2015 Pushcart Nominees

We are proud to announce our nominees for this year’s Pushcart Prize:

* David Samuel Levinson for his story, “The Dinner Guest

* Darrin Doyle for his story, “Engagement

* Craig Santos Perez for his poems, “From All With Ocean Views

* Sarah Messer for her poems, “Only Sky Animals,” et al.

* Harrison Candelaria Fletcher for his nonfiction piece, “Artifacts

* Jennifer Baum for her nonfiction piece, “A Different Set of Rules

Though selection is never easy, we nominate six writers every year for the Pushcart Prize because we believe in the endeavor of keeping the world reading and writing,

Leslie McIntosh

Project: Chapbooks
Role: Editor
Leslie McIntosh (all pronouns respectfully used) is black, male presenting, male attracted, autistic, an older millennial, a poet, a fictionist, &. Leslie has received support, in the form of residencies and fellowships, from Breadloaf, Callaloo, Millay Arts, The Watering Hole, Zoeglossia, and more. Leslie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Foglifter, Obsidian, Split This Rock, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, and in the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). A nominee for both Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the 2022 92Y Discovery Award, Leslie is an Assistant Poetry Editor at Newfound and lives on the stolen land of the Munsee Lenape, currently known as Jersey City, NJ, USA.

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Winniebell is a Chinese woman wearing short, curly hair and a light purple linen dress in front of a harbor. She is smiling and looking up to the left.

Winniebell Xinyu Zong

Project: Chapbooks
Role: Editor
Winniebell Xinyu Zong is a Chinese poet and chapbook editor at Newfound. She was the 2020 Frontier Poetry editorial fellow and a spring 2021 publishing intern at Copper Canyon Press. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of Net, and AWP’s Intro Journals Project, Zong holds an MA from Kansas State University and is an MFA poetry candidate at Cornell University.

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Reviews: Sight Lines

  ‘Sight Lines’ A review by Deborah Bacharach   Arthur Sze, “Sight Lines” Copper Canyon Press, 2019 67 pages, softcover, $16.00   Arthur Sze’s National Book Award winner, “Sight Lines,” leaps between images to ask fundamental questions: where are we…

Poetry: A.D. Lauren-Abunassar

  Reimagining The Interrogation of Betty Hill A.D. Lauren-Abunassar   —After Josh Tvrdy   i. Have you seen him?                                                 I’ve scene-played the whole thing out:                                                 the just-there eclipse,                                                 the pockmarked car. If I had to pick                                                 a favorite dress I’d…

“French Braid”: An Interview with Rennie Ament

Part instruction manual for living, part mourning song and meditation on America, Rennie Ament’s aptly titled chapbook, “French Braid,” weaves stories of being both at home and not at home in the world. The 2018 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize finalist braids lived experiences with the absurd, painting strikingly vivid, arresting scenes that rouse readers’ emotions and intellect. As she writes, “you have to be the explosion you wish to see,” and her poetry is precisely that: an explosion that we all need to see.

Rennie Ament’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, Redivider, Yalobusha Review, minnesota review, The Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2018 Yellowwood Prize in Poetry from Yalobusha Review and a nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She’s also received fellowships from the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in New York City.

Jamie Wagman: I would love to hear a bit about your writing life and your process. What’s influenced your writing? When did you first know you were a writer, and what has your journey as a writer been like? What delights and what scares you most as a writer?

Rennie Ament: Poem-wise, I don’t pay attention to semantics at first. I’ll give myself some kind of formal constraint (a sonnet, “e” the only vowel allowed, words can only come from a specific source text), but mostly I want to play in language and surprise myself. It’s fun to scribble gibberish until something sounds both strange and true.

“Diffusely Yours” by Kate Garklavs Suggests We Are All Connected on an Atomic Level

In the chapbook Diffusely Yours by Kate Garklavs (Bottlecap Press, 2018) each poem is a letter to a person or institution. These poem-letters are playful, absurd and full of private meaning.

The speaker diffuses bits of herself and her very visceral memories to a friend, lover or regular haunt, but it also clear she has absorbed parts of these people and places into herself as well.

