New Humboldt Environmental Poetry Prize

The Florida Review is pleased to announce a new award focused on poetry with environmental themes and concerns. An anonymous donor is providing funding for the new Humboldt Poetry Prize in honor of Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). A winner and two runners-up will be chosen each year from work published in the previous year in The Florida Review and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. Each winner will receive an award of $500, and each runner-up $250.

 

2019-2020 Recipients

We are also pleased to announce our first-ever winner and runners-up for the Humboldt Poetry Prize:

  • Bethany Schultz Hurst for “Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Handle Them,” winner (TFR 43.2, Fall 2019)
  • Doug Ramspeck for “Long Marriage (Parable of the Skull),” runner-up (TFR 43.2, Fall 2019)
  • Jacqui Zeng for “Natural Order,” runner-up (Aquifer 25 February 2019)

Bethany Schultz Hurst.     Doug Ramspeck.     Jacqui Zeng by Milton Velez Photography.

This year’s judge was David Keplinger, author of six collections of poetry; winner of Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Cavafy prizes; the Colorado Book and Emily Dickinson awards; recipient of two NEA fellowships; and Professor of English at American University. About the winning poem, he had the following to say:

Bethany Schultz Hurst’s exquisite response to an 1888 colonialist manual on the “management” of captured animals uses the erasure form in concert with the rigor and formal limitations of the sonnet to study the mistreatment, ailments, and murder (“with an iron bar a sharp and heavy blow”) of the monkey transplanted from its natural environment into a human menagerie, and whose existence there plays out like some profane translation of a sacred text. In the final sonnet in this sequence, the skinning and posturing of the dead conclude with the instruction to “Keep him in full light.” What a brilliant use of artifice to reverse that spell; to bring atrocity to light; to classify the crimes of colonialism; to speak out against what Empire has enacted in the name of power and spectacle.

 

The Humboldt Poetry Prize

Each year, one winner and two runners-up will be chosen from work published in The Florida Review and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online during the previous calendar year. Candidates will be identified from all categories of works published—those that stem from general and contest submissions, as well as from solicited work that we have published.

The Florida Review was chosen by the donor to administer the Humboldt Poetry Prize due to our long-standing commitment to and appreciation of poetry along environmental themes. We hope that the existence of the prize will encourage even more and stronger submissions of such work, but we chose not to create a separate submissions category for it because we hope not to segregate such submissions. Writers should feel free to identify in their cover letters whether they believe their work includes an environmental component. But all work must first be considered alongside our other submissions and published in the journal before it will be considered for the Humboldt Poetry Prize. Poems will be selected based on the criteria listed above, and an external judge will be selected by the editors to make final decisions.

Criteria set for the prize include:

  • Probing the capabilities and needs of wild animals and challenging their exploitation;
  • Exploring wild animal/human relationships;
  • Experimenting with and imagining the subjective life of wild animals;
  • Interrogating the poetic use of animals simply as metaphors;
  • Investigating natural processes, biospheres, and their complexity; and/or
  • Pondering awe in the face of nature and/or how to inspire such awe.

Each winner will receive an award of $500; each runner-up an award of $250. In addition, with each poet’s permission (or that of any subsequent book publisher), the poem will be reprinted. Works originally published in Aquifer will be reprinted in the print Florida Review, and vice versa.

 

Alexander von Humboldt 

The new prize commemorates the legacy of the visionary German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Humboldt’s fascination with natural processes started in childhood, when he earned the nickname “the little apothecary” and continued throughout a fifty-year career as a famous public figure, in which he investigated the fields of botany, minerology, geology, isothermal mapping, meteorology, and geodetic and geomagnetic measurement. During the Napoleonic Wars, he set off to explore Central and South America and, with a French botanist, covered 6,000 miles by foot, horseback, and canoe, studying astronomy, topography, flora and fauna, and the Earth’s geomagnetic field and barometric pressure, as well as mapping 1,700 miles of the Orinoco River. They measured the river phenomenon now known as the Humboldt (or Peru) Current.

