New Poetry & Columns
Rumpus Original Fiction: "Let All Our Ghosts Depart" by Meghana Mysore
"She started shaking and turned onto her side on the cot. The cot creaked. I placed my hand on her forehead and panicked."
Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Jon Jon Moore Palacios
"On winter hazel trees—pale, grounded suns that tolerate neglect, you build your hollow worlds, / each one called a gall. Your life, I think, is sucking? Sweet."
Rumpus Original Column Voices on Addition: "Searching For My Mother's Ocean" by Nilsa Ada Rivera
"At some point, I realize I am alone. I search for my mother while still swinging, but I don’t see where she’s gone. I turn to look behind me and lose my grip." |
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Interviews & Reviews
Lauren C. Johnson interviews Alejandro Varela about The People Who Report More Stress
"We don’t have enough frank, common sense conversations about our inequities or our plans for leveling society in a way that makes us all better and healthier."
Teju Cole's Tremor, reviewed by Thomas Larson
"Cole has taken the tragedy of a transcontinental survivalist to spin a narrative that transcends the conventional perimeters of a novel."
Reena Shah interviews Megan Kamalei Kakimoto about Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare
"I hope we can champion the full range of Hawaiian stories. Our stories matter and that’s important to me."
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What to Read When You're Healing
"I, like Lucille Clifton, don’t care if people believe in the potential for poetry to cultivate healing. What I do care about is what grows despite belief. The creation of something that can resist and heal simultaneously. I care about the capacity of language to revive and change whoever engages with it. It’s in the following texts that I see that happening, outside of genre, outside of sheer belief, and very much inside possibility."
—Tatiana Johnson-Boria |
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Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
Auction by Quan Barry x Pitt Poetry Series |
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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 November 15th, to receive our December Poetry Book Club pick Auction by Quan Barry and join our subsciber-only conversation with author Quan Barry, Nancy Krygowski, member of the Pitt Poetry Series interim editorial committee, and Brian Spears, Rumpus Poetry Editor.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of October 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 subscribers for 1 month after they take place.
About November's Poetry Book Club selection: In Auction, her first poetry collection in eight years, the poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry travels the globe in her signature quest into the existential nature of experience. These poems explore the inner landscapes of both the human and animal realms, revealing them to be points along the same spectrum.
“Barry risks the lurid, and the knowing, but comes out more like a prophet, overwhelmed—sometimes sublimely so—by the first- and second-hand truths she must convey.” —Publisher's Weekly
About December's featured indie press: The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They also sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognizes the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition. |
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| Interested in advertising in The Rumpus e-newsletter or on therumpus.net? Contact Monica at ads@therumpus.net. |
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| PORTLAND, OR: November 2, 2023
ROSE CITY BOOK PUB
Doors open at 6:30 pm, readings begin at 7:15 pm PDT
Join Curbstone Books and The Rumpus for an inspiring evening of readings featuring authors Omar El Akkad, Jennifer Fliss, Elisa Gonzalez, Perry Janes, Sebastián Páramo, and Jane Wong. Hosted by Rumpus Editors-at-large Marisa Siegel and Marissa Korbel. This event is open to the public and is an official Portland Book Festival 2023 Cover to Cover event. This event is pay-what-you-can. Suggested $15-$20 / donation. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds. All proceeds will be split evenly between the 6 readers and 2 host organizations (The Rumpus & Curbstone) to help with costs related to organizing and preforming at this event. Please RSVP to secure your spot. |
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| ONLINE: November 16
RUMPUS CROWDCAST CHANNEL
5 PM PST / 8 PM EST
Join The Rumpus and Kitchen Table Literary Arts on November 16 at 5pm PST / 8pm EST on The Rumpus's Crowdcast channel for an evening of powerful readings by Rumpus Voices on Addiction contributors Nilsa Ada Rivera, Iris (Yi Youn) Kim, Jasmin Lankford, Vanessa Mártir, and Heather Stokes. This event is curated and hosted by Kitchen Table Literary Arts Founder Sheree Greer and Kelly Thompson, The Rumpus's Voices on Addiction Editor. This event will celebrate the collaboration between our two organizations and our effort to increase the visibility of women writers of color and their stories across the spectrum of addiction.
Suggested donation of $20. Pay what you can (including $0 if you need to), no one turned away due to lack of funds. Proceeds will be divided equally between the 2 host organizations---Kitchen Table Literary Arts and The Rumpus. |
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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, author letters from . . .
November 1: Daniel Gumbiner’s first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award and a finalist for the California Book Awards. His 2nd novel, Fire in the Canyon, was just released by Astra House in early Oct. He is the Editor of The Believer and a 2022–23 Hermitage Fellow and lives in Oakland, CA. (subscribe by October 31)
November 15: Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the speculative memoir The Night Parade (illustrated by her sister Cori Nakamura Lin), which will be published on October 24, 2023 by Mariner Books / HarperCollins. Her work interrogates mythology, monstrosity, madness, and motherhood, and is influenced by Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan folklore. (subscribe by November 14) |
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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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