Contributor Update: Cameron Barnett

Congratulations to past Superstition Review contributor, Cameron Barnett, on the upcoming publication of his second poetry collection, Murmur. The collection is available now from Autumn House Press!

The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”

The collection includes two poems first published by s[r]. “Muck,” and the titular “Murmur,” can be read in Issue 22.

Murmur is already receiving attention and praise:

Cameron Barnett’s Murmur is in fact a glorious shout. These poems shake up histories, both intimate and political. They stir and disturb the ways we look at love, at race, at our people and ourselves. A bold, beautiful, and brilliant collection!

Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“‘Murmur’ plays jazz on the spinal cord.”

Monica Prince, poet and author of Roadmap: a Choreopoem

“With poems spanning histories, both personal and collective, and poems that center Blackness as a site of joy, promise, pain, and possibilities, these poems compel us toward knowledge we are deeply implicated in.”

M. Soledad Caballero, author of I Was a Bell

Cameron Barnett is a poet and teacher from Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water, the winner of the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is a graduate of Duquesne University and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Other honors include a 2019 Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for Emerging Artist and serving as the ’22-’24 Emerging Black Writer in Residence at Chatham University. Cameron teaches at his middle school alma mater, Falk Laboratory School. His work explores the complexity of race, place, and relationships for Black people in America. His work can be found on his website and social media: x i.

Fighting Hunger: Turning Poetry into Food

Logo artwork by Diane Wilbon Parks, all rights reserved

Hunger is everywhere and anywhere. And, thanks to pandemics, conflicts and climate change and politics, it’s on the rise big time. Just google “hunger” and you’ll see what’s going on.

In case you didn’t know, poets are fighting back.

Hiram Larew, Ph.d. founded www.poetryxhunger.com in 2017 to put poets and creatives to work bringing awareness to the persistent problem of global hunger. The initiative is his call for poets to write about hunger, because he believes that poetry has the power to touch hearts and minds in a way that statistics can struggle to communicate.

In his own words:

I founded Poetry X Hunger a few years ago to bring a world of poets to the anti-hunger cause. With partners like the United Nations, Feed the Children, arts councils and many food banks, more than 400 poems by poets near and far are now published on the website.

And, those poems are being put to work.

In 2023, Poetry X Hunger poets along with other creatives used readings and auctions to raise more than $10,000 US for global and US-based hunger-fighting organizations like Seed Programs International and Roots for Life. And yes, Feed the Children featured a Poetry X Hunger poem as voiceover in an internationally-aired Public Service Announcement. Even more recently, another poem on the website was selected as the lyric for a newly commissioned composition featuring a string quartet and a chorale. The soon-to-be released recording is amazing.

All to say, poets are turning their poetry into food.

Join us by writing and submitting your poetry about empty-stomach poetry for possible publication on the website. Here are the Submission Guidelines. The organization can be contacted at PoetryXHunger@gmail.com.

Since earning two degrees from Oregon State University (an MS in Botany and Plant Pathology in 1977 and a PhD in Entomology in 1981) Dr. Hiram Larew rose to prominence in the science, policy, and management of the US Government’s international agricultural sciences programs. Dr. Larew has won the hearts and minds of people around the world by helping to fill empty stomachs. His poetry has been nominated four times for national Pushcart Prizes, and he has received grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Prince George’s Arts and Humanities Council for his poetry activities. His poems have appeared widely in journals and books in the U.S., Germany, Britain, Nigeria, The Netherlands, Ireland and elsewhere.  His fourth collection, Undone, was published in 2018 by FootHills Publishing. You can find out more about Hiram’s own poetry on his website.

Contributor Update: Sloane Crosley

Congratulations to previous contributor Sloane Crosley on her new memoir Grief Is for People. The memoir goes on sale February 27th, 2024 but you can pre-order it from her website here.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with a verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now, the pathos that has been ever-present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.

For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together, as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, while Russell is still alive, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place.

When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels her on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic.

Crosley’s search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with a resounding empathy. Upending the “grief memoir,” Grief Is for People is the category-defying story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A modern elegy, it rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.

Crosley has received astounding reviews for this piece:

“[An] aching meditation on loss and friendship… Crosley elegantly links the two losses by explaining how her fevered desire to reclaim her burglarized items stood in for her inability to reclaim Russel. Her characteristically whip-smart prose takes on a newly introspective quality as she reinvigorates dusty publishing memoir tropes and captures the minutiae of a complicated friendship with humor and heart. This is a must-read.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Novelist and essayist Crosley is a tightrope writer of devastating wit and plain devastation, a balancing act no doubt requiring even more muscle in this memoir of her grief…Also a story of the shifting sands of the last two decades in book publishing and the author’s and her friend’s changing places within it, this is a searching, impassioned, cathartic, and loving elegy.”

