Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Good News from Blood Orange Contributors

At Blood Orange Review, we want to celebrate writers, not just for the moment they grace our virtual pages, but for their continued accomplishments. Heather and I are both writers, and we know how much rejection plays a role in the writer’s life.

So, when good things happen to our contributors, past and present, we want to spread the word. Become part of this stellar group by submitting your work or signing up to receive notification of new issues!

We’ll post several good news items each week. Keep up the good work!

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Thomas Lux chose Michelle Bitting’s (Volume 2.3) full length manuscript "Good Friday Kiss" as the winner of the inaugural C & R Press DeNovo First Book Award. It comes out in May 2008. Her chapbook Blue Laws, published last December by Finishing Line Press, was recently nominated this year for a Puschcart.


Doug Ramspect’s poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, has been awarded the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and will be published in the fall of 2008 by BkMk Press. We’re proud to have published his poetry in Blood Orange Review 2.2.


We wanted to share the news about Arthur Saltzman’s newest book. We were pleased to have him be a part of Blood Orange Review 2.3. Check out his short essay, and then check out this book:Solve for X, the fourth collection of creative nonfiction by Arthur Saltzman, demonstrates the writer's continuing effort to expand on the thematic range, lyrical capacities, and imaginative possibilities of the essay in a signature style marked by what Publishers Weekly deemed Saltzman's "riskily mellifluous language."



Eileen Malone was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes: one from Perigee and one from Cezanne's Carrot.


Joel James Davis, whose story appeared in Blood Orange Review Volume 2.4, has been nominated for a Pushcart by redivider for his story "jars."


Brent Fisk has won an honorable mention in Boulevard’s Emerging Poets Contest. His poetry previously appeared in Blood Orange Review Volume 2.5.

Meet the Writers

What can you learn from a writer’s bio? Publication credits and degrees give a skeletal outline of a writer’s movement through the literary world. From these, you can learn about new places to read and publish and discover new resources. But credentials don’t answer the big question: how do they do it? At Blood Orange Review, we ask all our writers what keeps them moving forward, day to day, with their writing. We’ve been inspired by what they’ve said. We hope you’ll take the time to get acquainted with the writer below and an issue from our archive. Don’t skip the bios! They’re worth reading in and of themselves. We’ll be posting answers to our question throughout the month, so come back and read some more.

Meet Sarah Bonifacio from :Blood Orange Review 3.1:

“I’m not even halfway into the writing life, so I know my answer will change as I mature. Needing to believe Jorge Luis Borges’s claim that 'in this world, beauty is so common' drives me to continue writing poems the way I do, to write them persistently and with the urge to make the everyday and oft-neglected epiphanic. I dwell in surroundings plainer than I’d wish them to be. I don’t know how I’d survive without the sensitivity to respond, by poem, to the small and the sudden: the glint in a fish’s eye, muffled shards of dialogue at a street corner, those 'certain slants of light' that Dickinson spoke of. To write about such moments is to try renewing them; it’s to plead them to be beautiful, to push myself to see them as so for I must see them as so if I’m to keep living. Should poem after poem be completed without my pursuit having ended, this is so only because it is transience itself—to which all human lives are subject, that which is common to us all—that I strive to contain, in the way Odysseus grappled with Proteus. Joyce accomplished this feat in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. I want to do the same. Only when I do would I quit writing, and be through with life too.”

Meet Ace Boggess from Blood Orange Review 1.2:

“I write poetry to take photographs. When crafting verse, I’m trying to capture an image, a scene or an idea that’s important to me at the time. My poetry books are my photo albums. Through them I can relive those parts of my past and, if I’ve done my job well, share them with others in a way that they can see what I’ve seen or know and understand what was on my mind at a particular moment in time. My notebook is the only camera I have, so if I stopped writing poems, I’d have no tether left to my past.”