upstreet is having a party—and you’re invited

upstreet will host an off-site party/reading during the 2010 AWP Conference, which will take place in Denver from April 7-10. Our party will be at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday 8 April at the 910Arts Eventgallery, 910 Santa Fe Drive. This event is free and open to the public. The readers, poets and prose writers from upstreet number five, will be Phyllis Barber, Matthew Burns, Nicole Cooley, Tiff Holland, Jay Kauffmann, and Xu Xi. upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel will emcee the festivities. Following the reading, there will be an opportunity for authors to sign copies of upstreet number five, or their own books, which will also be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be provided. Come help us celebrate AWP 2010 in Denver—and don’t forget to visit upstreet’s table (#K21) in the Bookfair.

upstreet poet Hostovsky publishes collection

Dear Truth, a poetry collection by Paul Hostovsky, has been published by Main Street Rag. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in three issues of upstreet: “A Woman Taking off Her Shirt” (number four), “The Sadness of Dads” (number five), and “Frame” (number six). Paul’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from The Comstock Review, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, and the Frank Cat Press. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac and Best of the Net. His first full-length collection, Bending the Notes (2008) is also available from Main Street Rag. Paul works in Boston as a sign language interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Here is the book’s title poem:

Dear Truth
I do not love you.

I am running away
with my beloved
illusions. The sweet
nothings. Nothing
is what it seems.
I love what seems.
I am crazy in love with
the painfully obvious
transparent surface.
I am simply hungry.
You keep the house
and everything in it.
I am taking the dog.
And the windows.
—Paul Hostovsky

“Although the title poem is a sort of Dear John letter to Truth, the book itself is, in fact, dedicated to truth on a larger scale: the expansive and various truth of the imagination. In these touching, finely crafted, and often funny poems, Hostovsky remains true to his lively and inquisitive vision of the world, to beauty, joy, pain, and grief, always displaying a love of language that is contagious and invigorating.” —Jeffrey Harrison

Pushcart Board nominates two upstreet works

In addition to the nominations sent in by independent publishers and literary magazines, Pushcart Press also considers works nominated by its own Board of Contributing Editors. For the third year in a row, the Pushcart Board has nominated two works from upstreet to be considered for inclusion in the next Pushcart Prize anthology, along with the six nominations made by our editors. They are a poem by Jeffrey Harrison, “Brief Note for April’s Departure,” and a short story by Xu Xi, “Anon.,” from upstreet number five.

It is a great compliment for upstreet to be singled out by this Board, which contains some very distinguished writers. Congratulations to both nominees, and best wishes to them in the competition.

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.