upstreet is going to Bermuda

The second Bermuda Writers’ Retreat, the brainchild of native Bermudian and upstreet author Kim Aubrey (“Notes,” upstreet number one), will be at the Rosedon Hotel, Pembroke, Bermuda, February 17-23, 2010. The retreat will take place during both Poetry Week and the Bermuda Arts Festival, and the schedule includes field trips to museums, galleries, plays and other cultural events, plus four two-hour generative morning workshops:

Postcards to the Edge, with Kim Aubrey
Character Development, with Elaine Batcher
At Home Abroad, with Nancy Anne Miller
The Fictional Environment, with Vivian Dorsel

Kim Aubrey is a Bermudian writer who lives in Toronto and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, in US and Canadian journals, and is forthcoming in The New Quarterly and Room magazine. She recently completed a memoir, The Girl in the Blue Leotard.

Kim hopes to develop the retreat into an annual event. For further information and to be placed on the mailing list for next year’s retreat, e-mail kaubrey@groupklement.com.

upstreet nominates six for 2010 Pushcart

The editors of upstreet have nominated six works appearing in the journal’s fifth issue for this year’s Pushcart Prize. The nominees are two short stories, “Anon.,” by Xu Xi, and “On Seeing the Skeleton of a Whale in the Harvard Museum of Natural History,” by Maya Sonenberg; two creative nonfiction pieces, “This Place is Literally No Place,” by Jon Chopan, and “Left Behind,” by Wendy Ralph; and two poems, “A Small Obsession,” by Stephen Ackerman, and “The Sadness of Dads,” by Paul Hostovsky.

These six works were submitted to compete for inclusion in the 2010 issue of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, the only annual anthology to showcase work from America’s alternative, literary presses. This is the fourth year that upstreet has made Pushcart Prize nominations.

Chariott, Martone essays called “Notable”by Best American Essays 2009

Two essays appearing in upstreet number four have been cited as Notable Works by Best American Essays 2009: “Vocabulary Lesson,” by Katherine Lien Chariott, and “Hermes Goes to College,” by Michael Martone.

Katherine Lien Chariott holds an MFA from Cornell University and a PhD from University of Nevada/Las Vegas, where she was a Schaeffer Fellow in fiction. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia, Hunger Mountain, Sonora Review, Concho River Review, 580 Split, and elsewhere. She lives in Shanghai, China.

Michael Martone, who was also the interview subject in upstreet’s fourth issue, teaches in the Program for Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Alive and Dead in Indiana, Michael Martone, and Racing in Place. He has edited nine other volumes, the most recent of which is Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover. His stories and essays have appeared in many magazines and journals, and he has received numerous fellowships, prizes, and awards.

upstreet number four won the Bronze Medal in the anthologies category of the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards. A third essay in that issue, “Everlasting,” by Frank Tempone, was cited as a Notable Work by Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009.

upstreet is delighted, and congratulates all of its Notable essayists.

Reiter chapbook available from Amsterdam Press

upstreet poet Jendi Reiter’s poetry chapbook, Swallow, winner of the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize, can now be purchased from Amsterdam Press.

Jendi is the Vice President of WinningWriters.com, a monthly online newsletter dedicated to the finding and creation of resources for writers, which has been named one of Writer’s Digest’s “101 Best Websites for Writers” for the past five years. Jendi’s first poetry collection was A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point, 2003). Her poem “Poet’s Resume” was published in upstreet number one. Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry 1990, and in many journals, including Poetry, The New Criterion, Southern Poetry Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Pavement Saw, Hanging Loose, First Things, The Lyric, The Christian Century, The Saint Ann’s Review, Cider Press Review, A New Song, U.S. Catholic, The Rose & Thorn, About Such Things, Grasslands Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Clackamas Literary Review. She has won two awards from the Poetry Society.

You can visit Jendi at her website, Reiter’s Block.

Tempone essay cited as ‘Notable’ by Best American Nonrequired Reading

“Everlasting,” an essay by Frank Tempone in upstreet number four, has been listed as a Notable work by the editors of Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009.

This is the first time a work appearing in upstreet has been mentioned in one of the prestigious annual Best American anthologies. upstreet number four was the winner of the Bronze Medal in the Anthologies category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards. The editors of that issue nominated “Everlasting” for a 2008 Pushcart Prize and for Volume III of The Best Creative Nonfiction.

Frank Tempone holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. A fiction writer and essayist, he has been a secondary school teacher for fifteen years, and his work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 580 Split, and The Berkshire Review. Another one of his personal narratives, “Born Again,” appeared in upstreet number three, whose editors nominated it for a 2007 Pushcart Prize and for Volume II of The Best Creative Nonfiction. The founder and former director of Word Street, the drop-in tutoring and writing center in Pittsfield, MA, he now lives in Chicago, IL.

We are very happy to congratulate Frank, who was Fiction Editor for upstreet number one, and Prose Editor for number two, and conducted the author interview for both issues.

upstreet submissions up 21%

During the first month of its submission period, upstreet number six recorded a total of 648 submissions (fiction 290, poetry 288, creative nonfiction 70), compared with 534 submissions (fiction 210, poetry 254, CNF 70) for upstreet number five during September of 2008. This represents an increase of 21 per cent.

This will be the second year that upstreet has used Submission Manager, the online submission system developed by Devin Emke of One Story magazine. The Submission Manager software is available for purchase by literary journals through the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

To have your work considered for upstreet number six, go to the website, click on Submit, read the guidelines, and follow the instructions. The submission period ends March 1, 2010.

Jean Valentine wins Wallace Stevens Award

Jean Valentine, whose poem, “Who watches,” appears in upstreet number five, has won the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award, given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Established in 1994, the award now carries a stipend of $100,000 for the recipient. This year’s judges were Frank Bidart, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Galway Kinnell, Nathaniel Mackey, Sharon Olds, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Kay Ryan, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Susan Stewart, James Tate, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and C. K. Williams.

Past winners have included A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, Mark Strand, James Tate and Richard Wilbur.

Valentine, current New York State Poet, has lived most of her life in New York City. Her collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003, won the 2004 National Book Award. Her tenth collection is Little Boat (Wesleyan, 2007). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Poetry Society of America. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y, and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was one of six featured poets in the May 2009 upstreet reading at BookCourt in Brooklyn.