Congratulations to our contributors Massoud Hayoun and Becky Hagenston, whose essay and story were selected as Notable Mentions in the 2020 Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories respectively. And another shout out to TSR’s associate editor, Vanessa Cuti, who also received a mention for her short story, which appeared in the Cimarron Review.
Read MoreWe have some news to share: We’ve made the difficult decision to delay the Winter/Spring 2021 issue of The Southampton Review in favor of a single print issue for the 2021 year, which will be the Summer/Fall issue, due out in May.
Our university has faced significant financial challenges in recent months, and The Southampton Review, along with many other Stony Brook University programs, has stepped up to share the burden. Rather than consider a sacrifice to quality, we have concluded that a delay for one publishing cycle was the safest path forward.
In the meantime, we’re excited to give you a preview of the Summer/Fall 2021 issue in the coming weeks and months as we publish a selection of work from contributors. Follow us on our social media accounts for updates, or visit TSR Online for the latest posts.
Over the past several months, we’ve been thinking about what it means to be part of a community. By making the Summer/Fall 2020 issue available for free as a downloadable PDF, we sought to broaden access to The Southampton Review and to the writers and artists we publish. But this was just the first step.
We invite you to visit our new Resources page, where we’ll be making content available in support of editorial transparency and inclusivity. Not only do we pull back the curtain about our editorial process, but the page will feature flash interviews with the editors of other literary journals discussing what they look for in submissions and offering advice about everything from formatting to whether or not they prefer a humorous cover letter.
Our next reading period begins January 1—we hope you’ll consider submitting to us and the other wonderful journals we’ll be featuring.
—The Editors
Read MoreWe're so excited for Tara Isabel Zambrano's debut short story collection, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations! Tara won our Short Short Fiction contest in 2019 with the amazing "New Old," and we can't wait to dig into this collection of short fiction.
As the spaceship crash lands in our backyard,' matter-of-factly begins one story in Tara Isabel Zambrano’s sexy, strangeDeath, Desire, and Other Destinations: this collection is likewise an otherworldly force, with startling impact.Lesbians have destination weddings on the moon, hearts leap from bodies, dead girls share cigarettes while contemplating their lost lives, women suffer temporary, sex-induced blindness, lovers swallow each other whole, harem girls kill their master’s enemies with poisonous kisses. This is a vivid, wild, captivating book.
—Kim Magowan, author of UNDOING and THE LIGHT SOURCE
Death Desire, and Other Destinations explores the rocky terrain of relationships and their fault lines, and unearths the boundaries between love, longing, and loss. Both real and surreal, lyrical and magical, sci-fi and speculative, these small stories shine a light in the darkness of seeking a human connection across space and time.
Check it out September 15 from Okay Donkey.
Read MoreJudge Prageeta Sharma’s remarks on when the signals come home by Jordan Franklin:
The first thing that greeted me was the song of the rain/against the hospital windows
The first thing that greeted me when I read this stunning collection was the power of polyphonic verse here, so many voices and ranges: poems about family narrated with indelible soundtracks, deep building emotion, and with added bonus tracks structuring the poignant and perceptual throughout. I simply adore how music and place are deeply entwined, and the dedications and references create such a fierce expanse of scope and pitch making these poems a veritable collection of engaged poetics. When the signals come home is full of potent signals, striking sonorous language, and resolute songs to accompany both addresses, dedications, and storytelling of longing, hope, and grief. We are immersed in popular music references from Prince to The Talking Heads in order to amplify the sonic detail and history of times in these poems. The deep ferocity in these poems is rich, particularly in how the speaker manages to address racial inequity, the strife of sickness and death, and the necessity of naming the racialized self in place, possession, poetry and in song.
Read MoreAfter nearly forgetting her first language, Hal Y. Zhang discovered a jagged hole that could not be filled by a second. AMNESIA, her debut poetry chapbook, grasps at the echoes of her mother and sister tongues, 中文 and English. In both subject and form, these poems excavate the personal and the linguistic and map profound shifts in identity to the shape of words and radicals. Find their buried skins, their bitter unfurling, and divine the root forms of their leaves.
