selves. These pieces help us to understand ourselves through a lens that saves us from our comfort—allowing us to dig deep and stay there.
Sabrina Sarro is a social worker in the state of NY. They hold an LMSW from Columbia University and are currently pursuing an MFA from the City College of New York—CUNY. As a queer non-binary writer of color, they are most interested in investigating the intersectionalities of life and engaging in self-reflection and introspection. They are an alumnus of the LAMBDA Literary Emerging Voices for LGBTQIA* Writers Retreat, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, and many others. They have received scholarships from The Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.
Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing collective founded in 2000 that hosts a variety of online journals and publishes chapbooks, full-length collections, and literary anthologies in both print and digital formats. Sundress also publishes the annual Best of the Net Anthology, celebrating the best work published online, runs Poets in Pajamas, an online reading series, and the Gone Dark Archives, preserving online journals that have reached the end of their run.
The editorial internship position will run from July 1 to January 1, 2021. The editorial intern’s responsibilities can include writing press releases, composing blog posts and promotional emails, proofreading manuscripts, assembling press kits, collating editorial data, research, managing spreadsheets, and more. The intern may also be responsible for writing copy, conducting interviews with Sundress authors, and promoting our catalog of titles.
Preferred qualifications include:
A keen eye for proofreading
Strong written communication skills
Familiarity with WordPress, Word, and the Google Suite
Ability to work under a deadline and multitask
Knowledge of and interest in contemporary literature a plus
This is a REMOTE internship with the team communicating primarily via email and text messages and is therefore not restricted to applicants living in any particular geographic area. Interns are asked to devote 10 hours per week to their assignments.
While this is an unpaid internship, all interns will gain real-world experience in the ins and outs of independent publishing with a nationally recognized press while creating a portfolio of work for future employment opportunities. Interns will also be able to attend all workshops at the Sundress Academy for the Arts at cost.
We welcome, encourage, and are enthusiastic to see a diverse array of applicants in all areas including race, ethnicity, disability, gender, class, religion, education, immigration status, and more.
To apply, please send a resume and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position to our Staff Director, Anna Black at black@sundresspublications.com by June 1, 2020.
Sundress Publications has given space for writers to discuss important topics impacting the literary community. We have hosted roundtables on plagiarism and accountability and, today, we are glad to offer space for a roundtable on publishing.
In this two-part series, editors Sarah Clark (ANMLY, beestung, and Bettering American Poetry), Sarah Feng (COUNTERCLOCK Journal), Luther Hughes (Shade Literary Arts), Iris A. Law (Lantern Review), and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello (Print-Oriented Bastards) discuss the ins and outs of online publication and running your own literary journal. While we at Sundress may individually agree (or disagree) in whole or in part with any or all of the participants, the views expressed in these roundtables are not necessarily representative of Sundress Publications, Sundress Academy for the Arts, or any other part of the collective.
Sarah Clark (SC), ANMLY, beestung, Bettering American Poetry: (they/she)
Sarah Feng (SF), COUNTERCLOCK Journal (Editor-in-Chief, 2019—): (she/her)
Luther Hughes (LH), Shade Literary Arts: (he/him)
Iris A. Law (IL), Lantern Review: (she/her)
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello(MCCB), Print-Oriented Bastards: (she/her)
What inspired you to establish your own literary magazine?
Iris Law: Loneliness, honestly. When Mia Ayumi Malhotra and I started Lantern Review back in 2009, we were both in MFA programs in separate states. We were two young APA writers who were desperate for community—for peers who could identify with our experiences as well as for literary mentors and role models to whom we could look and say, If they did it, so can I.
For me, in particular, the notion of being a professional poet was just not something that I grew up with a preexisting model for. Until I was in college, I didn’t know what poets did, frankly. Or that it could be a career. I’d never met one—let alone one who looked like me. It wasn’t until my undergrad years that I even realized that living Asian American poets existed (though when I did, it was a revelation). When Mia and I went off to our respective grad programs after college, we were both in that hungry, exploratory phase in which we just wanted to learn everything we could about other APA poets out in the world and also be reminded that we were not alone.
During the MFA, you’re told to read journals that publish writers with whom you and your work have an affinity—and then to submit to those periodicals (a piece of advice that I still find to be pretty sound). But, at least at the time, there were no literary journals out there that were specifically focused on poetry by APA writers. So one summer, I sat Mia down and asked her to help me found a journal that would do just that. Early on, we envisioned Lantern Review as a space to illuminate—to highlight and shed light on—APA poetry. And, at least at first, it was as much a means for the two of us to explore and learn as it was an opportunity to carve out a space for writers like ourselves in the world.
Luther Hughes:Shade first started off as a blog I created in undergrad. I had just begun studying a lot of writing by queer poets of color, poets I had no idea existed, and poets I knew existed but didn’t know were queer. I felt enlightened and overwhelmed. And then I began wondering what my life, my poetry would have been like if I were told about these amazing poets like Carl Phillips, Timothy Liu, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and many others. It was then I knew I had a duty to my community to create a platform so I can highlight works by queer people of color. I began doing spotlights, interviews, and more. The idea was that some queer Black or brown kid would come across the blog and feel seen; I wanted others to feel seen. The name “shade” was created to emphasize people coming to relax and feel comfortable.
In 2016, I realized the blog had run its course and I needed to expand. This is why The Shade Journal was created. Not only did I want to highlight already established queer poets, I wanted to publish “emerging” ones. One of my goals in life is to support queer writers of color any way I possibly can.
Just last year, 2019, I changed the name to Shade Literary Arts. This decision was made because I am working to make Shade a nonprofit and to expand outward to support not just queer poets of color, but all queer writers of color. While the journal will still be the main programming for Shade Literary Arts, there will be other programming like readings, workshops, retreats, and more to really be a place where queer writers of color recognize as home.
Sarah Clark: Last year, I was thinking a lot about how to really mean it when I talk about solidarity between women writers and non-binary writers. Too often, “women and non-binary writers” flattens non-binary people into “honorary women” or “women-lite.” Earlier that year, Sundress had approached me about joining their Editorial Board. So, I pitched the idea of a small magazine just for non-binary writers—beestung.
When I first started out as an intern, I didn’t think I’d ever really get the chance to work at a magazine that didn’t tokenize me for my identities. I thought there was no way around working somewhere that published mostly men, mostly white writers, and mostly abled writers. That I’d always have to swallow the toxic work of writers like Kenny Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. That I’d always have to tolerate the inevitable hand on my thigh from a more senior editor, and more of the same behavior from contributors swept under the rug. With both ANMLY and beestung, it’s been important for me to try to create places that are as equitable as I’ve been able to make them. To not tolerate abusers, and to strive to be accountable in our editorial practices. Being able to carve places like this out is part of what drove me to start my own magazine with beestung.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: In my senior year of college, my friend Inés Pujos and I found a huge gap between our school literary journal (which was print and open only to current students and alumni) and “The Famous and Important Journals”for writers who had already published. Sometimes it felt like the same names were being published in the same magazines over and over. There didn’t seem to be many easily accessible outlets for emerging writers with no previous publication credits. Our school library only subscribed to recognizable names, and if we didn’t discover a magazine through word-of-mouth, how would we even begin to look? How would we set it apart? We started Print-Oriented Bastards to provide space for emerging writers without a flashy list of publication credits, to create relationships with the writers we published rather than just have it be a transactional one-and-done relationship, and then promote it in a far-reaching grassroots style.
How did you develop and keep your team true to your specific mission statement?
IL: The size and structure of LR’s editorial team has varied throughout the years. Mia and I have always been associate editor and editor, respectively, though in practice we function as partners. She and I have been friends for a very long time, and there’s always been a deep trust between us. Over the years, we’ve gone through periods where we’ve had a team of blog contributors, then no one (other than us), and then, in 2019, we were lucky to have an amazing editorial intern on board. Currently, we’ve got two staff readers who helped us work our way through the record number of submissions we received in January and February.
Our team members have mostly come from preexisting relationships—we tend to ask people in our network whom we trust to help us—though we’ve also had strangers apply to write for us and who eventually became trusted staff. But at the core, there’s always just been Mia and me. We’re an editor-driven magazine. LR is not a business or a nonprofit; it’s our passion project. We spend a great deal of time personally poring over the choices of work that go into each issue—as well as their order and how to put them in conversation with one another.
Over the years, we’ve developed a strong sense of what we like and don’t like, as well as a rhythm to our process and a vision for what we want the magazine to be. I think that’s been a large part of what has helped us stay true to our mission. We’ve always shared the same priorities and sense of purpose: we’re providing a space for APA poetry, and we want to both showcase the best possible work as well as challenge our reader’s notions of what APA poetry can be.
LH: It took me some time to feel comfortable enough to ask others for help, or to hire staff. In fact, I didn’t hire staff until 2018, two years after the journal was created. When it came to hiring people, I put out a call and asked people to write a statement explaining why they were interested in working for the journal. I don’t know if I have a direct answer to this question, but what I was looking for when reading statements was a commitment to support queer writers of color and a willingness to step outside the box.
SF: So much of COUNTERCLOCK Journal originates from a shared vision among staff members, so something I was very interested in was having a dynamic, changing vision that kept true to a few original points: highlighting the diversity, resilience, and power of the human experience, and telling stories that were authentic and innovative. How we accomplished that was a question I was excited to see changed and shaped by the hands and eyes that would come across it.
When I became editor-in-chief, we wanted to make sure that when we expanded the staff, we hired people who had this kind of interest in pushing boundaries and being unafraid of experimentation and creativity in telling honest stories. We already had about 7-11 people on staff from when Rachel Sucher and Claire Lee were editors-in-chief before me—they were actually more involved than me at the very outset of the journal—but I hoped to have more people from around the world involved. We reached out to a lot of our past contributors whose writing we admired, and some of them agreed to join us. We also opened general applications and asked people to submit a few questions about their interest, as well as creative writing samples, and asked people we knew would share our conviction to send in applications. We appreciated the honesty in applicants’ responses, and we wanted to bring together a group of writers with varying styles.
I think that most people are willing and thrilled to contribute to a common vision when you communicate clearly with them about how open you are to that, as well as the bottom line of your journal’s mission. Literature erupts from the synapses of human connection, so magazines are born of the best of collaboration. (I apologize for waxing poetic—I believe in this truth, though!) We expect one another to come up with new ideas and give one another constructive criticism. Some of COUNTERCLOCK’s best initiatives were ideas of my incredible friends and co-editors, like the OUTBREAK folio, biweekly staff calls, and Facebook solicitations.
SC: I’m always trying to be a better editor. I’m always trying to learn and listen when readers, writers, and editors talk about how to make a journal that’s more fair, more ethical—more of what readers and writers need us to be. I’m very grateful to the experiences that I’ve had at other literary journals and presses. Working with Apogee Journal and The Atlas Review taught me a lot about what to do right. I won’t name the journals I’ve worked at that taught me what not to do. But needless to say, one journal required their interns to scrub toilets. And I was an intern.
Embracing the fact that all editorial work is subjective has been important for me. Embracing the fact that we all have implicit biases. That sometimes, it’s important to sit with work and ask yourself why your initial reaction wasn’t positive. To look for trends in the work that you do like, and challenge your own tastes. My previous work on the Board of Directors at VIDA and as former Editor-in-Chief at VIDA Review solidified a lot of these ideas for me.
Self-critique needs to be a part of editorial praxis. And there’s no end point to self-critique.
MCCB: For Print-Oriented Bastards, we kept it simple: Make space for emerging writers being overlooked. As editors, we wanted to love our role in championing new voices, but we also wanted to feel passionate about every single thing we published. With two equal editors, we decided we must both love every piece we published and had many discussions about what and why and how we meant “love.” We knew we were young and still learning, so we allowed ourselves to change our minds, to fight for pieces we believed in, to listen to each other, and to learn as we went. We made so many mistakes, but we made decisions we could stand behind with the knowledge we had at each point.
What were your reasons for choosing an online platform over print medium?
IL: When we began LR, we were both graduate students with absolutely no money for printing, mailing, or distribution. The Internet was cheap (for us) and free (for our readers). The possibilities of the technology also interested us: I knew how to code (I’d been building my own websites from scratch since high school), and I thought it would be interesting to experiment with ways to improve upon the experience of reading poetry on the web. We began with small things, like simulating a “page-flipping” experience in our early issues (though when we restarted the magazine recently, we got with the times and finally switched to having each piece on a single page) and using an elastic layout to code caesuras, breaks, and indents in a way that would stretch and shrink proportionally with the size of a browser screen. This made it possible to publish multimedia poems and poems that made complex, even tricky, use of white space on the page. Now, everyone can do these things, but back then, it made us a little different. An online platform just made more sense for us, both practically and in terms of the possibilities of what we could do with the space.
