The Common literary journal will receive its sixth grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2022. The Art Works grant of $10,000 will be awarded to The Common to help publish and promote place-based stories, essays, and poems by new and underrepresented writers from the US and abroad.
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.
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.
New York, NY (May 30, 2019)—The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), the national nonprofit organization that for more than 50 years has supported the essential work of literary publishers, has announced the finalists of its fifth annual FIRECRACKER AWARDS. Given to recognize the importance of independent literary publishing, the FIRECRACKER AWARDS honor the best self- and independently published books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry and the best literary magazines in the categories of debut and general excellence.
Congratulations to contributor Ben Shattuck for winning a Pushcart Prize for his Issue 16 story, The History of Sound! His story will be published in the forthcoming Pushcart anthology, out this November.
Read the story here.
“Clarity isn’t an exciting virtue, but it is a virtue always.” I repeat this maxim to my students, and it runs through my own head with even greater frequency. It comes from Good Prose, a guide to writing and editing excellent nonfiction, co-written by Tracy Kidder and the late Richard Todd, who passed away on April 21.
Join us in celebrating Issue 15 of The Common! The evening will feature readings from Liz Arnold, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and translator Lissie Jaquette, followed by a discussion with the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jennifer Acker. This event is free and open to the public.
Join the staff and interns of The Common for our launch of Issue 14! Come to hear readings from our new issue and enjoy wine and cheese in the Mead Art Museum’s beautiful Rotherwas Room.
Free and open to the public – students, parents, and local lit lovers all welcome!
Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer Prize winner, former Poet Laureate, and Editorial Board member for The Common, celebrated his 90th birthday on March 1. Here are photos from his birthday celebration at Amherst College.
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