(Amherst, Mass. — December 7, 2020)— The Common, the award-winning literary journal based at Amherst College, has hired acclaimed poet Willie Perdomo as its new Interviews Editor. With publishing experience stretching back twenty-five years, Perdomo currently teaches English at Philips Exeter Academy.
It’s that time of year again: bid for a personalized, handwritten postcard from your favorite author through The Common’s seventh annual author postcard auction! The personalization of the postcards makes them fantastic gifts, just in time for the holidays.
Join in on the fun this year for a chance to receive a postcard from New York Times-bestsellers, National Book Award-winners, and MacArthur 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 doodles to haikus.
New this year, in celebration of The Common’s 10th anniversary, some bidders will also receive rewards from Penguin Classics! The first and every fifth bidder, plus the highest bidder and top two underbidders (just missed out on winning!), will receive one of a handful of books from the gorgeous Deluxe or hardcover Vitae series including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, George Elliot’s Middlemarch, and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass.
Online bidding will open to the public at 10 am EST on November 9, 2020. Participating authors include literary powerhouses such as André Aciman, Susan Choi, and Valeria Luiselli, as well as writer-performers Jenny Slate and David Sedaris. Newcomers to the auction include acclaimed writers Anne Carson and Phil Klay and world-renowned singer/songwriter Natalie Merchant.
If you’re interested in supporting The Common but don’t want to bid, click here to donate.
The application window for this position is now closed. Thank you to everyone who applied!
The Interviews Editor organizes and edits a monthly interview feature for The Common Online. (Examples of recent interviews can be found here or here.) Additional interviews may be coordinated by TC’s central editorial team, in consultation with the Interviews Editor. A biannual honorarium is available for this position.
Issue 20 of The Common will be here this fall. Subscribe by September 30 to find this hot pink celebration in your mailbox! In addition to the global, place-based stories, essays, and poems you’re used to reading in The Common, this issue also includes a portfolio of writing from and about the Lusosphere: Portugal’s colonial and linguistic diaspora. You’ll find works in English and in translation, and explore Lisbon, Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and even Luso-American families and communities here in the States. 1 year subscriptions start at $12.
Subscribe now, so you can have your cake and eat it too!
Mohammad Ibrahim Nawaya’s story “To Be Led from Behind,” translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger, has been chosen to appear in Sonder Press’s 2020 award anthology The Best Small Fictions. The anthology, now in its sixth year, presents one hundred and twenty-six pristinely crafted pieces from an array of authors. It features micro fiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry.
The Bath Flash Fiction Award writes “[T]he beauty of an anthology such as this, pulling together the best of the form, is that you will always encounter something new, something different, something that pushes the boundaries of flash further than before. If this anthology proves nothing else, it is that small fiction in all its forms continues to go from strength to strength, as does the series itself.”
Congrats to Mohammad! Read “To Be Led from Behind” here, or check out other pieces from our Issue 17 portfolio of Arabic stories from Syria,.
Browse more of The Common’s prize-winning pieces here.
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: 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.
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.
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