LH: I think we live in a world now where print journals aren’t the only way a writer can feel validated; online journals now have just as much validity as do print journals. To put it simply, though, I didn’t have the resources to create a print journal. I was broke. I needed the journal to be out in the world and easily accessible. And if I’m serving an under-supported community, online instead of print felt like the right move.
SF: When it first started out, we believed an online medium would be much more accessible to a wider readership. COUNTERCLOCK would be a click away for readers interested in experiencing an issue. Perhaps some part of it was related to the finances of printing as well. In addition, formatting an online issue gave us a lot of freedom in terms of graphic design and embedding audio or visuals.
SC: Print journals are expensive! I love holding a book in my hands, but I wanted to create something that people could read for free. Convenience was also a factor. I wanted beestung to be something that you could read on the subway or after work. Something bite-sized and accessible.
MCCB: Our university offered an annual publishing grant called the Charles. C. Dawe Publishing Award. Students could apply with a specific publication project, many of which were one-time projects. Part of our pitch was to establish a literary journal that could be sustained indefinitely. Print-Oriented Bastards (POB) received a grant, which allowed us as broke college students to print the first few issues. We designed them to be small and square, like a pocket-sized address book. We included full-color art to visually break up the pages. Since we both felt guilty when we didn’t finish every new magazine issue burgeoning with work every month, we wanted to provide only a small number of pieces in each issue. After the first year the funding ran out, so we moved everything online. Neither of us knew how to code, so we were only able to do this because of click-and-drag website-building platforms like Weebly. We found that it allowed contributors to share their work more widely and proudly, and we were excited because so few journals were online at the time.
When starting out and gathering submissions, how did you get the word out?
IL: We relied on whatever small networks we had. I wrote all the Asian American poets I’d ever met and had an email address for, asking them to spread the word. I wrote to Carolyn Micklem, who at the time was serving as admin for both Kundiman and Cave Canem. I wrote to one of my college mentors who has a lot of contacts in the APA literary world. I asked professors and peers from my program for help and support. We started Twitter and Facebook accounts. We started a blog months in advance of our first call for submissions. Mostly, though, it was just a lot of networking. At AWP 2010, we bound little excerpts from our blog into mini chapbooks, gave them out, and left them on tables around the bookfair. We showed up to APA literary events and went up to the readers afterward to thank them for reading and tell them about ourselves. And people were so incredibly generous in helping us to spread the word! Kundiman and Notre Dame Review let me leave promotional materials on their bookfair tables. Neil Aitken of Boxcar Review took us under his wing right away, let us put stuff on his table, and introduced us to everyone he knew. Poets like Barbara Jane Reyes and Luisa A. Igloria kindly spread the word about us online and even sent us work. We also got connected with other APA literary journals like Kartika Review and AALR and partnered with them to promote one another’s work. Really, I think we were very lucky to tap into a community that was already very generous and eager to encourage us. Now that we’re in a position to help others in the same way, I try and pay it forward.
LH: To be honest, it was a lot of social media pushing. Luckily I had already made genuine connections with a number of people who were down to support and promote and put their trust in the mission. The community has held me close for so long, so I truly appreciated it when editors, writers, and other journals promoted my first call for submissions.
SC: Most of our work at beestung has come in through Twitter. I also reached out to various organizations, like the Asian American Writers Association, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and asked them to share our call for work. We’ve been really lucky that our mission has resonated with so many people, and I’m so grateful to everyone who’s shared our call via word of mouth.
SF: Claire Lee, the 2018-2019 editor-in-chief of COUNTERCLOCK said, “We started by posting in ‘Call for submissions’ and other literary and visual art Facebook groups. We were fortunate enough to receive many submissions we truly loved for our debut issue, and from there we also asked previously published writers and artists to spread the word about COUNTERCLOCK.”
MCCB: We solicited heavily for our first issue of POB. We asked our fellow students and current and former creative writing teachers to promote, recommend, and submit work. Once we had the first issue in hand, we mailed copies to several colleges and universities, every MFA program in the country, and a few literary organizations for archival purposes. It snowballed from there.
Your work encompasses much more than a lit mag, whether that work includes publishing books, featuring blog content and reviews, running a collective, etc. Can you talk about the decision to extend beyond the lit mag?
