The Common will receive its fourth grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2020. The Art Works grant of $15,000 will be awarded to The Common to help publish diverse writers, expand its readership, and support The Common‘s international portfolios.
It’s that time of year again: below are The Common’s nominations for the annual Pushcart Prize! The Pushcart Prize celebrates outstanding works of literature produced by small-press writers; each of our nominations are exceptional works of art that dare to take fresh and impactful perspectives on what it means to have a unique sense of place.
It's that time of year again: bid for a personalized, handwritten postcard from your favorite author through The Common's annual author postcard auction! The personalization of the postcards makes them fantastic gifts, and they should arrive in time for the holidays.
Join in on the fun this year for a chance to receive a postcard from Pulitzer Prize-winners, National Book Award-winners, and Guggenheim Fellows. In the past few years, authors have famously gone all out with their postcards: expect to receive anything from long letters to drawings and haikus.
Online bidding begins this year on November 11, 2019 at 10 a.m. EST! Participating authors include literary powerhouses like David Sedaris, George Saunders, Ann Patchett, André Aciman, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, among others. Newcomer authors this year include author-actors Jenny Slate and Alan Cumming. Don't miss out!
All proceeds from the auction will help The Common's effort to publish emerging writers, aid our Literary Publishing Internship Program, and allow us to establish even more connections with students across the globe via The Common in the Classroom. Check out the full list of authors at our auction site: https://charityauction.bid/postcards.
We’d love for you to join us in Amherst to celebrate the launch of Issue 18. The Common‘s student interns will be reading briefly from their favorite pieces in the new issue, and seniors will read from their own writing as well. There will be wine, cheese, and great conversation.
Friday, November 1, 5 p.m.
Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Frost Library
Amherst College
Come toast the latest place-based stories, essays, poems and artwork! We’ll be gathering in Frost Library’s beautiful Center for Humanistic Inquiry, on the Amherst College campus. This event is free and open to the public; bring your family and friends! You can also invite other lit lovers via our Facebook event page.
Wednesday, November 13, 4:30pm
The Center for Humanistic Inquiry
Frost Library
Amherst College
Free and open to the public
Join The Common and the Amherst College Creative Writing Center for a reading and Q&A with author Joseph O’Neill, hosted by TC Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker. This event is part of the Amherst College Creative Writing Fall Reading Series, which includes several readings around the town of Amherst.
Hugo Ríos Cordero’s story “Coloso” has been chosen to appear in Sonder Press’s 2019 award anthology The Best Small Fictions. The anthology, now in its fifth year, presents one hundred and forty-six pristinely crafted pieces from an array of authors representing twenty-six nations and six continents. It features micro fiction, flash fiction, haibun stories and prose poetry. Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works says, “Brilliant, incendiary, incandescent, these tiny stories capture worlds both intimate and universal. Give this book to anyone who says flash fiction doesn’t go deep. This newest volume of Best Small Fictions demonstrates once and for all that flash fiction writers are the Ginger Rogers of the literary world, accomplishing all that novelists and short story writers do, only backwards and in high heels.”
Congrats to Hugo! Read “Coloso” here, or check out his other piece for The Common, “Tonight, the Wind,” from our Issue 16 portfolio of work about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
Browse more of The Common’s prize-winning pieces here.
The Common magazine has been selected as the winner of the Whiting Foundation’s Literary Magazine Prize for medium-sized print magazines, the largest prize category. The Common will receive a total of $60,000 over three years. These funds will support The Common’s mission of featuring new and underrepresented artistic voices from around the world who deepen our individual and collective sense of place.
With July well underway, we’ve put together a list of transportive pieces that encapsulate the spirit of summer—the dust above the country roads, the coolness of the waterfronts, the anticipation of autumn, and of course, the sticky, melting sweetness of ice cream. Take a trip through space and time with these summery selections.
In fall 2020, The Common, in partnership with the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, will publish a portfolio from the Lusosphere: Portugal and its colonial and linguistic diaspora. We hope to include writers from and works about the many countries and communities that make up this diverse diaspora. Writers need not speak Portuguese or live in a Portuguese-speaking country to submit.
The Common is excited to announce Nina Sudhakar as its new Book Reviews Editor. She has served as The Common’s Dispatches Editor since July 2018 and has been a submissions reader since September 2017. She will continue to edit dispatches as well as reviews.
Nina Sudhakar is the author of the poetry chapbooks Matriarchetypes (winner of the 2017 Bird’s Thumb Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Embodiments (forthcoming from Sutra Press in summer 2019). Her work has appeared in, among other places, The Offing, Ecotone, and Midnight Breakfast, and been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Bettering American Poetry. A graduate of Amherst College (BA) and Georgetown University (JD/MSFS), she currently lives in Chicago.
On her new position, Sudhakar says, “Working for The Common over the past two years—as a prose reader and currently as Dispatches Editor—has been an absolute joy. I’m so excited to take on the role of Books Reviews Editor and continue helping our team bring exciting, thought-provoking and transporting work to our readers and the literary community.”
Browse Nina’s publications and learn more about her at www.ninasudhakar.com.
She can be reached at bookreviews@thecommononline.org.
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Celebrating 15 Years