Indiana Review is honored to be part of The Creative Process, an exhibition and international educational initiative traveling to leading universities. As part of the exhibition, portraits and interviews with writers and creative thinkers are being published across a network of university and international literary magazines. The Creative Process is including work by Indiana Review contributors in the projection elements of the traveling exhibition.
For each day in April, we Tweeted a debut poetry collection that we love. Here’s the full list, with links where you can purchase the books. Read and enjoy!
1) Rummage by Ife-Chudeni Oputa (Little A, 2017)
“Her poems explore the eternal themes of the human condition—nature, origin, shame, identity, desire, mortality—with sensitivity and specificity. They illuminate and interrogate the ways that her characters inflict and experience pain, ultimately revealing how we must all face our shame in order to grow.”
2) I Know Your Kind by William Brewer (Milkweed Editions, 2017)
“Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, I Know Your Kind is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids.”
We are thrilled to share that prize judge Samrat Upadhyay has selected Fierce Pretty Things by Tom Howard as the winner of the 2018 Blue Light Books Prize! We received a record number of submissions to this year’s prize and are honored to have read so many powerful story collections. Fierce Pretty Things will be published by Indiana University Press in 2018 as part of the Blue Light Books Series, which includes previous prize-winning collections What My Last Man Did by Andrea Lewis and Girl with Death Mask by Jenn Givhan.
Congratulations to Tom Howard, who has won the 2017 Fiction Prize for his short story “Fierce Pretty Things.” Thank you to all who submitted their work and made this year’s selection process so (delightfully) difficult. “Fierce Pretty Things” will appear next winter in IR 40.2.
2017 Fiction Prize Winner:
“Fierce Pretty Things” by Tom Howard
On the winning story, prize judge Caitlin Horrocks says: “Everyone around the narrator, Vardy, thinks they’ve got him figured out: he’s a bad apple, a loose cannon, a violent weirdo to be avoided in the school hallways. Vardy worries they may be right. His unforgettable, alternately hilarious and agonizing first-person narration, pulls the reader into his life and doesn’t let us out. When he starts wondering if there’s a way things could be different—if he could be different—he struggles to even guess what that might look like, let alone how to get there. Surrounded by enemies of his own making, and few allies, Vardy is a blazingly memorable character, his story one that will stick with me.”
The 2018 Blue Light Books Prize for a story collection is open until February 9! For this winter’s Twitter contest, we’re asking you to feature the prize’s namesake. In 280 characters or less, write a story that includes a blue light. Maybe it’s a set piece, maybe it’s the main character, maybe it’s the hinge on which the whole daring narrative turns. That’s up to you. Be sure to hashtag your story with #IRBlueLight. Entries are due by Friday, January 26.
Example Tweets:
