Harrison Candelaria Fletcher launches online CNF journal

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor for the past four years, has launched Shadowbox, “a biannual journal exclusively devoted to creative nonfiction of every shape, style, and incarnation.” Co-edited by John-Michael Rivera, each issue will include new writing, interviews, reviews of published work, interactive links, a gallery of visual/literary collaborations, and an archive of resurrected writings. The inaugural Spring 2010 issue features an interview with Brenda Miller, a word/image collaboration by Margo Klass and Frank Soos, and work by thirteen essayists, including upstreet number three author Karen Michelle Otero, upstreet number four author Daniel Hales, J. Michael Martinez, Kerry Muir, and Robert Vivian, and much more.

Fletcher’s work has appeared in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, New Letters, Fourth Genre, Water-Stone Review, Puerto del Sol, Palabra, and many other journals. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, PEN Center USA, and Bakeless Literary Prize, his recent honors include a New Letters best essay award and Pushcart Prize special mention. He just completed an essay collection, Man in a Box, and is writing a memoir. He teaches literary nonfiction at Regis University, the University of Denver, and Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop.

Rivera is Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he teaches cultural studies and literary nonfiction. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Palabra, Pilgrimage, sienwerden, Eclectica Magazine, American Literary History and Aztlan. An award-winning writer, he also curates writing exhibits for innovative writers of color in the US and abroad. He is working on a mixed-genre project titled amatl, an encyclopaedia in part(s), and Clock Works, a Diagram of Time.

upstreet sends Shadowbox its very best wishes for success.

upstreet Fiction Editor to read in Albany area

upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira will appear in two New York State Capital Region locations on Monday, July 26, as part of the reading/signing tour for her novel, My Name is Mary Sutter (Viking Penguin, 2010). At 2pm, she will visit Pruyn House in Latham, NY, where she will read from the novel and talk about its Albany setting.

At 7pm, there will be a reading and book signing at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, where Robin will be introduced by upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel.

My Name is Mary Sutter appeared in the July issue of O! The Oprah Magazine as the No. 7 selection on Oprah's Summer Reading List.

upstreet to be a sponsor of Berkshire WordFest

upstreet will be one of the sponsors of the first annual Berkshire WordFest, a celebration of words and ideas that will take place July 23-25 at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, the historic home and gardens of Edith Wharton. This literary festival will bring together a varied collection of contemporary authors in an exciting array of events that will include talks, readings, panel discussions, interviews, and book signings. Featured authors will include Garrison Keillor, Francine Prose, Jim Shepard, Susan Orlean, and many others. For further information about the WordFest schedule, and to reserve tickets and day passes, call 413-551-5113 or visit http://berkshirewordfest.org/

Barber essay cited as ‘Notable’ by Best American Essays 2010

“Sweetgrass,” an essay by Phyllis Barber in upstreet number five, has been listed as a Notable work by the editors of Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens. This is the fourth time a work appearing in upstreet has been mentioned in one of the prestigious annual Best American anthologies. The previous ones were Frank Tempone’s essay, “Everlasting,” in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, and the essays “Vocabulary Lesson,” by Katherine Lien Chariott, and “Hermes Goes to College,” by Michael Martone, in Best American Essays 2009—all from the award-winning issue, upstreet number four.

Phyllis Barber’s seventh book, Raw Edges (U. of Nevada), a coming-of-age-in-middle-age memoir, came out earlier this year. She is the author of the novel And the Desert Shall Blossom (U. of Utah), two books of short stories, The School of Love (U. of Utah) and Parting the Veil: Stories From a Mormon Imagination (Signature Books), and How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (U. of Georgia), for which she received the AWP Award Series prize in Creative Nonfiction in 1991. Phyllis has been on the prose faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was recently inducted into the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame. She lives in Denver.

We congratulate Phyllis, and thank her for helping to make upstreet Notable.