Dear Readers,
Welcome to Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist. For National Poetry Month, we're pleased to bring you an expanded poetry section featuring new work from Ali Shapiro, Henry W. Leung, Raina Lauren Fields, Matt Morton, Shelley Wong, Amorak Huey, Rosalynde Vas Dias, and Travis Smith.
This month's issue also feature fiction from Douglas W. Milliken, Meagan Ciesla, Nathan Oates, and Ravi Mangla. In nonfiction, we have an essay from Amy Benson. And our book reviews feature coverage of The Placebo Effect Trilogy by Yuriy Tarnawsky (reviewed by J. Andrew Goodman), Goodnight Nobody by Ethel Rohan (reviewed by Christi Clancy), Citizen J by Daniela Olszewska (reviewed by William Emery), and The Devil's Snake Curve by Josh Ostergaard (reviewed by Justin Thurman).
Another feature of this month's poetry celebration is in place of our usual "Excerpts" section, we're doing a small press feature looking at chapbooks from Organic Weapon Arts. In this section, we're pleased to be featuring selections from Joseph Legaspi's Aviary, Bestiary and Rachel McKibbens' Mammoth. Both of these manuscripts were selected by OW Arts through their 2013 David Blair Memorial Chapbook Prize. Guidelines for their 2014 contest can be found here.
Speaking of chapbook contests, we are very excited to announce the return of the Collagist Chapbook Contest, which is now taking entries. This year's contest will be prose only, but is open to all prose genres: short fiction, novellas, non-fiction, and any combination thereof—see our contest page for full details. The winning chapbook will be published by Dzanc Books, and will receive $250 and 25 author's copies. The contest is open until midnight on July 15, 2014. We're looking forward to reading your chapbook!
As always, thank you to all of our contributors for being a part of this issue, and thanks to you and all the rest of our readers for visiting us this month.
Sincerely,
Gabriel Blackwell
and Matthew Olzmann
Editors
The Collagist