Contributor Updates

Features, interviews, and news about our SR Contributors.

Jenny Marie Day’s Upcoming Exhibitions

Jenny Marie Day’s Upcoming Exhibitions

Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Jenny Marie Day on her assorted projects.

Jenny has upcoming solo exhibitions this winter featuring paintings and sculptures with Alabama Contemporary in Mobile, Alabama and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana. Jenny also has recent and upcoming artist residencies with Greenwich House Pottery in New York City and Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado.

Since 2022, Day’s work has also been included in solo and group exhibitions with Galerie Bengelstrater in Islehorn, Dusseldorf, and Cologne, Germany; Visons West in Denver, Colorado and Bozeman, Montana; William Havu Gallery in Colorado, Form and Concept in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and many other venues.

Day’s practice has expanded to new mediums, including acrylic on canvas paintings; ceramic; mixed media; and textile sculptures.

Jenny Day is a painter and sculptor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Arizona, a BFA in Painting from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz. Her exhibition record includes Arte Laguna in Venice, Italy; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Korea; Museum of Art Fort Collins; Mesa Arts Museum; Phoenix Art Museum; Blue Star Contemporary Museum in San Antonio, TX; Alabama Contemporary in Mobile, AL; and Elmhurst Museum in Chicago, IL. Day’s work has been supported by an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum, a Barron Purchase Award and ongoing support from The Process Museum. Day has participated at Greenwich House Pottery, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and the Playa Foundation For The Arts, among other artist residencies. Jenny Day is represented by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana; Visions West in Denver, Colorado and Bozeman, Montana; and Galerie Bengelstrater in Dusseldorf, Germany. 

View Jenny’s paintings essays in issue 19 and issue 29 of Superstition Review and hear Jenny discuss her issue 19 paintings and artistic backgrounds in her feature on the Superstition Review blog’s Authors Talk series.

Jenny’s work can be purchased through Galerie Bengelsträter, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, or Visions West. Learn more about Jenny and her works here.

Sarah Beth Childers, Prodigals

Sarah Beth Childers, Prodigals

Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Sarah Beth Childers on her forthcoming book, Prodigals: A Sister’s Memoir of Appalachia and Loss. 

Prodigals is a series of lyric essays of loss and resistance told in the voice of an Appalachian storyteller.

The book examines how Childers’ brother’s story was both universal and uniquely Appalachian. While the familiar story of the prodigal son carries all its assumed baggage, the Appalachian setting of Prodigals brings its own influences. Childers foregrounds the Appalachian landscape in her narrative, depicting its hardwood forests, winding roads, mining-stained creeks and rivers, hill-clinging goats and cows, neighborhoods and trailer parks tucked between mountains. The Childers family’s fervent religious faith and resistance to medical intervention seems normal in this environment, as is their conflicting desires to both escape from Appalachia and to stay forever at home.

Prodigals weaves in the stories of other famous prodigals, including the alcoholic brother of the Brontë sisters, Jimmy Swaggart, the fallen televangelist; Robert Crumb, her brother’s beloved author of racist and sexist comic books; and Childers herself. The story examines the role of prodigals within the intimate tapestry of family life and beyond—to its larger sociocultural meanings.

Read some of the book’s reviews:

“An Appalachian childhood steeped in Pentecostalism, the Brontë siblings roaming the English moors, the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son: Sarah Beth Childers’ memoir triangulates between these and more. From the outset, it raises the question of who the prodigal is—the younger brother Childers loved and lost, too young, to mental illness, or Childers herself, who left West Virginia and her insular family to become a writer and professor. In prose that’s full of swerves and surprises, Childers tells and retells her brother’s story. This telling is an act of loving retrieval—even a kind of return. Riveting, luminous, memorable. I’ve read it three times and can’t wait to begin again.” — Jennifer Brice, author of Unlearning to Fly and Another North.

“Prodigals is about the author’s grief as she explores—via memory, via writing, and via time—her brother Joshua’s mental illness and his loss. She came from a family that did not ascribe names and diagnoses to mental illness, no less Joshua’s, and she must not only find a variety of definitions for loss, love, and relationship but also for herself. This is a journey of self, intellect, and history, toward understanding.” —Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Wanting Radiance.