IL: In 2009, blogging was coming into its own on the Internet. Blogs were where everybody got their information (other than newspapers). We thought that beginning by launching a blog and then extending to a magazine would help us build an audience in advance of our first issue and retain it between issues. We intended for the magazine itself to focus mainly on the work. But we also believed that the conversation surrounding APA poetry was much larger than the poems themselves. So the blog became our designated space for extending the conversation beyond the magazine. We’ve experimented with different types of blog content over the years, from reviews and interviews to craft-centric posts and writing prompts. The magazine is more of a focused, curated document, a showcase of work, while the blog keeps us engaged in the current dialogue surrounding APA poetry and literature.
SF: Literary journals are beautiful, but I think, occasionally, they can feel a bit final: people submit, have their work published, readers experience that work, and then the cycle renews. The dialogue is not the most direct between writers and readers, and we wanted a space where the lines of communication and growth would be open. We hope that COUNTERCLOCK can be another lighthouse amongst the sea of lovely, trailblazing organizations and journals doing amazing work, that serves as a point of anchorage for creatives to find one another, to open up dialogues about culture, humanities, and history, and to ask questions of one another, so that the process of creation is less solitary and more fluid. In our Feedback Corner, we offer advice from our editorial staff to submitting writers. Our editorial staff uses it to hone their skills, and the money goes into paying for COUNTERCLOCK scholarships, initiatives, and website feeds.
We also wanted to deflate the idea that writing exists in a vacuum, and highlight how important it is for artists to collaborate in solidarity. Music, art, and creative writing are sisters cut from the same cloth; they’re songs of the same soul. Our masthead believes in that, and that’s why we created the COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective—so young people around the world could create multidisciplinary projects and learn from one another’s experiences. We didn’t see someone else creating this interdisciplinary experience for free, so we decided to open up this space.
Our latest initiative is OUTBREAK, a special folio of poems for poets to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. This is still in-progress, but our outreach director and poetry reader, Patrick, thought that we could do something to alleviate the isolation and racism faced by so many community members during this dark and unprecedented time. In honor of National Poetry Month, we wanted to bring a beacon of solidarity to readers while increasing the visibility of poetry. Going forward, we hope to host more folios that are connected to real-world events and national dialogues, so that poets visiting our site feel that COUNTERCLOCK is not just an escape from reality, but a plunge into it. We want it to be a mirror for what creatives around the world feel.
Additionally, we publish book reviews and cultural commentary in our blog, where we hope to intertwine poetry with culture, society, and politics. The reason we decided to open the blog is to better highlight long-form works by emerging authors—especially womxn, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized folks who are underrepresented in the publishing industry—and to serve readers who are interested in learning about poetry, as well as the social backdrop that informs it. The blog is catered toward readers of the journal who are interested in more direct, article-like pieces, and is aimed at generating more awareness in literature.
The arts are designed to dissolve barriers, and we think there are many ways to do that beyond publishing a traditional literary journal.
Keep your eyes out for part 2 in the new few days.
Sarah Feng is a rising freshman at Yale University from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been recognized by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, the Academy of American Poets, the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Adroit Prizes in Prose & Poetry, NCTE, The Critical Pass Review, Teen Vogue, and The New York Times. She plays piano and dabbles in charcoals, and she thinks rhythm and light and lyric pulse in every field of the creative arts—if you can call them distinct fields at all. In other words, she has faith in the power of the interdisciplinary arts and their persistence in our memories and minds. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Gigantic Sequins, DIALOGIST, and Indianapolis Review.
Luther Hughes is from Seattle and author of Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is the Founder of Shade Literary Arts and Executive Editor for The Offing. Along with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat, he co-hosts The Poet Salon podcast. He has been featured in Poetry, Forbes, The Seattle Times, The Rumpus, and others. Luther received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. You can follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.
Iris A. Law is a poet, editor, and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. A Kundiman fellow and two-time Pushcart nominee whose poems have appeared in journals such as wildness, Waxwing, Dusie, and the Collagist (now the Rupture), she is also founding co-editor of the online literary magazine Lantern Review. Her chapbook, Periodicity, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Florida Book Award and Milt Kessler Award. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, and more. She co-founded Print-Oriented Bastards (2011-2017). She currently serves on the editorial board for the Sundress Academy for the Arts, as poetry editor for Hyphen, and as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.
A 501(c)(3) non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.
Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce the results of the 2020 Poetry Broadside Contest. This year’s winner is D. M. Spratley with the poem “Each Morning an Animal.” Spratley’s poem will be letterpress-printed as an 8.5” x 11” broadside and made available for sale on our online store. Orders for our broadsides will be open later this summer.
