upstreet nominates Ackerman and Rian for Best New Poets 2008

The annual Best New Poets prize anthology allows eligible literary magazines to nominate two emerging poets (poets who have not published a book-length collection) each year. We have submitted two nominations from upstreet number three for the 2008 anthology: Stephen Ackerman, “Magic Lantern,” and Kirsten Rian, “The Dark Blue Swath Flies Like a Kite.”

Stephen Ackerman works as a lawyer for the New York City Law Department. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Seneca Review, and upstreet. He lives in Dutchess County, NY, with his wife, Laurie, and their sons, Nicholas and William.

Kirsten Rian is a poet and educator, and a freelance grant writer and editor. She was a finalist in the last Glimmer Train Poetry Open, and her work has appeared in the literary journal Rhino and in Raising Our Voices, an anthology of Oregon poets against the war. She is a writer in residence through the Writers in the Schools Program in Portland.

The guest editor for Best New Poets 2008 is Mark Strand, who will select 50 poems from nominations made by literary magazines and writing programs, as well as an open internet competition. The upstreet selections were made by Poetry Editor Jessica Greenbaum and Editor Vivian Dorsel. We wish both nominees the best of luck in the competition.

upstreet poet wins Prairie Schooner Award

Yerra Sugarman, whose poem, “We Were a Boat,” will appear in the upcoming upstreet number four, has won a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for an excerpt from “Journal: Rai’ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv-Yaffo, July 2003,” which appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Prairie Schooner.

Yerra Sugarman received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first book, Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow, 2002). Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, was published in January of this year, also by Sheep Meadow. She has received a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the George Bogin and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards of the Poetry Society of America and, most recently, a 2008 Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers.

Yerra’s poems, translations and articles have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Nation, ACM, Cimarron Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She was born in Toronto and now lives in New York City, where she has taught creative writing in undergraduate and MFA programs. She currently teaches poetry at Rutgers University and is Writer in Residence at Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts. You may visit Yerra at her blog.

upstreet nominates three for The Best Creative Nonfiction

The journal Creative Nonfiction is currently taking submissions for the third volume of its anthology, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and we have nominated three pieces from upstreet number four: “Run Story,” by Daniel Hales, “Tools of the Trade,” by A. J. Naslund, and “Everlasting,” by Frank Tempone.

Daniel Hales lives in Greenfield, MA, and teaches English to residential Special Ed high school students, and to honors students at UMass/Amherst. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit, Quarter After Eight, Slipstream, Cranky, Bateau, and Opus 42.

A. J. Naslund lives in Louisville, KY. He holds a BA and an MA from the University of Montana/Missoula, and a PhD from the University of Louisville. He was a university English teacher for several years in the US, Japan, and Korea. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Abiko Annual (Japan), Lips, Ceramics Monthly, RagTimes, Kentucky Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Caesura, and others. His poetry collection, Silk Weather (1999), was published by Fleur-de-Lis Press, Spalding University.

Frank Tempone, director of Word Street, holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. A fiction writer and essayist, he has been teaching for fourteen years, and his work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 580 Split, and The Berkshire Review. He lives in Dalton, MA.

The selections were made by Creative Nonfiction Editor Harrison Candelaria Fletcher and Editor Vivian Dorsel. We wish all three candidates the best of luck in the competition. upstreet number four will be available for sale by early July.

upstreet author publishes Nerds book

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them (Penguin, 2007), by David Anderegg, PhD, is now available in bookstores, and online from Amazon.com. Anderegg, a Lenox, MA, family psychotherapist who teaches psychology at Bennington College, also writes fiction under the pseudonym “Ed Anthony.” His short stories have appeared in The Berkshire Review and in upstreet number one (“Dejeuner Sur L’Herb,” p. 189) and number two (“Heretics,” p. 11). He was nominated by upstreet’s editors for a 2007 Pushcart Prize.

Nerds is a lively, thought-provoking book that focuses on how anti-intellectualism is bad for our children and our country. It asks why children are so terrified to be called “nerds,” and what this anti-intellectualism costs both our children and our society. In his book, Anderegg examines why science and engineering have become socially poisonous disciplines, why adults ignore the derision of “nerdy” kids, and what we can do to prepare our children to succeed in an increasingly high-tech world. Using education research, psychological theory, and interviews with both nerdy and non-nerdy kids, Nerds argues that we need to change our society’s anti-intellectual attitudes and prepare rising generations to compete in the global marketplace.

David Anderegg was born and grew up in Wisconsin, graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received his PhD in psychology from Clark University, Worcester, MA. He and his wife, Kelley DeLorenzo, have two grown-up children: Francesca, a doctoral student in violin at Juilliard, and Peter Lorenzo, a cellist in the Phoenix Symphony. For more information about Anderegg and his work, including selected book reviews and “The Last Nerd Self-Test You’ll Ever Need,” visit the author’s website.

Finishing Line to publish Coté chapbook

Flying for the Window, a poetry chapbook by Charles Coté, has been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press. The manuscript includes “Seeing the Oncologist,” which will appear in upstreet number four, and other poems about the poet’s son Charlie, who died of a malignant melanoma in 2005 at the age of 18, when he was still a high-school student and the frontman for a popular Rochester-area band, Fivestar Riot. The chapbook takes its title from one of the entries in the journal Charlie left behind:

Certainty is the cage that keeps us
safe from curiosity. I’ve been released
from the cage. I am the songbird
and I am flying for the window.
I know it’s closed but I plan on
breaking through.

Charles Coté was born in North Adams, MA, and lives in Rochester, NY, where he practices as a clinical social worker. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Blueline, Free Lunch, Identity Theory, Modern Haiku, Connecticut River Review, Adagio Verse Quarterly, and HazMat Review. To read his interview with Boston Literary Magazine on the poems he wrote about his son, go here: http://www.bostonliterarymagazine.com/win08interview.html

upstreet poet wins Rosenberg Award

“God Doesn’t Speak in the Psalms,” a poem by Jennifer Barber, received the $1,000 first prize in the 21st annual Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for poems on the Jewish experience. A reading and awards ceremony was held on 27 April at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center.

Jennifer’s work appeared in upstreet number three and will appear in the upcoming upstreet number four. Her book, Rigging the Wind, 2003, received the Kore Press First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Field, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She attended Colby College in Maine, studied medieval literature in England as a Rhodes Scholar, and received her MFA from Columbia University. She teaches at Suffolk University in Boston and edits the literary journal Salamander.