“A gorgeous meditation on family, place, and loss. In revisiting the life of her beloved brother, Sarah Beth Childers insists on bearing witness to people and places as they are while contemplating those who stay and those who leave, and the wide pulsing spaces left in their wake. Captivating and clear-sighted. A beautiful book.” —Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread.

Sarah Beth Childers is the author of Shake Terribly the Earth as well as numerous publications in literary journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University and lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

View the creative nonfiction essay “Beagle in the Road” by Sarah Beth Childers in issue 20 of Superstition Review.

Prodigals: A Sister’s Memoir of Appalachia and Loss, released on September 1 from the University of Georgia Press’s Crux Series in Creative Nonfiction. Purchase the book here.

Kelle Groom’s: How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays

Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Kelle Groom on her forthcoming book, How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays. 

The book has already earned strong praise from established voices. Read some of the reviews:

“Kelle Groom is a navigator of the soul’s voyage, from mooring to mooring, no matter the tumultuous seas. She is a writer of deepest heart and purest eye, who seizes you and takes you where she wanders. How to Live is one of the most beautiful books I know, a profound reckoning.” — Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships

“At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be– a way to live– after a series of devastating events. But there’s nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book.” — Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index and The News from Spain

“Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? This is a central question in this fiercely won, wildly original, and ultimately beautiful meditation. Kelle Groom is one of our most gifted writers, and this book is her Odyssey, which means we will end up back where we started, only changed. Along the way we will visit strange lands, we will come face-to-face with our fears, we will find ourselves among kind strangers, and we will understand why we are alive. This is a book which wrestles with our hardest, darkest questions, and comes out on the side of gratitude. ” — Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

“It’s really a book where the tissue between life and death feels very thin at times and Kelle Groom negotiates these mortal stations like a wandering medieval saint on residencies and short term teaching jobs who finds consolation, wisdom and suicidal despair in violet rain, flashes of feeling in the grasp of a hand, while the euphoria of love and eloquent scraps of knowledge keenly ornament this trail where being a bare faced reader is precisely enough. Kelle Groom writes with a relentless and avid consciousness and in this story there is a child and I think it her own becoming.” — Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls and Afterglow

Kelle Groom is the author of the award-winning memoir I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl and four poetry collections. Groom’s honors include numerous fellowships and grants, and her works have received Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others.

Groom is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction. She was previously Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe and formerly poetry editor of The Florida Review. She is now a nonfiction editor for AGNI Magazine and works as director of communications and foundation relations for Atlantic Center for the Arts. 

View four poems by Kelle Groom in issue 5 and “Dear Baby” in issue 13 of Superstition Review.

The book is available for preorder here. The book will be for sale from Tupelo Press starting October 1, 2023.

To learn more about Kelle Groom’s work, visit her website. 

David Shields: How We Got Here

Superstition Review
photo by Tom Collicott

Director, producer, and writer David Shields has a forthcoming film, How We Got Here. The film is now streaming on Tubi, Mometu, Cineverse, and Free Movies Plus and a companion volume of the same name will be published by Sublation Books in January 2024.

In both the book and the film How We Got Here, Shields traces the history of postmodernism and ultimately argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.

Shields found inspiration for the film when attending the NonfictioNOW writers’ conference in Phoenix, Nov 1-3, 2018, just before the midterm elections. He asked fellow writers and professors in attendance questions such as: How do you know what you believe? Do you have any absolute beliefs? Is there such thing as “truth”? What is ‘nonfiction” and is it “true”? What do you think is the difference between “truth” and belief? If you have siblings, have they shown your view of the world to be flawed? Are you superstitious? Do you believe in ghosts? Why are you here and not canvassing for Stacey Abrams?

Shields found that the consensus answers: I have no absolute beliefs, though I do believe in the power of art; there are no absolute truths other than that there is no truth; my sister and I are estranged; there are no ghosts except psychic luggage; I probably should be canvassing for Abrams, but I’ve lost faith in the process.