—Booklist

Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and How Did You Get This Number, as well as Look Alive Out There (a 2019 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and the bestselling novels, The Clasp and Cult Classic. She served as editor of The Best American Travel Writing series and is featured in The Library of America’s 50 Funniest American Writers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay and others. She was the inaugural columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed “Townies” series, a contributing editor at Interview Magazine, and a columnist for The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Independent, Black Book, Departures and The New York Observer.

Superstition Review did an interview with Crosley in issue 7, you can access that here. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website here.

Contributor Update: Lisa Ko

Congratulations to past contributor Lisa Ko, who has a new novel coming out in March! The novel is titled Memory Piece and will be available for purchase March 19th, 2024. Visit Penguin Random House for preorder information.

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.

By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

This novel has received outstanding reviews:

“A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York’s art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.”

Vogue, Best books of 2024

“Lisa Ko has brought us one of those rare, sumptuous tales of art and friendship that feels both universal and inimitable.”

Elle, Best (and most anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024

“This novel serves as an archive of our past and a vision for what’s to come, hauntingly beautiful in a way that’s both nostalgic and dystopian. In essence Memory Piece is about the power of remembering, especially when it’s painful.”

Booklist

Lisa Ko is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times and The Believer.

Superstition Review did an interview with Ko in issue 21, you can view that here. To learn more about Ko and her work visit her website here.

Contributor Update: Barbara Crooker

We at Superstition Review would like to congratulate Barbara Crooker on the release of her new book Slow Wreckage!

The poems in this collection consider the “slow wreckage” that comes with advancing years. As well as considering the travails of an aging individual, Barbara Crooker uses a wider lens to examine the damages inflicted by society and its failings. And through it all, or despite it all, Crooker finds beauty and hope in the physical world. In Slow Wreckage, she writes with candor, irony, and ultimately, love.

This collection has received notable praise:

“Barbara Crooker ushers us seamlessly into each moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago. Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those ‘delicious burdens’ we must carry each day… Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to ‘love in these dangerous times.’,”

—James Crews, author of Unlocking the heart: writing for mindfulness, creativity, and self-compassion

“For years I have been an admirer of Barbara Crooker’s poems, her voice and intelligence, its truth and grounded vision offering such specific attention to the world. Slow Wreckage raises her poetic project to yet higher ground, interrogating irony, wit, humor, and metaphysical cast into the difficulties we all come to in age-the scope and range of this collection is remarkable. These poems take up loss and well as love, yet resonate ultimately with praise and thanks, singing authentically as all the best poetry does.”

—Christopher Buckley, author of One Sky to the Next

Barbara Crooker is the author of twelve chapbooks and nine previous full-length books of poetry. A recent collection, Some Glad Morning, was longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press. Her previous collection, The Book of Kellls, won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea. Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature.

Barbara has three poems featured in Issue 2 of Superstition Review. You can view more of Barbara’s work on her website here, and purchase Slow Wreckage here.

ASU Book Group Meeting

When: Thursday, February 29th 2024 from 12:00-1:00pm

Where: Piper Writers House (PWH) 450 E. Tyler Mall, ASU Tempe Campus OR Online

What: The ASU Book Group’s February 2024 reading selection is To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories by Sarah Viren. The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon–1 p.m. with two different options for attendance: either in-person at the Piper Writers House or virtually on Zoom (registration required for online attendance). In-person attendees are invited to join the author for lunch after at the University Club, no-host.

Haven’t read the book? Come anyway! Authors are always present.

Synopsis of the Book: Past and present collide in this propulsive, one-of-a-kind meditation on truth and conspiracy, based on Viren’s viral essay of the same name. “This all started after the [2016] election,” Viren begins, “when the main narrative I kept hearing was that only uneducated whites believed the lies that were being told.” At first, she set out to write a book about her charismatic high school philosophy teacher, whose instruction sometimes bordered on conspiracy theory, interviewing teachers and classmates from her past to pick at the ways reasonable people can be manipulated to believe far-flung fictions. Then Viren’s wife received an email accusing her of sexual misconduct at the university where both worked, and Viren tapped into her background as an investigative journalist to untangle the accusations and clear her wife’s name.

