upstreet number four wins IPPY Bronze Medal

upstreet number four has been named the Bronze Medal winner in the anthologies category of the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY). These awards, chosen from 3,380 entries in 65 national categories (there is no literary journals category), have been given annually for the past thirteen years in recognition of excellence in independent publishing.

upstreet number four, which was released in June of 2008, features a 24-page interview with Indiana-born author Michael Martone. The 36 poets and prose writers whose work appears in this issue include finalists for the 2007 National Book Award (David Kirby) and the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (Michael O’Brien), a winner of the World’s Greatest Short Story Contest (Michael Martone), a 2008 IPPY Bronze Medalist (Karen Chase), a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow (Bill Zavatsky), and the winner of the 2003 Governor General’s Award for English Fiction, Canada’s highest literary prize (Douglas Glover). Their work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and the Norton anthologies. Besides these accomplished authors, upstreet number four includes many whose publication careers are just beginning. We are very pleased about this, since upstreet was founded with the vision that it would ultimately be a mixture of established and emerging writers.

In the IPPY anthologies category, the 2009 Silver Medal winner is Listen to Me: Shared Secrets from WriteGirl, by Keren Taylor (WriteGirl), and the two books tied for the Gold Medal are A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, edited by Stacy Bierlein (Other Voices Books), and And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, edited by Muneeza Shamsie (The Feminist Press, CUNY). The medals will be presented at an awards ceremony and reception in New York City on Friday, May 29.

Our thanks and congratulations to everyone who has been a part of upstreet number four.