Humboldt also succeeded in marrying science and aesthetics, promoting the belief that every element of nature is dynamic and interconnected, and that these forces should be apprehended with both head and heart. In thirty volumes published during his lifetime—and filled with detailed illustrations and lyrical descriptions—Humboldt taught that nature, properly understood, stimulates the imagination as well as the intellect and is a source of beauty and consolation. His close friend Goethe noted that “with an aesthetic breeze” Humboldt lit science in a “bright flame.”

As the first scientist to identify climate zones and view the Earth’s ecology as interconnected and ever-changing, Humboldt anticipated the deleterious impact on wildlife and the biosphere, and he frequently decried the careless environmental destruction of Europe in the colonies. Even as his fame and wealth diminished later in life, Humboldt assisted many young scientists in embarking on their careers. References to his ideas appear hundreds of times in Charles Darwin’s writings, and he profoundly influenced John Muir and generations of conservationists and nature writers.

We at The Florida Review hope to continue to encourage those writers concerned with the human relationship with our planet and with the beauty and power inherent in the Earth in the tradition of the writing of Alexander von Humboldt.

Alexander von Humboldt as painted by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, c. 1860.

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Meek Awards for 2018!

We’re happy to announce the winners of our Meek Awards for the 2018 publication year. Congratulations to all of these artists and writers whose work was chosen from among all the work we publish from general submissions–these works are not from contests or solicitations, but straight out of the “slush pile,” and they represent some of the finest work we published last year. We’re thrilled to be able to compensate some of our writers through a generous donation. This year’s winner are:

Poetry—Alana de Hinojosa, “Sombras nada mas” (42.2)

Fiction—Janelle Garcia, “A Warning” (Aquifer)

Creative Nonfiction—Christopher Citro, “Root That Mountain” (42.2)

Graphic Narrative—Peter Witte, “After Kafka” (Aquifer)

Digital Media—Mark Keats, “Surnames” (Aquifer)

Short Film—Gloria Chung, “MEMORY  VI: An Ostrich’s Eye Is Bigger Than Its Brain” (Aquifer)

Visual Art—Michael Hower, “Redemption” (Aquifer)

We’re publishing more great work all the time, and we extend our appreciation to all of our writers and submitters. Keep up the great work!

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The Meek Awards NEW at TFR

We’re a bit late in getting this news on the website, but we’re proud to announce that a new donor has made it possible for us to select one author or artist (or to split the award between two) in each of our publication categories each year. These writers and artists are some of those who come to us through general submissions rather than contests or other means. At The Florida Review, we recognize that writers deserve to be paid for their work, and, though it remains financially impossible for us to provide remuneration for every writer and artist, we are happy that now every writer who submits to The Florida Review and Aquifer has at least the possibility.

For the inaugural 2017 year, we selected the following writers and artists for this special recognition. They represent the kind of work we love to publish at The Florida Review and Aquifer–both personally moving and aware of the wider world.

  • Esteban Rodriguez (“Roadside,” 41.2) and Sherrie Fernandez-Williams (“the crossing,” Aquifer) for poetry
  • Laura Farnsworth (“Salvio: A Short Story,” Aquifer) for fiction
  • Re’Lynn Hansen (“The Han Gan,” 41.1) for nonfiction [also recipient of recognition as a Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2018]
  • Aubrey Hirsch (“The Language of Trauma,” 41.1) for graphic narrative
  • Hannah Kaplan (“Dear Doctor,” Aquifer) for digital/electronic story
  • Jave Yoshimoto (“Meditation on the Purpose of Art Making,” Aquifer) for visual art

Congratulations to these and all of the other wonderful writers and artists we publish. In 2018, we will be adding a winner in the short film category as well, and look for that announcement sooner than November!