Read MoreTSR contributor Denise Prince’s video, “Love, Especially First,” is a lulling, languorous take on the wonders and dangers of falling in love. Like much of her photography, which we featured in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue, the video comes at its subject from a slant perspective. The soothing soundtrack makes this a calming little break in the midst of all the chaos.
Read MoreTSR is more affordable then ever! For $3 receive a link to download an easy-to-navigate PDF of the latest issue.
The titles in the Table of Contents link to the corresponding pieces in the file. Each page has navigation tabs on the bottom and a button that will send you back to the Table of Contents. This makes browsing the issue as easy as flipping through a hard copy.
We want as many people as possible to be able to access all the wonderful writing and art we publish in The Southampton Review. Each issue, we select a few pieces to appear online. But the digital download is an affordable way to read the entire issue.
Read MorePoems from TSR contributors Jeffrey McDaniel and Sharon Olds has been selected for the Best American Poetry 2019 Anthology by editor and TSR contributor Major Jackson.
Jeffrey McDaniel’s poem "Bio From a Parallel World" was first published in the Winter/Spring 2019 issue of The Southampton Review.
Sharon Olds’ poem "Rasputin Aria" first appeared in the Summer/Fall 2018 issue of The Southampton Review.
Get the anthology here
Read MoreTSR contributor Sonya Bilocerkowycz’s new book of essays, On Our Way Home From the Revolution, will be published by Ohio State University Press this month. Included in the collection is the essay, “I Saw the Sunshine, Melting,” which was first published in the Winter/Spring 2018 issue of The Southampton Review.
Bilocerkowycz’s series of linked essays explores the knotted threads between Ukraine and Russia, as well as the personal ties of the author and her diaspora community in the US.
ON OUR WAY HOME FROM THE REVOLUTION: Reflections on Ukraine
by Sonya Bilocerkowycz
PRE ORDER HERE
You can read “I Saw the Sunshine, Melting” here: https://www.thesouthamptonreview.com/tsronline/2019/5/21/i-saw-the-sunshine-melting
Read More“Part mythology, part personal essay, and part historical fact-finding mission that circles her family’s patriotic devotion to Ukraine, Sonya Bilocerkowycz asks what it means to love a country that struggles to confront its complicated history and wonders what to make of the incomplete narrative she inherited as a child. Tender, probing, and deeply honest.” —Angela Pelster
“A fierce, lyrical book that achieves a rare balance between the burden and beauty of heritage. A powerfully American book even as it travels to post–Cold War Ukraine. The best use of memoir is not a how-I-got-to-be-me story, but a book like this—a courageous effort to pierce the secrets of a vexed political and cultural history.” —Patricia Hampl
The Summer/Fall 2019 issue of The Southampton Review is here! The Southampton Review (TSR) publishes its 25th issue on July 13 and inside readers will find an updated look and work by authors such as Rick Moody ("Hotels of North America"), Lisa Locascio ("Open Me"), Aliki Barnstone (Poet Laureate of Missouri), Katherine Faw ("Ultraluminous"), Scott Cheshire ("High as the Horses’ Bridles"), and Rachel Lyon ("Self-Portrait with Boy").
Read MoreSummer/Fall 2019 contributor and Frank McCourt Memoir Contest second prize winner, Massoud Hayoun, has a debut memoir out this summer.
In When We Were Arabs, Hayoun brings alive the worlds of his grandparents, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle. When We Were Arabs seeks to reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity—and to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends.
PRE-ORDER
WHEN WE WERE ARABS
A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History
by Massoud Hayoun
Pub. Date: June 25, 2019
Massoud Hayoun’s essay, “Urumqi mon amour,” was published in the Summer/Fall 2019 issue of TSR and is available to read here.
Read MoreSummer/Fall 2019 Issue Available for Pre-Order
Featuring work by Rick Moody, Rachel Lyon, Katherine Faw, Aliki Barnstone, Rosebud Ben-oni, Evan Grillon, Massoud Hayoun, and more. Order your copy here.
