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In this episode, Crystal Wilkinson reads her story “Endangered Species: Case 47401” from Story magazine.Crystal Wilkinson is the author of three books, including The Birds of Opulence, (winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for both the Orange Prizes and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Kentucky Arts Council, The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and is a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently The Kenyon Review, Story, Agni Literary Journal, Oxford American, and Southern Cultures. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is an associate Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.  Story is a tri-annual print publication devoted to the complex and diverse world of narrative with a focus on fiction and nonfiction. Since 1931, work that originally appeared in Story has been reprinted dozens of times in editions of The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The Prize Stories.   Buy Issue Subscribe Author photo by Anastasia Pottinger of Rogue Studios; Story magazine cover art is by Maria Alejandra Zanetta.

In this episode, Lea Carpenter reads her story “Candy Cane” from the Summer 2019 issue of the Sewanee Review.Lea Carpenter is the author of Eleven Days (Knopf, 2013) and Red, White, Blue (Knopf, 2018). She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was valedictorian. She is a Contributing Editor at Esquire and wrote the screenplay for Mile 22, a film about CIA’s Special Activities Division, directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg. She lives in New York.Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly. Many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, have appeared in the magazine. SR also has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent: they published excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels, and the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged. Buy Issue Subscribe Author photo by Michael Lionstar.

In this episode, Erin Somers reads her story “Waltz” from the Summer 2019 issue of Ecotone.Erin Somers’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House Open Bar, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, The Cincinnati Review, and many other publications. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and was a 2016 NYC Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and a 2016 Millay Colony resident. She lives in Beacon, New York, with her husband and daughter. Stay Up with Hugo Best is her first novel.Ecotone’s mission is to publish and promote the best place-based work being written today. Founded at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2005, the award-winning magazine features writing and art that reimagine place, and our authors interpret this charge expansively. An ecotone is a transition zone between two adjacent ecological communities, containing the characteristic species of each. It is therefore a place of danger or opportunity, a testing ground. The magazine explores the ecotones between landscapes, literary genres, scientific and artistic disciplines, modes of thought.​ Buy Issue Subscribe Author photo by Nina Suben; Magazine cover art is Pink Gets Hot (oil on canvas) by Denise Stewart-Sanabria.

In this episode, John Miguel Shakespear reads his story “We The Living” from the Fall 2019 issue of The Cincinnati Review. John Miguel Shakespear is a writer, editor, and musician from Massachusetts. He is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University, where he is a 2019-20 creative writing fellow at the Curb Center for Arts, Enterprise, and Public Policy and co-translations editor of Nashville Review. His writing has appeared in Cincinnati Review and Boston Review, and his music has been featured on NPR, PopMatters, and American Songwriter. He bears no known relation to William Shakespeare. Since its inception in 2003, The Cincinnati Review has published many promising new and emerging writers as well as Pulitzer Prize winners and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellows. Poetry and prose from our pages have been selected to appear in the annual anthologies Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, New Stories from the South, Best American Short Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best Creative Nonfiction.  Buy the Issue Subscribe Author photo courtesy John Miguel Shakespear; Cover art by Adriana Calvo. 

In this episode, Tiphanie Yanique reads her story “The Special World” from the Winter 2019 issue of The Georgia Review. Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. She is also the author of the novel Land of Love and Drowning, which won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. She is also the author of a collection of stories How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honor. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and teaches at Emory University. The Georgia Review is the literary-cultural journal published out of the University of Georgia since 1947. While it began with a regional commitment, its scope has grown to include readers and writers throughout the U.S. and the world, who are brought together through the print journal as well as live programming. Convinced that communities thrive when built on dialogue that honors the difference between any two interlocutors, we publish imaginative work that challenges us to reconsider any line, distinction, or thought in danger of becoming too rigid or neat, so that our readers can continue the conversations in their own lives. Buy the Issue Subscribe Author photo by Debbie Grossman; Issue cover art is a detail of a mixed media work called “SHE” by Michi Meko.

