The Missouri Review

We’re pleased to announce that the second ever Missouri Review Audio & Video Competition is now open and accepting your submissions. You might notice something a little different from last year: the new video category. We’re very excited to see what you can do with this new option. We are also continuing the Narrative Essay, [...]

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[Tara Yellen is the author of the recently published novel After Hours at the Almost Home.]
My first semester of teaching, I was a graduate student in my early twenties at the University of Colorado. I’d arrived, I was certain, entirely prepared to teach.  I had articles and short stories — and an arsenal of exercises.  [...]

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We’ve now concluded our podcast presentations of the winners of our 2007 Audio Competition. You can all of the winners are listed below with links to the podcast containing their work. Congratulations again to all of our winners!
  
Narrative Essay
First place, $1,000: Judith Sloan, “Sweeping Statements” [Listen]
First runner-up: Kris Saknussemm, “Cahoots” [Listen]
Second runner-up: Richard Paul, “Fighting With My Dad” [...]

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On this Missouri Review podcast, we have for you the audio feature “Lord God Bird” produced by Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, which was the 3rd runner-up in the Documentary category of our 2007 audio competition.
You can listen to this podcast directly here.

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On this Missouri Review podcast, we’re happy to share “The Secret Pianos of Manhattan,” by Ken Cormier, which was the 2nd runner-up in the Documentary category our of 2007 audio competition.
Ken Cormier is editor and producer of The Lumberyard, a radio magazine of poetry, prose, and music broadcast on WHUS in Connecticut, and also available [...]

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On this Missouri Review podcast, we’re pleased to present “Shakespeare in Black and White,” by Richard Paul, which was the first runner-up in the Documentary category of our 2007 Audio Competition.Richard Paul was also a winner in the Narrative Essay category, and you can listen to that program along with other winners in our previous [...]

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 On this Missouri Review podcast, we present the first place winner in the Documentary category of our 2007 Audio Competition.
Lu Olkowski, in her documentary “Grandpa,” looks at the Zagar family and how they deal with death. A father and son have a contest to take the best photos of their dying father/grandpa. The result is [...]

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On this Missouri Review podcast, we present our final 10-minute play, “Avian Invasion.” This entry is the work of six first-time participants at the National Audio Theatre Festival’s Audio Theater Workshop, and was the second runner-up in the 10-minute play category of our 2007 Audio Competition.

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On this Missouri Review podcast, we have another ten-minute play for your listening pleasure. Today’s entry is “Old Dog, Newer Tricks,” by George Zarr, which was the first runner-up in the ten-minute play category of our 2007 audio competition.
You can listen to this podcast directly here.

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On this Missouri Review podcast, we begin our presentation of a particularly exciting category from 2007 Audio Competition, the 10-minute plays. Today we have the first place winner, Kris Saknussemm, with his play “The Memory Wound.” Kris also had a winning entry in the Narrative Essay category, which you can listen to on one of [...]

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This episode of our podcast features the remaining runner-up entries in the Voice-Only Literature: Creative Nonfiction category. The second runner-up was Randolph Jordan, with his entry “A Death in the Family,” and the third runner up was Angela Cervantes, with “A House of Women.”
You can listen to this podcast directly here.

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This episode of our podcast features the first place and first-runner up entries in the Voice-Only Literature: Creative Nonfiction category. First place went to Albert Haley’s “The Cough.” Haley is associate professor of English at Abilene Christian College. He authored Exotic, the winner of the John Irving First Novel Prize. Places where Haley’s short fiction [...]

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We’ve added another video to our growing collection at You Tube. Here, Speer Morgan discusses the motivations behind and the rewards of publishing The Missouri Review.

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 In this Missouri Review podcast, we are pleased to present the wonderfully varied range of the second, third, and fourth runners-up from the Voice-Only poetry category of our 2007 Audio Competition. These are “The Golden Lesson” by Susan Somers-Willet, “Taking Tickets” by Eric Torgersen, and “Women in Strange Trousers” by Josh McDonald.
With “The Golden Lesson,” [...]

