All posts tagged: news

The Common Magazine Announces Inaugural David Applefield ’78 Fellow

(Amherst, Mass. November 2, 2023)—The award-winning, international literary journal The Common announced today that Sam Spratford ’24 will be the inaugural recipient of the David Applefield ’78 Fellowship. The fellowship, the magazine’s first endowed student internship, was established in 2022 by a group of friends and family organized by David Whitman ’78, in honor of his late classmate and roommate, who was a literary polymath, international activist, media entrepreneur, and the founder of Frank, an eclectic English-language literary magazine based in Paris.  

The Common Magazine Announces Inaugural David Applefield ’78 Fellow
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Issue 26 of The Common

Issue 26 cover: light pink background with a turnip and greens

Issue 26 launches on November 6, 2023


Click here to purchase your print or digital copy, starting at just $8.

After November 6, browse the Table of Contents, including online exclusives, at thecommononline.org/issues/issue-26.

Love Issue 26’s portfolio of writing from the farmworker community? Donate to support The Common’s mission to feature new and underrepresented voices from around the world.

Interested in teaching Issue 26 in your class? Click here to explore your options and resources.

 

About Issue 26

From the Farmworker Community

Half of our fall issue is dedicated to a portfolio of writing and art from the farmworker community: over a hundred pages filled with the stories, essays, poems, and artwork of immigrant agricultural workers. 

The portfolio, co-edited by Miguel M. Morales, highlights the work of twenty-seven contributors with roots in this community. Most started work in the fields as children, and the portfolio reflects their diverse experiences—the long hours and low pay, protests and picket lines, but also the fierce resilience of their families, the warmth of their communities, and the satisfaction of doing hard work well, among friends and loved ones. Pieces in the portfolio consider decades of migrant and immigrant farmwork in the US, from the braceros to the current day, and experiences from picking berries to hauling cattle. Many writers reflect on the generational divides in their families, the complex relationships that can arise when parents work hard to get their families “out of the fields,” and, in succeeding, raise children very different from themselves. Stories and poems highlight youthful queer experiences, and essays explore the way modern agriculture is changing, and the lives of farmworkers with it.

The portfolio features stunning full-color artwork by Narsiso Martinez, who creates moving portraits and scenes of farmworkers in the fields, painted on flattened cardboard produce boxes. Portfolio co-editor Miguel M. Morales’s poem “Sisters” opens with a tender recollection of the integral and varied roles women play in shaping farming communities. The migrant labor camp becomes a vivid site of love and violence in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Fields of 1936,” as she juxtaposes material harshness with emotional tenderness.

Several pieces deal directly with labor organizing. In her essay “California Obscura,” Anna Mei Kim maps the topography of labor abuse and resistance in Southern California through the story of her family’s produce stand. Aideed Medina, who self-describes as a “daughter of the United Farm Workers’ movement,” shares three bilingual poems on the inventive paths labor finds to dignity. In “Jacinta Murrieta,” Julio Puente Garcia tells the tale of the eponymous Jacinta, a mythic martyr figure for the disparate farmworker communities of central California. The story is translated from the original Spanish by The Common’s editor in chief Jennifer Acker.

2022 National Book Award Finalist Allison Adelle Hedge Coke considers displacement and adaptation in three evocative poems that depict moments of peace and liminality during migrant journeys. Oswaldo Vargas’s poem “Thresher Days” and Leo Rios’s queer love story “Lencho” likewise grasp at moments of innocence, attraction, and togetherness amid transience. Nora Rodriguez Camagna closes out the portfolio with “Boysenberry Girls,” an essay that insists on the power of familial love, across generations, to build a better life from the everyday hardship of farmwork.

 

From Around the World

Issue 26 includes three additional pieces of fiction, all of which explore the ways that place molds relationships. Nayereh Doosti’s “The Little One” shows the unfolding of intergenerational fractures from the perspective of an Iranian grandfather and the bond he forms with his infant granddaughter, born in America. In Sebastian Romero’s “Transgressions,” readers can consider how presence and memory blur together when a group of college friends returns to a Chicago bathhouse. O. Henry Prize-winner Amar Mitra’s “The Substitute,” translated by Anish Gupta, illuminates the dynamics of identification and mimesis in a close-knit Kolkata community through the form of an unsettling fable.

Issue 26 is dedicated to David Applefield, a literary polymath who shared The Common’s mission to publish international and emerging writers. Sam Spratford, The Common’s inaugural Applefield Fellow, surveys Applefield’s impressive contributions to the literary world in the issue’s opening essay. In Vix Guttierez’s haunting essay, “Don’t Step Off the Path,” the author recounts her nomadic childhood amid the 1990s breakdown of Yugoslavia and the entanglement of war and sexual violence. 

Finally, The Common brings readers a varied and evocative selection of poetry. Virginia Konchan invokes musical and religious symbols in three soul-searching contributions. David Lehman, founder and editor of the Best American Poetry series, is transported through time and space by a radio broadcast in “The Last Day of February.” Whiting Award-winner Rickey Laurentiis negotiates her Blackness and transness as she moves through Palestinian checkpoints; her verse in “Tall Lyric for Palestine (Or, The Harder Thinking)” is broken into a list, mirroring these fractured spaces. Issue 26 also includes the DISQUIET Prize-winning poem “The Gardener” by Joshua Burton, in addition to poems by R. Zamora Linmark, Julia Lisella, and Oksana Maksymchuk.

