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Issue 18 Launch and Reading

October 18, 2019 News and Events

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 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.

[Pre-order Issue 18 here.]

“Coloso” Chosen for 2019 Best Small Fictions Award Anthology

July 29, 2019 News, News and Events

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 Receives Whiting Literary Magazine Prize

July 18, 2019 News, News and Events

The Common Receives a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize: The Largest National Prize for Nonprofit Literary Magazines, a Grant Award of $60,000

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.

Call for Submissions from and about the Lusosphere

June 22, 2019 News and Events

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.

We seek pieces in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid works. Pieces may be written originally in English or Portuguese. If written originally in Portuguese, please provide an English-language sample of at least 30% of the piece.

Submissions open July 1 and close on November 15, 2019. Early submissions are very much encouraged, as we will accept pieces until the portfolio is full.

Submit here via Submittable.

Nina Sudhakar Begins New Role as Book Reviews Editor

June 21, 2019 News and Events

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 [email protected]

The Common Magazine Named Finalist for CLMP Firecracker Award

June 3, 2019 News, News and Events

Logo of firecracker for CLMP

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.

FAQ: Weekly Writes Vol. 3

June 1, 2019 Weekly Writes

Q: What if I’m busy and can’t work on the week’s prompts? Will they expire?

A: No. While we hope that writing every week is part of your program experience, we understand that life gets in the way. The prompts are yours to download and keep, so you can start writing whenever you have time.

Photos of LitFest 2019

March 7, 2019 News and Events

This year marks the fourth LitFest, an annual literary festival hosted at Amherst College. From February 2-March 2, students, professors, alumni, and community members came together in Amherst College’s Johnson Chapel to hear National Book Award finalists Jennifer Egan, Brandon Hobson, and Jamel Brinkley speak about their writing processes, what writing means to them, and the purpose of writing. On March 2, Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert and NYT-bestselling author Charles C. Mann ’76 had a robust conversation about environmental changes and science journalism. Additional events included author masterclasses, a poetry slam, career panels, and a literary tour of Amherst. LitFest is sponsored by The Common, the Center for Humanistic Inquiry and the Emily Dickinson Museum.

Click here for a full write-up and more photos.

Photos by Jiayi Liu and Matai Curzon ’22.

The Common’s 10 Most-Read Pieces of 2018

January 18, 2019 News and Events

As The Common office continues to anticipate the exciting work we plan to share in 2019 both online and in our next issues, it seems like a great time to reflect on the pieces that made 2018 just as exciting for us. See what resonated with readers the most in 2018 by browsing the list below of our most-read works of the past year: they range from fiction to essays, interviews, and more!