It is from these interviews that Shields has crafted How We Got Here. The film consists of interviews with more than thirty NonfictioNOW attendees, eighteen brief 2-Truths-and-a-Lie videos, and a slideshow / TED talk (on speed) / montage / soundscape / voiceover / monologue / intellectual history of the last 170 years. The film shares diverse perspectives across the history of postmodernism from its roots in art and philosophy all the way to modern day election denial and media politicization.

The film has received great praise:

“This film should be required viewing for every Intro to Humanities course in the country. It does the seemingly impossible: reinserts some context to our mostly decontextualized lives. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, the film’s pace and structure prevent it from ever feeling even slightly boring, despite the heavy lifting it does to excavate the ideological roots beneath our country’s growing social and political turmoil.” —Michael Wheaton, Autofocus.

“A brilliant, encyclopedic film. The meanings are conveyed by how the film is edited: cutting between the history of ideas of the truth, the arrangement of quotations, the personal versions articulated by different speakers, the black-and-white live action, the colorful animation, and the intersplicing of Two Truths and a Lie.”—Susan Daitch, author of Siege of Comedians: A Novel.

“A fast-paced, exhilarating collage of voices converging on the question of how we got to birtherism and election denial.”—Jennifer Jacquet, author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Shields, a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

Shields has also written, stared, produced, and directed several films including the film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel; Lynch: A History; I’ll Show You Mine; and How We Got Here.

View David Shields’ interview regarding “Keeping Up with the Speed of Light,” in issue 11 of Superstition Review.

To learn more about the film, visit the website here. View the film on Tubi here.

On the Gaze: Dubai and its New Cosmopolitanisms by Adrianne Kalfopoulou

Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Adrianne Kalfopoulou, who recently published On the Gaze: Dubai and its New Cosmopolitanisms, a book-length essay that explores the meaning of Dubai as a nation-state at the crossroads of the world. The book explores the history of Dubai’s development through a philosophical lens and a historical perspective, analyzing its evolution into a member state of the United Arab Emirates. It presents a completely new narrative on Dubai through multiple gazes.

Read some of the book’s reviews below:

“Adrianne Kalfopoulou has created a conceptual and reflective astrolabe of Dubai that could well become the new intellectual way of entering its space. Her narrative slides effortlessly on the chronological map crossing the gaze of time with the tactility of experience—hers and those of many others who have found themselves in this place of futurity in the hopes of escaping the vicissitudes of their individual presents. Transnational fluidities, Kalfopoulou tells us, rest on narratives of a future that has already become another mirage. Infrastructure indexes forms of modernity, and on this conceptual map we see fixed points that sculpt the modernities of the Gulf States—the hospital, the airport, the bank, the gaze from above, and the vision to the future, in a narrative that is as detached as a surgeon’s scalpel and as intimate as the literary account of a pedicure.”  – Neni Panourgiá, author of Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State

“In a personal narration that reads like a reflective literary diary, Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s On the Gaze chronicles the situational everydayness of her lifeworld in Dubai. The optics encapsulate manifold perspectives interwoven with anecdotes from the fabric of the city’s recent history, and oriented by analytic leitmotifs with Baudrillardian attunements. She depicts the intercultural arabesque of the cosmopolitanisms of a maritime megalopolis that rose in its architectonic edifices from the purity of the Arabian desert dunes. Dubai appears through her gazes as experiential labyrinthine lessons of inhabiting the locales of a global landmark of urbanity that reflect the neo-aesthetics of our hyperreal paradoxical age.”  – Nader El-Bizri, author of The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger 

“Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s On the Gaze is a book-length essay on her immersive experience upon entering, and living in, a world far from her own cultural roots. We follow her multiple gazes—temporal, abstract, theoretical, and personal—and journey with her from Dubai’s humble beginnings as a port village to its evolution as a global city of the digital age. The book abounds in honest and vivid portraits of people and places written in beautifully crafted prose. A very welcome addition to the growing body of anglophone literature on the Arabian Gulf.” – Yahya Haidar, editor and translator, Al-Din: A Prolegomenon to the Study of the History of Religions 

Adrianne Kalfopoulou is based in Athens, Greece where she has taught in higher education for many years. She is a poet, essayist, and scholar, authoring three poetry collections. She has served as a poetry and nonfiction faculty mentor in the low residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University, and was the McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College for 2020-2021.

