Indiana Review Funk

We Want Your Funk

Indiana Review is planning to bring the funk in summer 2008. Our 30.1 issue will feature a special "Focus on the Funk" section, with art, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that has a uniquely funky aesthetic. As we have been informed, funk has the power to move and re-move, and it also has the power to defy definition. So please don't ask us to tell you what funk is (although the Godfather of Soul may be helpful). We're looking for work that makes you want to jump back and kiss yourself. When our reading period opens September 1st, we'll also be accepting regular submissions, but if you have work you'd like us to consider for this special section, please mark it "Attn: Funk Editor". Indiana Review can only contain so much funk, so we'll only be reading for this section during the month of September. Any submissions after that will be returned. You can check out more specific guidelines on our website. But whatever you do, no matter what anyone tells you, no matter what you see on TV or in the newspapers, no matter what it says on wikipedia, please, please, make sure that whatever you do, you do it on The One.

Sheree in VIBE and a few other publications

Well, I'm not even going to say anything about 50's busted photo--oops!--but if you turn to pages 22 and 48, why, you could see yours truly and my interview of an exciting debut fantasy novelist, Troy CLE. Check out his new fantasy series, MARVELOUS WORLD: Book 1 - The Marvelous Effect and keep yours eyes for the next five volumes.

BRONX BIANNUAL:
vol. 2

The New York Free Press published an article about the second volume of this new Hip Hop literary journal. Read it here. I was out of town for our first reading, but I will definitely be in NYC this fall for the upcoming one, when maverick editor and globetrotter Miles Marshall Lewis makes his way back from his home in Paris.

From the publisher, Akashic Books: Bronx Biannual is the most important literary journal in hiphop America. Consider Bronx Biannual an urban Paris Review, or McSweeney's Quarterly Concern from a hiphop standpoint. The journal publishes new writing--fiction, essays, reportage, interviews, poems--twice a year. The intention is to publish both celebrated and unsung writers on a variety of subjects germane to the black aesthetic. Urbane urban literature: bourgeois yet boulevard. Bronx Biannual will be fluid like water. No guiding manifesto per se, no set format. Issues might be published as graphic novels, or with two sheets of metal bound like a spiral notebook and shrink-wrapped in a Mylar sleeve, or with a concept in mind of what the Factory might've come up with had Andy Warhol put out a literary journal. Like XXL magazine edited by Rhodes Scholars at Oxford or Vanity Fair edited in the South Bronx at the Point. The sophomore issue includes new short stories by Sheree Renée Thomas, Sun Singleton, and Michael A. Gonzales; an account of white usurpation of Zora Neale Hurston's legacy by Liza Jessie Peterson; a poetic essay on racism by Uptown editor SékouWrites; and Def Poetry on Broadway poet Staceyann Chin on the tragedy of New Orleans.

Read some great blurbs from Kwame Dawes, Marilyn Hacker, and Hilda Raz, the editor of Prairie Schooner.

Here is a reader's review from Amazon.com:

""The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South," a compulsively rich anthology edited by Nikky Finney, raises many of the usual arguments about identity politics and aesthetic quality. But another, and more personally interesting, comes from a different quarter: Why is this anthology so much better than any Southern-based collection edited by a white writer in recent years? After all, these have contained African-American writers (and even women).

But they have not been nearly as representative of the old and the young; the native-born Southerners and the emigres, even the visitors; the formalists and the writers of free verse, not to mention Ebonics and spoken word poets. Forrest Hamer, from whose work the book's title is taken, is one of the better-known newcomers; others to watch are Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Sharan Strange, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Hermine Pinson, Earl Braggs, Harryette Mullen, and Kendra Hamilton, to name only a few.

There are moments in Finney's anthology when readers might well feel that quality has been sacrificed for inclusiveness. Preferring gumbo to poached okra when it comes to such matters, I licked the bowl clean. "