Dear Reader,
You may have already seen the big news on the Table of Contents for this issue, but if not, then I'm happy to announce that we are now taking entries for the 2011 Collagist Chapbook Contest, the winner of which will be published by Dzanc Books later this year. We are open for entries immediately, and will take them until April 15th, with the winner announced in our May issue.
One of the hopes I've always had for The Collagist is that it would be able to stand as its own entity, while also serving to help Dzanc Books as a whole with its mission of finding innovative and accomplished books to publish. Although I think we already have had some degree of success with that already, merely by bringing new readers and writers to Dzanc, I'm very glad to be taking this more direct step toward that goal by hosting this contest.
One of the things I'm most excited about regarding our contest is that rather than restrict to one genre or another, we've decided to open it to every kind of writing that The Collagist publishes: chapbook manuscripts can be submitted in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and as collections of smaller works or as longer single works, such as the book-length poem or the novella. We're also using our submission manager to remove all identifying information from the entries until after we've made our decisions, which means that the judging will be done will be done completely blind, with only the quality of the writing itself left to differentiate between entries. It's going to be a great couple of months of reading, and I can't wait to get started.
Please feel free to pass along the contest information to whoever you want, and if you have a manuscript you'd like to submit, please do! I'm looking forward to reading a great number of fine manuscripts, and then to unveiling the winning writer in a few months, as well as working with that writer throughout the publishing process and beyond. I'm sure that whoever wins the contest will be an excellent addition to the Dzanc roster.
For complete rules and the links to submit, please click here.
*
One other bit of news this month: Former blog co-editor Marie Schutt has recently left us to focus on other opportunities, and so I want to take this opportunity to thank her for her fine work over the past year, and also to wish her the best of luck in her writing and other endeavors. To fill that spot on our roster, Ariana Lenarsky has joined our team, and will join Tyler Gobble in interviewing all of our contributors, as well as performing other editorial duties. While we're obviously sad to see Marie go, we're also very excited to have Ariana join us, and I hope you'll enjoy her work with us as it starts appearing in the next weeks.
*
In Issue Eighteen, we have new fiction by Michelle Latiolais, Roberta Allen, Jensen Beach, and Nick Kocz and Jenniey Tallman, plus novel excerpts from The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow and Pacazo by Roy Kesey.
Our poetry this month comes from Melissa Broder, Laura Van Prooyen, Gary L. McDowell, and Daniel D'Angelo.
In non-fiction, we have an essay by Kyle Beachy, plus book reviews of Citrus County by John Brandon, The Poetics of Trespass by Erik Anderson, Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination by Grace Dane Mazur, and Avatar by Evan Lavender-Smith.
As always, thanks to all of our contributors for letting us publish their fine work. Thanks also to everyone who reads the magazine, everyone who sends us submissions, and of course everyone who takes the time to post about the issue to their blogs, Facebook, or anywhere else. We appreciate your time and talents, and can't thank you enough for sharing them with us.
Sincerely,
Matt Bell
Editor
The Collagist