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In this installment of The Missouri Review podcast, we feature the first place and first runner-up entries to the Voice-Only Literature (Poetry) category of our 2007 Audio Competition. Both of these awards go to poems by Todd Boss: “To Wind a Mechanical Toy” (1st place) and “Yellowrocket” (1st runner-up). Both poems are sonically resonant, without [...]

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Today’s podcast presents both of the winning entries in the Voice-Only Fiction category.
First place: Josh McDonald earns first place in the flash fiction, voice-only category with his submission, “Lost.” It’s a comic, surreal story of a madman on a bus shelter roof and the elderly woman who finds him. McDonald is a writer, musician and [...]

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Individual copies of our Spring 2008 issue (31.1), featuring the winners of the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, are now available for pre-order through our online shopping cart. Guarantee your copy by ordering today — or better still, subscribe to The Missouri Review!

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Today, we finish off the Narrative Essay category with “Fighting with My Dad,” by Richard Paul, which was our second-runner up. In this essay, we learn that solitude can give an artist peace and freedom, but it can also be addictive. And just like any drug, too much can damage the artist and people around him.
You [...]

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Kris Saknussemm takes the first runner-up position in the Narrative Essay category with his piece entitled “Cahoots.” Saknussem has won first prizes in the Boston Review and  River Styx short fiction contests, and he has published in a wide range of magazines, including Chelsea, The Antioch Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner and ZYZZYA. His first [...]

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Our first installment of the Audio Competition winners features the first place recipient of the Narrative Essay category, Judith Sloan. The essay, “Sweeping Statements,” is a first-person author-read accounting of teaching theatre, writing, and juggling in jails and alternative sentencing institutions with incarcerated teenagers. Category judge Jay Allison, of transom.org, says the essay “truly left [...]

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As we continue our expansion into different forms of online media, The Missouri Review is pleased to introduce you to own first video posting on You Tube! In this short feature, TMR Editor Speer Morgan talks about the early days of the magazine.

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The Missouri Review has a long history of sending our former interns into the world of publishing. Jason Koo, our former poetry editor, becomes our latest flag bearer into the literary magazine world. He and friends Bill Hughes, Robert Liddell, and Jeff Bernard have just launched Low Rent magazine. Check it out at www.lowrentmagazine.com.

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We had a wonderful evening Monday night with Peden Prize winner Seth Fried.

Seth read from a new piece he’s working on concerning a group of brewers addressing a public health crisis. A good time was had by all!

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Due to reported online delays experienced by some submitters to the Editors’ Prize contest, TMR is extending its online submission deadline to Friday, October 5, 2007. We will continue to accept fiction, poetry, and essay entries to the contest through the online submission system until midnight on Friday.

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Congratulations to the winners of the 2006 Editor’s Prize Contest. It was a tough competition this year, and we’d like to thank everyone who submitted their work to our judges. Here are the finalists:
Fiction
Winner:
Jacob M. Appel, “Creve Coeur”
New York, NY
 
Finalists:
Jennine Capó Crucet, “And in the Morning, Work”
Champaign, IL
 
Erica Debeljak, “Biology”
Evanston, IL 
 
Elliott Holt, “Fem Care”
Brooklyn, NY
 
Poetry
Winner:
Jonathan [...]

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We recently heard Unbridled Books’ new podcast series, which presents interviews with authors and short readings from their work. The series is being produced and hosted by Kay Bonetti Callison, who conducted some of The Missouri Review’s most memorable interviews, talking with authors such as Chinua Achebe, Richard Ford, Jamaica Kincaid, and Robert Olen Butler.
The [...]

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The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses (2007 Edition), available this December, will include stories by John Clayton and David Schuman.
Included in the anthology are Clayton’s “Voices”, which appeared in issue 28:3 of The Missouri Review, and Schuman’s “Stay” in issue 28:2.
Congratulations to these authors!

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[By Michael P. Kardos]
First, the admission: this season I started watching “American Idol.” I’d never watched an episode until this spring, and at first I did my best to poke fun at the contestants, the judges, and the millions of silly viewers. But after a few weeks I had to stop telling myself that I [...]

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We are pleased to make available an audio file of Danielle Ofri reading the opening chapter from her new book, Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine. The chapter, “Living Will“, first appeared as an essay in the Missouri Review (27:1, 2004) and was later selected by Susan Orlean for inclusion [...]

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