Sarah Viren is an assistant professor in the Department of English’s creative writing program.

About the book group:

Remaining ASU Book Group meetings and selections for 2023–24 are:

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative by the Department of English and organized in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

For more information about the book group contact Judith Smith at jps@asu.edu and follow the link provided for all the details and to register for the meeting: https://asuevents.asu.edu/event/asu-book-group-name-bigger-lie-sarah-viren

After Dinner Conversation: Technology and Ethics

Congratulations to After Dinner Conversation literary magazine on the recent publication of their first themed short story collection! Technology Ethics is part of a series of nine themed editions the magazine is releasing throughout 2024.

The dawn of AI, transhumanism, and robotics, will rise just like the sun, inexorably, and we are now struggling to imagine that future, to understand what it might mean for humanity when/if something else takes the wheel. There is no doubt now that AI will surpass our abilities in many areas: radiological analysis, data entry, medical diagnosis, paralegal research, and the list expands daily, as does the worry surrounding the disruption to our jobs, and to our lives.

This issue of ADC speaks to the growing unease with respect to our loss of control and our involuntary delegation of decision-making to technology. This powerful and accelerating wave will be transformative.

Deborah Serra – Technology Ethics Edition Editor

You can purchase the Technology Ethics collection on Amazon. Their next collection, Crimes and Punishments is available for preorder and will be released on February 21!

This collection has already received well-deserved praise:

“These collections can offer a spine for such courses, or the individual stories could be added to a course as illustrative material to stimulate discussion; outside of educational contexts, they work nicely to stimulate conversation in families, elder hostels, youth clubs, or book groups.”

Luc Bovens, PhD – Philosophy Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

After Dinner Conversation is an independent, nonprofit, literary magazine that focuses on short story fiction that encourages philosophical and ethical discussions with friends, family, and students.  Each story comes with five suggested discussion questions. You can discover more on their website and social media: f x i.

Internships for ASU Students

Superstition Review

Internship Opportunities with Superstition Review 

Superstition Review is the online literary magazine produced by creative writing and web design students at Arizona State University. Founded in 2008, the mission of the journal is to promote contemporary art and literature by providing a free, easy-to-navigate, high quality online publication that features work by established and emerging artists and authors from all over the world. We publish two issues a year with art, fiction, interviews, nonfiction, and poetry. We also enjoy honoring all members of our Superstition Review family by maintaining a strong year-round community of editors, submitters, contributors, and readers on our blog and social networks.

Trainees

Trainees will register for a 3 credit-hour ENG 394 course. The course will offer a study of the field of literary magazines.

Upon successful completion of ENG 394, trainees will enroll in ENG 484 and become active interns with the magazine.

  • All work is done completely online.
  • We welcome interns from all fields.
  • Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.
  • Internships are now available for ASU Online students and graduate students.

What Interns Say:

“This class has been a huge eye-opener for me and I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to work in the publishing and editing industry before graduating.”

“The skills I learned have given me a huge amount of confidence as I begin my search for a job, and I’m so glad this course was available.”

“I feel I got a great internship experience that will help me post graduation.”

K-pop. Literary. Phenomenon. Contributor Update: Christine Ma-Kellams

Congratulations to previous contributor Christine Ma-Kellams on the upcoming publication of her novel, The Band! On April 16th, 2024, readers will be able to purchase her book from Atria Books.

“Talent is a burden for which the only relief is attention.”

(But is it paying attention or giving it?) the footnote asks. The Band is a novel that melds the literary and the self-aware. Five K-pop idols rise to unparalleled fame. One disappears. What is the difference between love and paying attention? And what do we miss regardless of how close we think we are watching? Christine Ma-Kellams’ work is humming with insight and connections. The story itself is supremely aware of its existence within a canonalbeit one that includes the Bible alongside Grand Theft Auto V. Often situating itself to other elements of culture, The Band effortlessly stands apart as one of the most unconventional reads of 2024.

Ma-Kellams’ novel has already received well-deserved praise:

“This could very well be the first great K-Pop literary phenomenon.”

Debutiful, Most Anticipated Books of 2024

“No one else could have written this book.”

—Loan LE, Senior Editor at Atria Books

Ma-Kellams’ short story, “Chazzy,” can be found in Issue 19 of Superstition Review.

Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. Her work and writing have appeared in Huffpost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and much more. The Band is her first novel. You can find her in person in one of California’s coastal cities or online at ChristineMa-Kellams.com.