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.

Ruback story to appear in war anthology

Max Ruback, whose creative nonfiction piece, “Soldiers,” appeared in upstreet number three, will have a short story in Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform (Press 53), which will be released on Saturday, May 23. This anthology of war stories, edited by Jeffery Hess, also contains work by 23 other writers, including Tim O’Brien, James Salter, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tobias Wolff. A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to USA Cares, a nonprofit organization that assists post-9/11 members of the military and their families to cope with the financial burdens resulting from their service to America.

Max Ruback was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Mount Ida College. He teaches English and reading at John I. Leonard High School in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he also coaches the JV boys’ basketball team. He has recent or forth-coming work in Descant, Frostproof Review, Quick Fiction, Zing, Smokelong Quarterly, and other publications. He recently finished a collection titled The Kindest Light.

upstreet author elected VCFA Faculty Chair

Author and editor Xu Xi, whose short story “Anon.” will appear in upstreet number five, has been elected to a three-year term as Faculty Chair of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. She has been a member of the program’s prose faculty for seven years, and advises both fiction and creative nonfiction students. As Faculty Chair, she will work in cooperation with the program’s administrative director and faculty advisory committee to provide oversight for the program on academic issues and matters having to do with faculty. She will also conduct the graduation exercises during each residency and respresent the program in broader literary forums such as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She will continue to conduct workshops, and will advise a reduced number of students each semester.

Xu Xi is the author or editor of ten books. Recent titles include Evanescent Isles (essays), Fifty-Fifty (ed., anthology), Overleaf Hong Kong (stories and essays) and The Unwalled City (novel). She inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website.

upstreet is happy to congratulate Xu Xi on her new position.

Two upstreet authors featured in Hunger Mountain auction

Hunger Mountain, the semiannual arts journal published by Vermont College of Fine Arts, will hold its spring fundraising auction on ebay, beginning at noon EST on Saturday, May 2. Participants will have an opportunity to bid on manuscript critiques to be conducted by mail, e-mail or phone with notable authors and agents, two of whom will be upstreet authors Michael Martone and Xu Xi. Bidding will end at noon EST on Saturday, May 9th. Two other writers whose manuscript consultation services are being offered are David Jauss, who purchased the first copy of upstreet number one sold, and Philip Graham, upstreet’s first subscriber.

All auction purchases are tax deductible. Along with other items, the one-on-one critiques in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, writing for children and writing for the stage will be available at http://stores.shop.ebay.com/thehungermountainstore. Check it out.

upstreet wishes Hunger Mountain a successful auction.

Two upstreet authors published in2008 Best of the Net Anthology

Two authors whose work has appeared in upstreet have had pieces that were published in online magazines chosen for the Best of the Net 2008 anthology. “His Wife,” a story by Barry Jay Kaplan that was published in Apple Valley Review, was one of five stories chosen, and “To a Motion Activated Paper Towel Dispenser,” a poem by Paul Hostovsky that was in Thick with Conviction, was one of the 17 poems selected.

Barry’s story, “His Brother Calls,” appeared in upstreet number three. His stories have also been in Descant, Bryant Literary Review, Central Park, Brink, Appearances, and the Northern New England Review. He has written the novels Black Orchid (with Nicholas Meyer), That Wilder Woman, and Biscayne. His book of interviews, Actors at Work (with Rosemarie Tichler) was published in August 2007. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Key West. Landscape of Desire, published by Smith and Krause, was the American representative to the 25th Australian National Playwrights Conference. He lives in New Haven, CT, and is currently working on a novel, The Body in Exile.

Paul’s poem, “A Woman Taking off Her Shirt,” was published in upstreet number four and another, “The Sadness of Dads,” will be in the upcoming number five. His poems have also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac, and have been published in Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, and many other journals and anthologies. He won the Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award for 2001 and the White Pelican Review’s Hollingsworth Prize in 2005. He has three chapbooks, Bird in the Hand (Grayson Books, 2006), Dusk Outside the Braille Press (Riverstone Press, 2006), and The Best Lunches (Frank Cat Press, 2008), as well as one full-length poetry collection, Bending the Notes, (Main Street Rag, 2008). Paul’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize 13 times; he has won once. He makes his living in Boston as an interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing where he specializes in working with the deaf-blind.

Two upstreet authors to teach at Postgraduate Writers’ Conference

upstreet authors Michael Martone and Robin Behn will be on the faculty of the fourteenth annual Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, which will take place at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, from August 11-17, 2009. The Conference will offer fourteen workshops in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and young adult literature.

Michael Martone will facilitate a workshop on The Short Story, for the fifth consecutive year. His essay “Hermes Goes to College” appeared in upstreet number four, in which he was also the subject of the author interview. He is the author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Blue Guide to Indiana, Alive and Dead in Indiana, and Racing in Place. His 2005 book Michael Martone gathers fifty fictions in the form of “contributor’s notes,” and Double Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone was released in 2007. He co-edited The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. The Flatness and Other Landscapes, a collection of his own essays about the Midwest, won the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 1998. He teaches at the University of Alabama.

Robin Behn will lead a Poetry Manuscript workshop; this will be her third time teaching at the Conference. Her poem “Elegy and Lament” will appear in upstreet number five. She is the author of Paper Bird, which won the AWP Award Series in Poetry, The Red Hour, Horizon Note, which won the Brittingham Prize, and the chapbooks The Oboist and Naked Writing. She is also co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships, she teaches in the MFA programs at The University of Alabama and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

For more information about the program, including accommodations, fees, and how to apply, contact Conference Director Ellen Lesser at (802) 828-8835 or e-mail: pgconference@vermontcollege.edu

Eight upstreet poets publishedin Wom-Po listserv anthology

Eight of the 259 poets, or one out of every 32 (3%) whose work appears in the new anthology of poems from the Women’s Poetry Listserv, have had or will have work published in one or more of the first five issues of upstreet. Wom-Po is an international listserv devoted to the discussion of Women’s Poetry. Membership is open to all individuals who are interested in discussing poetry written by women. The discussion covers women poets of all periods, aesthetics, countries, and ethnicities.

Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv, edited by Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, and Lesley Wheeler (Red Hen Press, 2008), contains the following work by upstreet poets:

—Jeanne Marie Beaumont (upstreet #4), “Home in the World,” p. 57
—Nicole Cooley (#5), “Grief As Is,” p. 98
—Lisken Van Pelt Dus (#1, 2, & 5), “Broken Things,” p. 131
—Eve Grubin (#5), “Modesty,” p. 174
—Marilyn Hacker (#5), “Ghazal: In Summer,” p. 180
—Maryanne Hannan (#1), “To You Who Speak of Audre Lorde,” p. 184
—Elaine Sexton (#3 & 4), “Public Transportation,” p. 338
—Yerra Sugarman (#4), “To Miklós Radnóti,” p. 354

The anthology also includes an introduction by D’Arcy Randall and a preface by Wom-Po founder Annie Finch. This one-of-a-kind international collection of 259 poets (258 women and one man) was shaped by consensus-based feminist collaboration over the internet.