The Missouri Review

We are delighted to report that Rick Hilles and Benjamin Percy have just been named recipients of 2008 Whiting Awards. Each writer received a $50,000 prize from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. Presented annually since 1985, the Whiting Awards, according to the foundation’s website, are presented to authors who exhibit “exceptional talent and promise [...]

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Now that the Olympics are over and Michael Phelps with his eight gold medals is off on a victory lap of TV talkshows (look for him on SNL this weekend), we can take time to consider the proper pronunciation of the city “Beijing.”
In her blog “The Word” from The Boston Globe, Jan Freeman, takes on [...]

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Cash Peters’ entertaining take on print-on-demand technology

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With sadness we learned of Raymond J. Smith’s death this week. Smith, along with his wife of more than forty years, Joyce Carol Oates, was a founding editor of The Ontario Review and Ontario Review Press. He leaves a rich and distinguished contribution to literary publishing.
In the essay “On Editing The Ontario Review,” which [...]

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If you’re a fan of one of our favorite cartoonists–Mick Stevens–then you will enjoy reading his blog I Really Should Be Drawing. He discusses where he finds inspiration and a whole host of other things that fall this side of funny. You also can see more of Mick’s work in our newest issue–Vol. [...]

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On Tuesday, January 8, Governor Matt Blunt named Walter Bargen, one of our favorite local poets, as official poet laureate of Missouri.
Walter’s work has appeared in the pages of The Missouri Review no less than four times–in 1983, 1989, 1991 and 1997.

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If you were listening to Columbia’s NPR station last week and thought you heard Speer’s voice, you weren’t mistaken. Speer sat down to chat with Janet Saidi for Off the Clock, a local arts/culture program. Listen to the complete interview here.

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When I was sorting through the mail last week shortly before leaving for Thanksgiving break I spied our copy of Best New Poets 2007. As I flipped through the pages two names stood out, so I wanted to take a moment to congratulate these individuals–Elizabeth Langemak and Brett Foster–both former TMR interns.
Good job and [...]

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At this time of year we are reminded to be thankful, so I decided to make a quick list of people and things we at The Missouri Review are thankful for.
Things we are thankful for (in no particular order):
The British Library, The Huntington and the HRC
Gutenberg
Independent Publishers
Readers everywhere
A staff of great interns and [...]

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We’re delighted to announce that Seth Fried is the winner of this year’s William Peden Prize in Fiction. Seth’s winning story, “The Siege,” appeared in the Winter 2006 (Vol 29 #4) issue of The Missouri Review and was selected by outside judge, Nancy Zafris, fiction editor of The Kenyon Review.
The editors award the William [...]

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Peruse the list of honorees here.

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In his undergrad days at Occidental College in L.A., Barack Obama penned some poems that found their way into the school’s literary magazine. While the work yields no clues to his future political ambitions, it does indicate he had an ear for language and, blogger Steven Barrie-Anthony writes, shows a “modicum of humanness from a less circumspect past.”

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The Costa Book Awards, formerly known as the Whitbread Book Awards, recognize the previous year’s best books from writers in the UK and Ireland. This year’s winner is first-time author Stef Penney. Read the announcement here.

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Recently a group of University of Missouri faculty created a list of their favorite influential books published since 1900. Those that made the cut were chosen for literary merit, availability, and their appeal to young readers. You can browse the titles here.

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The short list of nominees for the annual Costa Book Awards, formerly known as the Whitbread Prize, has been released.   To be eligible, authors must be based in the UK or Ireland.  Winners will be announced in early February. 
Leading contenders for the prize in the novel category are Mark Haddon (A Spot of Bother) and [...]

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In case you missed it, Nicaraguan/Salvadoran writer Claribel Alegría was selected as the winner of the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The $50,000 prize is awarded biennially by Oklahoma University and the journal World Literature Today to the most outstanding international writer. See the interview [here].
Alegría, acclaimed for her writing on justice and liberation, [...]

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An unpublished work by Sylvia Plath has been discovered in the Plath archive at Indiana University.
The sonnet appears in Blackbird, the joint online venture of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and the New Virginia Review.

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Books, not guns, are some of the latest weapons against crime in Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico. The Nezahualcoyotl police force now requires its officers to read classic literature, such as Don Quixote, as part of their training to tackle crime in the streets. The program is aptly named Literature on Alert.

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 was announced last Thursday and this year’s winner, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, “has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself as principally a fiction writer with no political agenda.”  Listen to Pamuk’s address on artistic freedom at the PEN Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Memorial [...]

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This November will mark the ninth year of existence for National Novel Writing Month, in which writers everywhere are encouraged to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of the month. The NaNoWriMo website offers support forums, advice columns, and a radio show to help you along the hard road of producing 1,700 words [...]

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