Issue 26 of The Common
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The Common Awarded 2023 Amazon Literary Partnership Grant

Amazon Literary Partnership Logo

We are pleased to announce that The Common is among the 93 literary nonprofit organizations awarded a 2023 Literary Magazine Fund Grant by the Amazon Literary Partnership Literary Magazine Fund, in conjunction with the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses. Since 2017, funding from the Amazon Literary Partnership has helped further The Common’s mission of publishing and promoting emerging and diverse authors who deepen our individual and collective sense of place. In 2023, the Amazon Literary Partnership awarded nearly $1M in funds.

The Common Awarded 2023 Amazon Literary Partnership Grant
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Join Weekly Writes Summer 2023: Accountable You

→ Signups for Weekly Writes Summer 2023 are now closed. To register your interest in hearing about our next WW program in January, please fill out this form


Weekly Writes is a ten-week program designed to help you create original place-based writing, beginning July 24.

We’re offering both poetry AND prose, in two separate programs. What do you want to prioritize this summer? Pick the program, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a weekly dose of writing inspiration (and accountability) in your inbox!
    

writing with a pen in a notebook

Join Weekly Writes Summer 2023: Accountable You
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Issue 25 of The Common is Here!

 

Here are all the ways to experience Issue 25:Issue 25 cover: The Common's square dark logo over a scattering of smashed brown and white egg shells, on a pale blue background.


Click here to purchase your print or digital copy, starting at just $7.

Click here to browse the Table of Contents, including online exclusives.

Love Issue 25’s portfolio of stories and art from Kuwait? Donate to support The Common’s mission to feature new and underrepresented voices from around the world.

Interested in teaching Issue 25 in your class? Click here to explore your options and resources.

 

 

Issue 25 of The Common is Here!
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The Common Young Writers Program Opens Applications for Summer 2023

Students with issues of The Common

Applications are now open for The Common Young Writers Program, which offers two two-week, fully virtual summer classes for high school students (rising 9-12). Students will be introduced to the building blocks of fiction and learn to read with a writer’s gaze. Taught by the editors and editorial assistants of Amherst College’s literary magazine, the summer courses (Level I and Level II) run Monday-Friday and are open to all high school students (rising 9-12). The program runs July 17-28.

The Common Young Writers Program Opens Applications for Summer 2023
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Announcing LitFest 2023

Purple square with the words "Amherst College LitFest 2023: illuminating great writing and Amherst's literary life" in white

We hope you’ll join us for the eighth annual LitFest, hosted in conjunction with Amherst College. This year’s lineup includes Pulitzer Prize-winner Hilton Als, MacArthur Fellowship-winner Valeria Luiselli, and 2022 National Book Award finalists Meghan O’Rourke and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, among others.

This year, we are continuing to highlight the work of The Common’s own Literary Publishing Interns and Amherst Alumni Authors during a reading at 4pm on Saturday, February 25. Join us for this exciting weekend!

Purple button with "Register Here" in white.

Announcing LitFest 2023
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The Common to Receive $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts

Amherst, MA—The Common literary journal is pleased to announce its seventh award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The $10,000 Arts Projects award approved for 2023 will support the publication and promotion of place-based stories, essays, and poems by diverse writers from around the world.

National Endowment for the Art logo

In previous years, The Common has published numerous global portfolios from areas including Palestine, the Lusosphere, and the Arabian Gulf. In spring 2023, supported by the NEA award, Issue 25 will feature a portfolio of stories and art from Kuwait, co-edited with TC Arabic Fiction Editor Hisham Bustani. This will be the magazine’s sixth annual portfolio bringing contemporary Arabic fiction to American audiences.

“This generous NEA grant funds our continuing commitment to bring readers in this country the best contemporary Arabic short fiction,” says founder and editor in chief Jennifer Acker. “Our unique portfolios showcase a curated selection of work that can’t be found anywhere else.”     

The grant will also support The Common‘s ongoing commitments to make a wide variety of international literature available to American readers and to provide writers in the U.S.with a global platform. The magazine’s comprehensive outreach and promotion plan includes the open-access website, publicity campaigns and partnerships, educational programs like The Common in the Classroom and The Common Young Writers Program, as well as a variety of audio and web features promoting reader and contributor engagement throughout the year

Since 1966, the NEA has supported arts projects in every state and territory in the nation. The Common‘s grant is among 1,251 Grants for Arts Projects awards totaling nearly $28.8 million that were announced by the NEA as part of its first round of fiscal year 2023 grants.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support arts projects in communities nationwide,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “Projects such as this one with The Common strengthen arts and cultural ecosystems, provide equitable opportunities for arts participation and practice, and contribute to the health of our communities and our economy.”

For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, visit https://www.arts.gov/news.

The Common to Receive $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts
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Weekly Writes Volume 7: Accountable You

 
typing on a laptop

Weekly Writes is a ten-week program designed to help you create original place-based writing, beginning January 30.

We’re offering both poetry AND prose, in two separate programs. What do you want to prioritize in 2023? Pick the program, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a weekly dose of writing inspiration (and accountability) in your inbox!

Weekly Writes Volume 7: Accountable You
Read more...