Labor Day in a Beach Town and What It Means

I live in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I don’t know what it means. I just got here.

I moved to a shore town to be closer to work during the final crescendo of summer. On an evening walk last month I overheard a child complain to his mother that it was still too hot, even after sundown. She joked, “We’ll have to start vacationing in Alaska.”

I cannot imagine being a person who uses “vacation” as a verb, let alone doing that verb.

Making the Tongue Dry: An Interview with Prose Prize Finalist Jen Soriano

Jen Soriano is a Filipinx-American writer whose work blurs the boundaries between nonfiction, poetry and speculative fiction. Her chapbook “Making the Tongue Dry” was a finalist for the Newfound Prose Prize.  Her lyric essay “A Brief History of her Pain” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her essays have appeared in a number of journals including Waxwing, Pleiades and TAYO Literary Magazine. Jen is an MFA candidate in nonfiction and fiction at the Rainier Writing Workship, and lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, WA with her two favorite boys in the world.

I’m learning to kick that controlling brain to the backseat and just let instinct allow words to tumble onto the page. – Jen Soriano

Eppinger: My first question is about genre. What do you consider the genre of “Making the Tongue Dry” to be? Elliptical prose? Creative Nonfiction? Something else? Alsodoes genre matter to you?

Soriano: Genre definitely matters to me, but not in the conventional sense. I care about the ways genre descriptions can work to help readers understand what they are reading. But I don’t care about genre as a rigid container that writers must fit our writing within.

So, to help readers understand my chapbook I guess I’d describe it as lyric essay and hybrid nonfiction. It’s important to me to name that it’s nonfiction because I’m deliberately trying to capture actuality on the page. Each essay in the chapbook grapples with an aspect of reality as I see it.

Small fires, dulled senses in the short fiction of Andrew Duncan Worthington

The main assertion of collection “A Very Small Forest Fire” by Andrew Duncan Worthington (Bottlecap Press, 2018) seems to be that the ultimate way to undermine capitalism is to be too bored to participate.

“Assertion” may be too strong a word. These 12 short-short stories employ what I suspect is purposefully dull and vague language, creating characters numbed by the constant stimulation of modern American society. Narrators (often unnamed) drift through recreation activities but don’t have any funthey don’t feel much of anything. The sparse language evokes Kerouac, but with a more limited vocabulary.

Deep journeys into the psyche with Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Debut short story collection “White Dancing Elephants” by Chaya Bhuvaneswar (Dzanc Books, forthcoming October 2018 and winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize) plunges readers deep into the psyche of women—largely South Asian women.

Characters have the darkest corners of their minds exposed (through their own admissions or by omniscient narrators) and what comes forth is usually disagreeable. At the same time, well-trodden narratives about immigration are upended regularly.

The main character in “Jagatishwaran” is a woman who refuses to feel gratitude for or awe of a sister who has emigrated to the U.S. “But it’s my sister who’s the smart one, the doctor lady,” she rants to the reader.

“She thinks of us as dull-witted rice eaters waiting for her borrowed Anglo china plates and blue jeans, silk ties and pantyhose, perfume in fish shaped bottles, white linen napkins and forks so we won’t eat with our hands, expensive bolts of brilliant cloth—smelling slightly of glue, precious…”

Deconstruction and Rebirth in the Poetry of Caseyrenée Lopez

Debut poetry collection “the new gods” by Caseyrenée Lopez (Bottlecap Press, 2018) uses rich language to conduct an examination of the body: how bodies are placed within pop culture, how they are valued or derided in society, and how they are the vessels that lead us through love.

You Don’t Understand Bruce Springsteen

I’ll be the first to admit: I grew up in New Jersey not understanding Bruce Springsteen. I heard his songs at home (first on vinyl, then on CD), in the car radio or at sporting events but I never quite understood the appeal. He was my first live concert experience, with my parents when I was 12. I attended dutifully, sang along, but didn’t feel real love in my heart while I chanted “BRUUUUUUCE!”

Only recently have I realized that Springsteen is often misunderstoodmost gravely by his loyal fan base.