View Adrianne’s essays in issue 24, issue 16, and issue 9 of Superstition Review.

The book is available for preorder here. Learn more about Adrianne and her works here.

Catherine Broadwall’s Fulgurite

Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Catherine Broadwall, who recently published the poetry collection Fulgurite through Cornerstone Press. The book’s title takes its name from the crystalline structures that can form underground when lightning strikes sand or soil. It is used as an extended metaphor for jolting events—global and personal—that leave traces in their wake. Poems center on fairy tales, gender, coming of age, and the natural world. Many work in the tradition of domestic fabulism, blending the real with the fantastical. The cover was designed by Julia Kaufman. 

The book has received generous praise:

“These ethereal poems exist within the mysterious, magical realm of fairytale. Fluid and porous, they have a witchy, spellbound nature. These pieces float.” — Allison Titus, author of High Lonesome

“Here is a poet who understands metaphor as deep transformation, whose lines strike like lightning and fuse to startle us into truth at once spiritual and politically vital.” — Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

“We are fortunate to have Kyle’s many-faceted constructions in the world.” —Jennifer Militello, author of The Pact

“Fulgurite walks beside us, a ‘star-specked’ companion, into the radiant thicket. Beware, be there, be where the lightning touches.” —Emily Corwin, author of Sensorium

“Through masterfully painted imagery, Kyle offers hope by showing that a woman can find her power in a world where ‘men prowl the streets with enormous polished guns.’” —Reverie Koniecki, author of to the god of sore feet and bad backs

“A soulful and often stunning poetry collection.” —Kirkus Reviews

Catherine, formerly known as Catherine Kyle, married and changed her last name to Broadwall shortly after the book came out. Broadwall is a name created in collaboration with her husband and their families. She published Fulgurite under the name Catherine Kyle because it reflects that past chapter of her life. She sees it as one way to honor that time. 

In addition to Fulgurite, Catherine is the author of Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the 2019 Idaho Book of the Year Award. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She was the winner of the 2019-2020 COG Poetry Award and a finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review Prize in poetry. She is an assistant professor at DigiPen Institute of Technology, where she teaches creative writing and literature.

View Catherine Kyle’s Abandoned Mall in issue 31 of Superstition Review.

To listen to a playlist of songs that helped inspire and share themes with the book, click here. To purchase Fulgurite, click here. To learn more about Broadwall, visit her website here.

Rachel Cantor’s Half-Life of a Stolen Sister

Superstition Review
Rachel Cantor

Rachel Cantor has recently published Half-Life of a Stolen Sister. The imaginative novel follows the lives of the Brontë siblings—Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and brother Branwell—retelling their story from the beginning in their precocious childhoods, to the writing of their renowned novels, to their early deaths. The work is a form-shattering novel written by an author praised as “laugh-out-loud hilarious and thought-provokingly philosophical” (Boston Globe).

The novel-by-stories book beautifully brings together diaries, letters, home movies, television and radio interviews, deathbed monologues and fragments from the sprawling invented worlds of the siblings’ childhood. The writing explores how the three sisters were able to produce literary landmarks that have withstood the ages and how their lives and circumstances brought the children together in greatness. Rachel Cantor is able to meld known biographical facts with storytelling to depict the family’s genius, their bonds of love and duty, impassioned creativity, and the ongoing tolls of illness, isolation, and loss.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero, praised Cantor’s reimagining of the Brontë family, “With humor and heart, Rachel Cantor paints a vivid, multi-voiced picture of the Brontës via a shape-shifting, time-bending tapestry of unforgettable characters and situations. Whether you’re a fan of this literary family or not, this book is a must-read for anyone looking for a truly innovative, tender, and humorous take on genius, the creative process, family, and life.”