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2018 Pushcart Nominations

Please join us in celebrating the following writers and their work, which we’ve nominated for the Pushcart Prize this year. It’s always hard to choose from all the excellent work we are honored to publish, but these stood out to us for their fresh insights into the current social moment in which we live.

  • Renée Branum, “Bolt” (42.1, winner of our 2016 Editors’ Award in Nonfiction)
  • Natalie Disney, “Blind Field” (42.1, fiction)
  • Tony Hoagland, “Feeling Generous” (42.1, poetry)
  • Brian Kearney, “American Jumble 2” (42.2, graphic narrative)
  • Raven Leilani, “The Void Witch” (Aquifer, fiction)
  • Robert Wrigley, “Horses” (42.1, poetry)
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Hispanic Heritage Month in Aquifer

This fall, The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online celebrate Latinx / Latina / Latino writers. Starting September 15, and running through October 15, we will be featuring numerous Latinx authors in Aquifer, and later this fall we will include a special section in 42.2 of the print Florida Review as well.

Starting with issue 40.2, we have focused a special section of each fall print Florida Review on an issue of social relevance. After the Pulse tragedy in 2016, many literary magazines and other media outlets focused attention on the issue, and we felt that we needed to offer a closer-to-home perspective to that national dialog. We featured six pieces of writing dedicated to the impact of the event.

After that special feature, we had the opportunity to interview distinguished author Ana Castillo about her book Black Dove, a memoir partly about her son being incarcerated for theft. Between Castillo’s work, a plenitude of submissions from prisoners and former prisoners across the country, and submissions by family and friends of prisoners, a themed section for Fall 2017 (41.2) emerged. The number of people being incarcerated in the US is an important social issue, and we were able to highlight it in seven writers’ moving literary responses.

This year, in Aquifer‘s second year, we decided to connect online and print themes and to continue to raise awareness of social issues. At The Florida Review and Aquifer, we are acutely aware of the VIDA count, which documents discrimination against women in the publishing world and sometimes also focuses on writers of color. At The Florida Review and Aquifer, we are dedicated to being part of the solution to gender and racial inequity.

Nicole Oquendo, special Latinx feature editor, notes, “As editors, we have a responsibility to make time to highlight a diverse range of voices.” As our former creative nonfiction editor, Nicole agreed to come back and help put together this celebration of Latinx authors, especially early and mid-career writers who deserve more recognition.

“There is so much exciting new work going on, and Latinx writers are adding to both the Florida and the national literary scene,” comments editor-in-chief Lisa Roney.

This is the fiftieth anniversary of Hispanic Heritage Month, and we are thrilled that this will be our first Aquifer special feature. Between the Aquifer feature this month and the authors included in 42.2 later this fall, we will have the privilege of sharing the work of more than forty Latinx / Latina/ Latino writers and several artists.

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Michael Chin Wins Leiby Chapbook Contest

The Florida Review is pleased to announce the winner of the 2017-2018 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award: Michael Chin, for his collection of flash fiction Autopsy and Everything After, which will be published early in 2019. As noted by final contest judge Juan Martinez:

There is so much pathos and beauty and good humor in these pieces. I loved spending time with these people, how they surprised me, how much I learned about the itinerant wrestling world and how that world contains all of ours—our dead fathers, our lost exes, our fears and hopes.

Michael Chin is an alumnus of the Oregon State University MFA program. He has previously published two hybrid chapbooks, Distance Traveled with Bent Window Books and The Leo Burke Finish with Gimmick Press, and is a contributing editor for Moss.

In addition, we would like to recognize two finalists whose work we hope to excerpt in The Florida Review next spring: Ahsa Dore for Disfigure Studies and Ethel Smith for We Ready.

As Martinez noted about these two submissions:

Disfigure Studies is a powerful and intricately constructed creative nonfiction piece that conjures resonances between art, violation, trauma, disability, and beauty. And The X-Men. The work never fails to surprise, even as it builds to an insightful meditation on gender.