D. M. Spratley (she/her) is a mixed-race, Black, queer, Southern poet. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Drunken Boat, and the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, among other journals. She has received awards from the North Carolina Arts Council, Princeton University, and Rattle. She is currently at work on a full-length poetry manuscript and a fiction project, and her micro-chapbook Some Tricks I Was Born Knowing is forthcoming from Ghost City Press in August 2020. Find her online at http://www.dmspratley.com and on Twitter @dmsprat.
Thank you to everyone who sent us their work. Finalists and semifinalists include:
Finalists:
“The Murdered Woman Visits Antarctica,” Megan Alpert “March 2020,” Jennifer Franklin “Love to the Ground Like Berries,” Amelia Gorman “Eating Ortolans,” Kate Leland “In My Mind’s Coral, Mother Still Calls Us from Inside,” Jennifer G. Lai “The World Is Ending, Endless,” Wheeler Light “anxiety shit,” Jasmine Lomax “Lake House,” Rachel Marie Patterson “Hear Me Out,” Michele Parker Randall “Killing Eve,” Sreshtha Sen “This Is Not a Poem About My Mother,” Sreshtha Sen
Semifinalists:
“Letter to My Long-Distance Lover While Lying to Myself,” Caitlin Cowan “How to Run Away,” Jesica Davis “Harrow,” James Ducat “Simone de Beauvoir Sends Trump a Sext,” Sandra L. Faulkner “Ode to the Tropical Storm I Slept Through,” Brett Hanley “All the Men Who Own My Underwear,” Kate Leland “Anthems for Losers,” Jennifer G. Lai “Come Clean,” Joshua Nguyen “Dog,” Jennifer Perrine “qarrtsiluni,” Anda Peterson “Vital Signs,” Remi Recchia “To the Astronomer,” Jessica Reidy “Just a Sliver Back Then,” Annie Robertson “Birthplace,” Amy Small-McKinney “Eulogy for Ntozake Shange,” Cynthia Young
A 501(c)(3) non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.
Despite the world’s current predicament, I’ve been reading a lot of apocalypse-themed literature. Funny enough, I am taking a class on apocalypse literature and have a newfound fascination for subgenres that exist within the genre.
Anya Ow’s Cradle and Grave is set in a post-apocalyptic future ravaged by a genetic mutation-based plague called the Change. Immediately, the premise attracted me because I have presented research on genetic fiction, taken notes on plague apocalypse, and read up on bio-punk. Cradle and Grave fits the bill for all of these sub-genres, creating an intricate narrative chalked full of engaging details.
From the first page, the reader becomes enraptured by Dar Lien—the main character of the novella who is an experienced scout who has gone on supply runs through a dangerous, yet picturesque landscape called the Scab. She is hired to lead Yusuf and the enigmatic Servertu through the Scab for a generous sum of taels. Along the way, they encounter unpredictable creatures affected by the change, as well as facing conflicts that could alter the course of the Change.
Ow is masterful when it comes to describing the land and her unique characters. The descriptions of the Scab are hauntingly grey and bleak; it’s an atmosphere entangled with horrifying moments, yet I’m drawn in, not willing to miss a word.
The characters keep the readers engaged every step through the Scab from bickering to proverbs that unveil more about this world devastated by mutations that technology can barely rein in from fully turning someone into their worst nightmare.
For readers fascinated by new worlds, Cradle and Grave is full of engaging post-apocalyptic details with a fresh mix of subgenres perfectly captured in precise words.
Remember, an apocalypse does not define an end; it’s how a society begins anew to survive. Hope can ring, even at the bleakest moments.
Born in Singapore, Anya Ow moved to Melbourne to practice law, and now works in advertising. Her short stories have appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and Daily SF. She can be found on twitter @anyasy and otherwise at www.anyasy.com.
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Emma Hudson is currently a third year student at the University of Tennessee working on her double concentration BA in English: Rhetoric and Creative Writing, along with a minor in retail consumer science. She’s a busy bee; she is the Editor-in-Chief of the up-and-coming Honey Magazine. Emma is also a long-time member and leader in UTK’s Creative Writing Club and on the Executive Board for UTK’s Sigma Tau Delta, Alpha Epsilon chapter. In her free time, she figures out how to include K-Pop group BTS into her research projects and watches “reality” tv shows.