Read some of the book’s other reviews below:
“Cantor pulls out all the stops to make this a unique and unforgettable reading experience that is as difficult to describe as it is to set down . . . Clever without straining, true to the basic facts of the Brontë family history, and emotionally compelling as the children grow while continuously facing new obstacles, Cantor’s unusual tale can be read and reread for endless diversion.”
—Booklist

“Cantor spins a free-ranging and intriguing tale of a literary family inspired by the Brontës that incorporates a mix of forms and anachronistic details . . . Cantor’s frisky and time-collapsing blend of forms elevates the experiment above run-of-the-mill Brontë fodder . . . For Brontë fans, this is a jolt of fresh air.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[Cantor’s] take on [the Brontës’] lives plays fair with their limited life spans and general relationships to each other and the world while throwing them into a setting replete with bagels, McMansions, subways, television, and soy milk. The structure of the novel is playful . . . with a few surprising insights.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Innovative . . . Cantor spins the known biographies of the Brontë siblings into a surrealist, eccentric story where modernity blends with the archaic … Retells the story of the Brontë family with flair.”

—Foreword Reviews, Starred Review


Rachel Cantor is the author of the novels Half-Life of a Stolen Sister (Soho Press 2023), Good on Paper (Melville House 2016), and A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Melville House 2014). Two dozen of her stories have been published in the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere, and she has written about fiction for National Public Radio, the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is writing a series of middle grade and young adult books set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 

Rachel Cantor was interviewed in Issue 17 of Superstition Review. View it here.

Half-Life of a Stolen Sister is available for purchase here. Read more from Rachel Cantor at her website or find her on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Success for L.I. Henley

Superstition Review

Congratulations to L.I. Henley for the success of her recent projects. L.I. Henley won the 2023 Robert and Adele Schiff Award in CNF through The Cincinnati Review, chosen by Jerald Walker for her essay. She was also chosen as runner-up for the Southeast Review’s Ned Stuckey French award in CNF with forthcoming essays in The Southeast Review and The Southern Humanities Review. Henley is offering two summer writing workshops that will help writers to generate new material and offer feedback.

Courtesy of L.I. Henley

The workshops include mini lessons on craft, weekly advice, tips, reading published works, engaging dialogue, guided questions to deepen engagement, unique prompts for creating and improving work, writing warm-ups, oral feedback from Henley and other writers, personalized reading suggestions and suggestions for publishing opportunities. Through writing-focused sessions, attendees will learn how to generate new material alongside a community of excited writers.

Through these personal essay workshops, attendees should be able to draft a solid longer piece but also work on multiple “seedling” pieces that can grow after the series has ended, helping to start long-term writing.

Sessions will be held on Zoom. Offerings include “Show Me the Moment: An Online Generative Workshop on the Personal Essay for Beginners,” “Behind the Door is Another Door: An Online Generative Workshop on the Personal Essay,” and “Writing the Unruly Body: An Online Generative Workshop on CNF and Poetry about Pain, Pleasure, Injury and Everything in Between.” Dates are varied, with workshops starting between July and December, depending on the course you select.

Throughout all her work, she continues to create installments of her series, Paper Dolls & Books, which you can view here.

Henley brings extensive teaching and workshop experience to her coursework, as well as a breadth of publishing experience to help emerging writers in their journeys. She is an interdisciplinary artist, as a writer and paper artist, authoring numerous books that have appeared in Adroit, Brevity, Ninth Letter, The Indianapolis Review, Calyx, The Bellingham Review, The Los Angeles Review. Her personal essays have been awarded the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize and the Robert and Adele Schiff Award. She is also the creator of Paper Dolls & Books. Follow her work and upcoming projects on Instagram @lilhenleyart.

View her poems in issue 24 of Superstition Review.

Learn more about Henley’s writing workshops here. To register for sessions, email li.henley@hotmail.com or visit her contact page.