The main threads in We Ready are the necessary ones of race in Alabama and the ways in which family and community can uplift us. But this collection of flash nonfiction pieces also skillfully explores the many valences of education: how it is needed, how it can be rewarding, and how its trajectory shifts. In addition, it’s a joy to spend time with some truly memorable people in these pages—Miss Pearl, the Prell sisters, and the undergrads popping up in the writer’s office.

We thank all of the many wonderful writers who submitted work last year and who made our decisions so difficult. This year’s contest is now open, and we hope to hear from many of you and many more writers again in support of the publication of prose and graphic narrative work of a certain length that doesn’t fit either bite-size or big-book size.

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Congratulations to Our 2018 Editors’ Awards Winners!

We’re proud to announce the 2018 Editors’ Awards. We continue to be astonished by the work of the many fine writers who submit. This year’s winners and finalists are:

Poetry Winner
Amanda Hawkins, “/in the year of salt & death/” and “Through High Desert to the Path of Totality”

Poetry Finalists
Lillo Way, “Appropriation”
Dylan Weir, “Bottle Rocket”

Fiction Winner
Mi-Kyung Shin, “Mouth-Matching”

Fiction Finalists
Pankaj Challa, “The Bridge”
Corey Flintoff, “Rope Dancers”

Nonfiction Winner
Katy Shay, “Coleoptera”

Nonfiction Finalists
Megan Baxter, “Hunger”
Richard Froude, “Some Trees”

In addition, we had ten semi-finalists, some of whom we will also be publishing. We hope to post a profile on each winner and finalist here and in social media as the months progress to next spring’s publication. Congratulations to these fine writers and all of those who submitted. We hope you will keep continuing to write and submit and support small literary magazines’ existence. Next year’s contest will open in January.

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Dana Roeser Wins Wilder Prize

Combining mea culpa and congratulations, we would like to acknowledge that we did not include Dana Roeser’s full contributor’s note in 42.1. Our apologies, but this allows us to celebrate here her latest accomplishment in winning the Wilder Prize. Dana was a finalist for our 2016 Editors’ Award in Poetry with her magnificent “Late July.”

Dana Roeser’s fourth book, All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, won the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press and will be published in Spring 2019. She is also the author of The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed, recipient of the Juniper Prize, as well as Beautiful Motion and In the Truth Room, both winners of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.  Recent poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Crazyhorse, Poetry, Diode, Cimarron Review, and Seneca Review.  She is the recipient of a 2018 Pushcart Prize. She recently contributed a book review of Elizabeth Powell’s Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter to Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.

Purchase your copy of 42.1 here.

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Aquifer Is Firecracker Award Finalist!

We’re pleased to announce that Aquifer: The Florida Review Online has been named a finalist in the Best Debut Magazine category of the Firecracker Awards. These awards are sponsored each year by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) to support and celebrate independent publishing. Thanks to CLMP and judges for recognizing our work. And thanks to all of our authors and editors who have contributed so much great work over Aquifer‘s first fifteen months!

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2017 Editors’ Awards Are Here!

Before Hurricane Irma descends, we’d like to announce the winners of the 2017 Editors’ Awards. Thanks to the many fine writers who submitted their work and made our choices oh, so difficult. This year’s winners and finalists are:

Poetry Winner
Allison Adair, “City Life” and “Hitching”

Poetry Finalists
Dana Roeser, “Late July”
Rebecca Morgan Frank, “Gerbert of Aurillac and the Magic Eightball”

Fiction Winner
Eliza Robertson, “Louise McKinney Correctional Center for Women”

Fiction Finalists
Mike Alberti, “Two Floods”
Lenore Hart, “Thirteen Ways of Living with a Wolf”

Nonfiction Winner
Renee Branum, “Bolt”

We hope to publish a profile on each winner and finalist here and in social media as the months progress to next spring’s publication. Congratulations to these fine writers. Next year’s contest will open in January.

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