New Essays & Columns
Rumpus Original Column Voices on Addiction: "If You Give" by Vince Granata
“There are lots of ways to miss someone, and in the nine years since my mother died, I’ve collected quite a few.”
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Interviews & Reviews
Celeste Lipkes interviews April Gibson about The Span of a Small Forever
“It all came back to my illness: the way that I see life, my relationships with people, my self-image, how I encounter systems.”
Hannah Jansen reviews Kimberly King Parson's We Were the Universe
“It’s easy to overuse the word and concept of light in writing, but in Parsons’s work, it crackles, adds texture, illuminates a kind of sticky darkness.”
Barrett Bowlin interviews Maria Bamford about Sure, I'll Join Your Cult
“You could write about this weird thing, and people who like to read will be down to find out about this different world.”
Kelly Sundberg interviews Sejal Shah about How to Make Your Mother Cry
“The stories were conversations I was having with myself and with my characters. There’s a way, when you are really in it...where an outside reader drops away.” |
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| Announcing Our New Virtual Event Series!
Starting with . . .
Queer Coming of Age: Personal Narratives of Belonging, Identity, and Finding Community |
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 | Join us Sunday, June 23 at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST for a conversation and Q&A with writers Greg Mania (author of Born to be Public), Jacob Tobia (author of Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story), Jen Winston (author of Greedy: Notes From a Bisexual Who Wants too Much), and Jason Yamas (author of Tweaker World). Co-hosted by Greg Mania and Reema Zaman and presented by The Rumpus.
These four authors will share their experience crafting personal experiences into public narratives. They’ll contribute their insights on writing distinctly queer stories, finding an audience, and (most importantly) finding a creative community. Suggested donation of $20. Pay what you can, no one turned away due to lack of funds. All proceeds after processing fees will help keep The Rumpus going. As an independent volunteer-run lit and culture magazine, the vast majority of the magazine’s funding comes from reader support. This event is co-hosted and organized by Rumpus board member, Reema Zaman. This is the first in a series of monthly author and publishing industry conversations with people we admire and hope to learn from. Themes and topics will vary widely, but all events will connect to our mission of being a platform for risk-taking work and bringing historically underrepresented voices into the literary conversation. |
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| Do you want to establish a regular writing routine? |
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We recently launched a new Rumpus offering: The Writer's Welcome Kit, a 5-week asynchronous online course to establish your regular writing practice. This course was created by author and writing coach Paulette Perhach specifically for writers who are looking for a starting point as they begin to practice their craft in an intentional way. *Perhach's book, Welcome to the Writer's Life, was published in 2018 by Sasquatch Books / Penguin Random House and was selected as one of Poets & Writers' Best Books for Writers.
If you're a beginning writer in any genre who would like guidance on establishing a dedicated writing practice OR any writer who wants to commit to an intentional routine, this course was built for you.
Ready to start? |
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“The following books offer different views into types of leaving: people, places, religions, and versions of themselves. In some of these stories, people return; in others, the narrators make a break for good. What is clear through all of these books is that leaving is just the ending of one narrative arc, necessary for another to begin.”
— Kelly McMasters, What to Read When You Want to Leave |
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Interested in volunteering with The Rumpus? Applications are now open for two roles. We are looking to expand our book reviews teams, and we'll be bringing on two new prose and two new poetry book reviews editors soon.
If you're interested in joining our team, learn more about the position and apply at the links above! We're accepting applications now through TODAY, Friday May 31. |
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 | Join The Rumpus on Instagram Live for Small Press Sunday with Janet Rodriguez! Small Press Sunday is a look inside the presses who make your favorite books. Our next press is Noemi Press with co-publisher Suzi F. Garcia!
Noemi Press is a 501(c)(3) independent non-profit publisher committed to publishing innovative writing. In addition to titles in poetry and prose, we also feature several imprints including Akrilica, a series of vanguard Latinx writing, and Infidel Poetics, short works of contemporary poetics addressing the overlap between poetry, politics and identity.
Make sure to follow The Rumpus on Instagram and tune in on 6/2 at 3:30 PST / 6:30 EST. to join the conversation. |
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| Letters in the Mail (from authors!) |
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Letters in the Mail from authors is a Rumpus subscription in which you receive an actual, postmarked letter from one of our favorite writers in your IRL mailbox twice a month. All letters are non-promotional, include a creative prompt, and have a return mailing address in case you'd like to write the author back!
Up next, an author letter from . . .
June 1: Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. A recipient of multiple fellowships, including a Pushcart Prize. He holds an MFA from University of Mississippi. His writing appears in New York Times Magazine, POETRY, Marvel Comics, and the Atlantic. Julian is the author of Refuse (Pitt, 2018), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, The Pilar Ramirez Duet (Holt Books for Young Readers), The Chainbreakers (HBYR, 2024) and The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: Essays (Bold Type Books, 2024). He can be found at @JulianThePoet and on his website JulianDavidRandall.com. Subscribe by TODAY, May 31! |
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| Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
by CAConrad x Wave Books |
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For our September 2023 - August 2024 selections (and possibly beyond!), we’ll focus on great new poetry collections AND hear from the indie publishers behind the books with our new Indie x Indie Poetry Book Club format!
Join by midnight June 15, to receive our JULY Poetry Book Club pick Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return by CAConrad and join our subscriber-only conversation with author CAConrad, a Rumpus editor, and a representative from Wave Books.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of July and you'll also be invited to an exclusive online video discussion with the book's author + the author's editor + a Rumpus Editor and fellow book club members. Subscribers are encouraged to join in the chat with their questions before and during the conversations. These will take place on the Rumpus' Crowdcast channel and will remain available to watch for FREE with your Member code anytime after.
About JULY's Poetry Book Club Selection: Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad's Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us. Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.
About the author:
CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest books are Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return and AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration. The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. With Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, they co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. In 2022 Augusto Cascales made a film of their play The Obituary Show. They recently had their first solo exhibition at Fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled "13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return." They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.
About the Press:
Wave Books is an independent poetry press based in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to publishing poetry and books by poets.
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| We are now accepting submissions for The Rumpus’s Adoptee-themed month: Letters to Adoption. Letters are being accepted in four categories: letters to birth mothers, letters to birth fathers, letters to my younger self, and letters to adoptive parents. Submissions open now until TODAY, May 31 at 11:59 pm EST. Submit here.
Two new columns, Collaborative Criticism and Close Reads are now open year-round!
Our new column Parallel Practice is open again for submissions. Read the call here before submitting.
We are open for Funny Women and Prose and Poetry Book Reviews submissions year-round.
(Reminder, annual Rumpus Members can submit their work in any genre all year long.) |
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Reader Support Keeps The Rumpus Going! |
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Founded in 2009 in San Francisco, CA and now based in Asheville, NC with readers and editors all over the US and abroad, The Rumpusis one of the longest-running independent online literary and culture magazines. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Often, we are an emerging writer's first notable publication, which is something we’re really proud of. We believe that literature builds community—and if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Our Membership and subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, help keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability.
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