In this episode, Catherine Browder reads her story “Wind Phone” from the Summer 2019 issue of New Letters.Catherine Browder is the author of several books of short fiction and a new  novel. She has held fiction fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Missouri Arts Council. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Kansas Quarterly, New Letters, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Kansas City Noir, and elsewhere. She facilitated “The Memory Project” at the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, 2004-2008; is affiliated with the creative writing program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; and is an advisory editor at New Letters magazine, where her book reviews appear. Her current project is a mixed genre collection motivated by a 2016 trip along the Tohoku Coast of Japan, still under heavy reconstruction following the devastating earthquake and tsunami of 3.11. The “clash of cultures” is a recurring theme in her work. She lives with her husband in the historic Northeast district of Kansas City, MO.New Letters magazine works to discover and publish the finest new writing, wherever it exists. That mission implies encouragement of writers just starting or those who deserve wider readership. By placing the emphasis on literary excellence, we best promote the cause of the literary arts and affirm their transforming qualities. Editorial decisions have been made from three core questions: Is the writing intense; does it advance literary art; does it offer hope? Buy the Issue Subscribe   Author photo by David Remley; Issue cover art is a detail of a painting called “Trail’s Run,” by Carol Zastoupil.

In this episode, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reads her hybrid story “Gut” from Obsidian 45.1. NOTES i. nature from “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’ Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” by Sylvia Wynter, 272 ii. the correlated otherness continuum from “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn” by Sylvia Wynter, 22 iii. name from “Ethno or Sociopoetics” by Sylvia Wynter, 87 iv. we still have no name from “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter” by David, 137 v. at the level from “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” by Sylvia Wynter, 66 vi. positively marked/menstrual blood from “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’ Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” by Sylvia Wynter, 252 vii. the exiled captive priests from “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn” by Sylvia Wynter, 24 viii. cannot be seen from “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” by Sylvia Wynter, 64 ix. the price paid for our well being from “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” by Sylvia Wynter, 70 x. rigorously abductive from “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn” by Sylvia Wynter, 18 xi. justice, not as grim retribution, but as shared happiness from “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter” by David, 124  Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities have held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited volume of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony in March 2020.) Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more. Founded in 1975, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora supports—through publication and critical inquiry—the contemporary poetry, fiction, drama/performance, visual and media art of Africans globally. Recognized by the National Endowment of the Arts as one of the premier journals dedicated to Africa and African Diaspora Literatures, Obsidian is published biannually in print, and year round online at this new website and also at our Obsidian website hosted by Illinois State University. Since its inception, Obsidian has featured a range of acclaimed writers and critics including Elizabeth Alexander, Houston A. Baker, Abena John Brown, Octavia Butler, Wanda Coleman, Thadious Davis, Melvin Dixon, Gerald Early, C.S. Giscombe, Terrance Hayes, Essex Hemphill, Gayl Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Brenda Marie Osbey, Claudia Rankine, Jerry Ward, and Gloria Wade Gayles among others. Buy the Issue Subscribe

In this episode, Colleen O’Brien reads her story “Charlie” from the Summer 2019 issue of the Gettysburg Review. Colleen O’Brien’s chapbook, Spool in the Maze, won the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press contest. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Fence, Kenyon Review Online, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals.   The Gettysburg Review, published by Gettysburg College, is recognized as one of the country’s premier literary journals. Since its debut in 1988, work by such luminaries as E. L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, James Tate, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall has appeared alongside that of emerging artists such as JM Holmes, Lydia Conklin, Jessica Hollander, Emily Nemens, Charles Yu, and Ashley Wurzbacher, who was recently named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Buy the Issue Subscribe

In this episode, Robert Long Foreman reads his story “Weird Pig Meets Owen Flye” from Chicago Quarterly Review, Volume 29.  Robert Long Foreman‘s first novel, Weird Pig, (which this story is adapted from) won the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel. It will be published in October 2020. His collection of short stories, I Am Here to Make Friends, will be published in early 2020. His first book, Among Other Things, a collection of essays, won the inaugural Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose and is published by Pleiades Press. He earned a Ph.D. in English with a Creative Writing emphasis at the University of Missouri. He lives in Kansas City..The Chicago Quarterly Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal publishing short stories, poems, translations and essays by both emerging and established writers since 1994. They have had work chosen for Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, the O. Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Their mission is to stimulate, entertain, and inspire. Buy the Issue Subscribe

In this episode, the debut of The Stack, Yxta Maya Murray reads her story “After Maria” from Conjunctions 73: Earth Elegies. Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor living in Los Angeles. She won an Art Writers Grant in 2018. Her new novel, Art Is Everything, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press/Curbstone. Her collection of short fiction, The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could, is forthcoming from University of Nevada Press.  Published by Bard College, Conjunctions is a home for innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly forty years, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous quality. Buy the Issue Subscribe