Natalie Young’s All of This Was Once Under Water

Superstition Review
Natalie Padilla Young

Congratulations to Natalie Young for the release of her first book, titled All of This Was Once Under Water, published by Quarter Press. The collection is “part of a manuscript that mixes factual scenery and history with speculative fiction, in order to explore peculiarities in human nature, culture, identity, and environment.”

The book’s cover art and illustration were done by Maximiliane Spieß. Maxi is from western Germany where she works as an illustrator and writes novels in her free time. The Limited Edition hardcover book includes 8+ illustrations by Maxi in offset printing on matte pages. The book is printed in full color and comes with a blue vellum dust jacket.

All of This Was Once Under Water by Natalie Padilla Young (Published by Quarter Press)

The book has received many reviews regarding the beautiful narrative it establishes and the themes it is able to intertwine across each poem. Read them below:

“All of This Was Once Under Water is entrancing, beguiling, disquieting—a collection of poetic dispatches from a terrain of lost faith and ecological decline. A genderless alien from another world, a philosophical monster residing in the Great Salt Lake, and a human “She” with a long-buried trauma: these are just some of the dramatis personae in this compendious collection that make the familiar strange again. Interspersed fragments of history about the birth of the Mormon Church comment ironically on our current state. The tone isn’t elegiac. There is hope in these searching poems, in their sensuous encounter with nature—not to mention a love affair between alien and human. The wondrous attention, the wry melancholy, and the sly humor of these poems will allow readers to glimpse their own lives with new eyes.” —Dan O’Brien.

“In All of This Was Once Under Water, Natalie Padilla Young conjures a physical and metaphysical universe in which the history of the Great Salt Lake and the struggles of her Mormon ancestors intertwine. Narratives of suffering, phantasmagorical legend, environmental threat, science, faith, love, and gender fluidity unspool in language as pristine and biting as salt. A great imagination is at work in these poems as Young probes the enmeshed lives of an alien, a lone human She, and a mythic monster in startling diction and syntax and haunting imagery.”  – Teresa Cader, History of Hurricanes, The Paper Wasp, Guests.

Natalie Young is a founding and managing editor of Sugar House Review, a poetry magazine. She also works as an art director for an ad agency based in Salt Lake City. Her poems from this series have been published in Green Mountains Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, South Dakota Review, Terrain.org, Drunken Boat, Pilgrimage, and elsewhere.

View her poem “Notes on Earth Life” in issue 18 of Superstition Review.

The limited edition is currently in preorder. Only 250 copies have been printed. Order yours today here.

Eileen Cunniffe’s Mischief and Metaphors: Essaying a Life

Eileen Cunniffe’s Mischief and Metaphors: Essaying a Life

Superstition Review
Mischief and Metaphor: Essaying a Life by Eileen Cunniffe (Published by Shanti Arts March 28th, 2023) | Eileen Cunniffe

Congratulations to Eileen Cunniffe for her collection of essays titled Mischief & Metaphors: Essaying a Life, published by Shanti Arts. Its cover art and illustrations accompanying the essays were created by Cunniffe’s mother, Rosie Cunniffe. The collected essays are introspective, exploring the underlying patterns of memories through characters spanning “family members, friends, and co-workers; but also butter, baseball, birds, and assorted articles of clothing.” Cunniffe has created a Spotify playlist to pair with Mischief and Metaphor and can be previewed here.

Eileen celebrated the book’s launch on April 23rd in-person with her mother and community. See photos from the launch on her site here.

Eileen Cunniffe with her mother Rosie Cunniffe

Eileen Cunniffe writes nonfiction that explores identity and experiences through the lens of travel, family, and work. She is known to write prose poetry on occasion. She was a regular contributor to Nonprofit Quarterly from 2013 to 2021, covering arts and culture. Her writing has appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Four of her essays have been recognized with Travelers’ Tales Solas Awards and another received the Emrys Journal 2013 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award. Her nonfiction piece Consignments was published in issue 9.

Mischief and Metaphor: Essaying Life can be purchased here or from Bookshop. To learn more about Cunniffe, visit her website.