qarrtsiluni

Thanks to all the qarrtsiluni readers and issue editors that offered suggestions on nominees for the Pushcart Prize this year. As usual, it was virtually impossible to settle on just six items, but here’s our list:

“Between Us and the Slow Fall” by Susan Elbe

“Anna Atkins” by Iris Law

“I Heard Their Wings Like the Sound of Many Waters” by Marly Youmans

“Suspension Bridge” by Kenneth Pobo

“Qavak Songs” translated by Nancy Campbell

“My Cellies” by John Purugganan

Our congratulations and gratitute to the authors.

Once again we are soliciting suggestions from readers on our nominations for this year’s Pushcart Prize. Any work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, including translation, that has appeared in qarrtsiluni since January 1 would be eligible, so the Translation and Imprisonment issues, the chapbook series, and the currently unfolding Worship issue. Remember to hit the “Older entries” link at the bottom of each page to navigate through an issue. Grab permalinks by clicking on the titles.

Please leave suggestions in the comment thread for this post, or mail us: qarrtsiluni [at] gmail [dot] com, up to six nominations per commenter. And tell us why. We are much more likely to be swayed by articulate arguments and personal reactions than by numbers of “votes”; this isn’t a popularity contest. Please don’t nominate your own works, or tell all your friends to nominate them for you! Aside from that, anyone is welcome to make suggestions, including first-time readers, but we will give greater weight to suggestions from those who regularly comment here, indicating a long-term engagement with the magazine.

We need to print out and mail in our nominations no later than December 1, so we’ll be making our final decision before the end of the month. We realize there’s very little chance that nominations from a journal as obscure as qarrtsiluni will make it into the anthology, but given that a mere nomination is regarded by many writers as something of an honor, we like to try and make that nomination as meaningful as possible.

—Dave and Beth

UPDATE (12/1): Here are our six nominations. Thanks to everyone who left comments and emailed suggestions.

“24” by Barbara Young (New Classics issue)

“Tantric” by Clayton Michaels (Watermark)

“Relics” by Sherry Chandler (Health issue)

“Sea of Stars” by Dick Jones (The Crowd issue)

“So soft his neck, so distant from the thought of stone” by Jee Leong Koh (New Classics issue)

“Apart” by Aline Soules (Chapbook Finalists 2010; originally published in The Houston Literary Review, May 2009)

***

Once again we are soliciting suggestions from readers on our nominations for this year’s Pushcart Prize. (See last year’s post for more on our thinking about this.) Any work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry that has appeared in qarrtsiluni since January 1 would be eligible: basically, the Health and New Classics issues, the chapbook series, and the currently unfolding Crowd issue. Remember to hit the “Older entries” link at the bottom of each page to navigate through an issue. Grab permalinks by clicking on the titles.

Please leave suggestions in the comment thread for this post (or if you’re shy, email us: qarrtsiluni [at] gmail [dot] com), up to six nominations per commenter. And tell us why. We are much more likely to be swayed by articulate arguments and personal reactions than by numbers of “votes”; this isn’t a popularity contest. Please don’t nominate your own works, or tell all your friends to nominate them for you! Aside from that, anyone is welcome to make suggestions, including first-time readers, but we will give greater weight to suggestions from those who regularly comment here, indicating a long-term engagement with the magazine.

We need to print out and mail in our nominations no later than December 1, so we’ll be making our final decision before the end of the month, and will announce the nominations by an update to this post, as before. In the meantime, we’d really appreciate your help in combing through the archives. Incidentally, last year, although none of our six nominations made the anthology, one of them was also later nominated by one of Pushcart’s official advisors (we don’t know who): Khadija Anderson’s poem “Islam for Americans.” It felt a bit like a vindication of our crowd-sourcing approach.

—Beth and Dave

UPDATE (11/30): Here are our six nominations. Thanks to everyone who left comments and emailed suggestions.

“Miracle Fish,” by Karla Huston and Cathryn Cofell

“Patty-Cake,” by Karen Stromberg

“Economy of the Untameable,” by Jane Rice

“Economies,” by Monica Raymond

“Some Yellow Tulips,” by Pamela Johnson Parker

“Islam for Americans,” by Khadija Anderson

***

In the spirit of rewarding a few of our otherwise unpaid authors for the use of their work, this year we thought we’d start sending in nominations for the Pushcart Prize. International readers or those outside the North American small press literary scene might be unaware of it, but in many circles the Pushcart is so prestigious that a mere nomination is considered worthy of mention in an author’s bio — as if the highly subjective and arbitrary selections of a couple of yahoos like us says anything meaningful.

But then we thought: why not ask qarrtsiluni readers to help find our six nominations? That seems like one way to make them a bit more meaningful. Any work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry that has appeared in qarrtsiluni since January 1 would be eligible (here are the minimal guidelines), which encompasses the Mutating the Signature and Economy issues as well as the currently unfolding Words of Power. Remember to hit the “Older entries” link at the bottom of each page to navigate through an issue. Grab permalinks by clicking on the titles.

Please leave suggestions in the comment thread for this post (or if you’re shy, email us: qarrtsiluni [at] gmail [dot] com), up to six nominations per commenter. And tell us why. We are much more likely to be swayed by articulate arguments and personal reactions than by numbers of “votes”; this isn’t a popularity contest. Please don’t nominate your own works! Aside from that, anyone is welcome to make suggestions, including first-time readers, but we will probably give somewhat greater weight to suggestions from those who regularly comment here, indicating a long-term engagement with the magazine.

We need to print out and mail in our nominations no later than December 1, so we’ll be making our final decision before the end of the month, and will announce the nominations by an update to this post. In the meantime, we’d really appreciate your help in combing through the archives.

—Beth and Dave