No More Submission Fees!
That's right—submissions to all general categories of TSR are free! (Previously they cost $3.) It's the fair thing to do and we're thrilled to be able to do it.
Print Pay Rates
We pay our print contributors!*
$75 per poem
$100+ for prose
$100 per page for illustration
$200 per art portfolio
*Visit our GENERAL GUIDELINES page for the full details.
One-Year Subscriptions for TSR Online Contributors
We're excited to offer our TSR Online contributors a one-year subscription to the print edition of the review.
New Reading Periods
Our next reading period opens August 1 and closes September 1. This is for all categories, including the TSR Short Short Fiction Prize.
Volunteer
Have a passion for literature? Ever wondered what it's like to read submissions for a literary journal? You're in luck! TSR is actively seeking readers and art screeners. Email editors@thesouthamptonreview.com for more info or check out our VOLUNTEER page.
New Subscription Prices
$15 for a single issue
$25 for a one-year (2 issues) subscription
$45 for a two-year (4 issues) subscription
Congratulations to the 2019 Frank McCourt Memoir Prize winners, honorable mentions, and finalists, and thank you to all who entered!
Look for “Baab” by Isabel Seabeck and “Urumqi mon amour” by Massoud Hayoun in the forthcoming Summer/Fall 2019 issue of TSR, due out in June.
FIRST PRIZE
Isabel Seabeck “Baab”
SECOND PRIZE
Massoud Hayoun “Urumqi mon amour”
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Connie Kuhns “Girl Parts”
Catalin Partenie “Gudrun”
FINALISTS
Kartika Budhwar
Bill Marsh
Kathy Palko
Ernie Reynolds
N. R. Robinson
Daniel Rousseau
Lisa Smith
Alina Stefanescu
Kate Whitehead
James Winter
Congratulations to Will Finlayson, Elizabeth Stix, and Tara Isabel Zambrano, whose microfiction will be published in the Best Microfiction 2019 anthology. Their short, short stories were winners of the 2018 and 2019 TSR Short, Short Fiction Contest. We’re absolutely thrilled for Will, Elizabeth, and Tara!
Read MoreTSR contributor Jona Colson’s poetry asks the reader to reconsider ordinary life as something curious, even fantastic. In a collection that illuminates both the public and private self, Colson leads us from grief to healing, giving voice to what normally goes unsaid. From fanciful, imaginary dialogues to sorrow over a father's death to a lyric sequence based on Velazquez' Las Meninas, in which the subjects of the famous painting speak, Colson shows himself to be a young poet of astonishing, apparently limitless range—sometimes whimsical, sometimes terrifying, but always contemplative, delicate, and wise.
Jona’s poem, “Snow,” appears in the Winter/Spring issue of TSR.
Twitter: @jcolson01 | jonacolson.com
Read MoreGlass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018) is a queer book of love and skepticism—of figuration, and of the tensions queer women inherit in their relationships to one another and to the culture in which they make their way. In it I hope to suggest something about what we might learn from moments of breakage and failures of resolution about our relationships to meaning itself.
Rae Gouirand is the author of Open Winter (selected by Elaine Equi for the Bellday Prize for Poetry, Bellday Books, 2011) and Must Apple (selected by T.C. Tolbert for the Oro Fino Chapbook Award, Educe Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared recently in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, diode, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. She leads several longrunning workshops in poetry and prose in northern California and online, and lectures in the Department of English at UC-Davis.
Purchase Glass is Glass Water is Water HERE.
Read MoreOn November 16, the Winter/Spring 2019 edition of The Southampton Review was launched at an event at Stony Brook Southampton’s Manhattan Center for Creative Writing and Film.
When fans of the much-beloved publication get their hands on the new issue, they may notice that it comes with a slightly different look and feel than past editions. That’s because the highly regarded literary guide has a new editor-in-chief at the helm, Amagansett resident Emily Smith Gilbert, and, already, she has added her touch to the layout.
Read the full story HERE.
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