The Missouri Review

Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog featured a note today from R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah, a journal many back issues of which are on a shelf behind me, concerning the expansion of its digital presence and the end of its sixty-year run as a print journal. This is old news, but news to me, and my immediate [...]

[Read more →]

The end of July also means the end of our summer internship class.  We’ve had a wonderful group that was with us for eight weeks – way too short – and they’ve done a tremendous job on putting the finishing touches on the new issue out now and the autumn issue, which will be arriving [...]

[Read more →]

We’ve enjoyed the long weekend: any excuse for a three-day weekend that includes barbecue, fireworks, baseball, and parades is okay with us. So, when I returned to the TMR office today, there was a large pile of unread emails in my Inbox, including a lengthy thread from literary journal editors about this annoucement via GalleyCat. [...]

[Read more →]

I’m just going to copy and paste this one from TMR friend Andrew Scott, who along with Victoria Barrett runs the awesome journal Freight Stories and the very cool short story reading club tastefully named Andrew’s Book Club.  I’ve already responded to his call to action and I hope you will, too: Kathryn Lang, the [...]

[Read more →]

There is sad news coming out of Southern Methodist University this week.  SMU Press, the oldest university publishing house in Texas, will have its operations shut down on June 1, 2010.  The editors of the press – Keith Gregory, Kathryn Lang, and George Ann Ratchford – had no hint or prior warning that this was [...]

[Read more →]

More good news from a recent contributor to TMR! Scott Coffel‘s poems appeared in TMR 31.2, our summer 2008 issue.  In the introduction to his poems, Scott wrote “poetry should resist easy victories or the siren songs of self-improvement.” So he knows that getting his first book of poems, Toucans in the Arctic, published last [...]

[Read more →]

TMR is delighted to announce that Cheryl Strayed’s essay “Munro Country” has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Strayed’s fantastic essay, which was our “From The Archives” selection last month, originally appeared in summer 2009 issue (or, call it “The Missouri Review: Messy Art“; or, now, just call it the “Strayed Issue”). We had the chance [...]

[Read more →]

We’d like to congratulate some of our past contributors on their recent achievements: Peter Levine’s story “How Does Your Garden Grow” was recognized as a notable story in the University of Texas Press’ 2009 volume of Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. The story first appeared in TMR issue [...]

[Read more →]

This week Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ramona Koval interviewed Jason Anthony about his experience in Antarctica. Anthony’s essay, “Song of Hypothermia,” appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of The Missouri Review and was the springboard for much of the conversation. We’ve posted the full essay for your reading enjoyment, and you can hear the interview here.

[Read more →]

Dear Friends of TMR: The search continues for missing poet Craig Arnold. The following message comes once again from Jess Piazza, one of the primary forces in marshaling resources that first raised the alarum and is continuing to work with Craig’s friends and family to keep up search efforts: With the assistance of the University [...]

[Read more →]

Sixteen years ago we published a remarkable coming-of-age short story by Kevin Canty, which was later included in his fiction collection A Stranger in This World. This year, that story, “Blue Boy,” will come to life on the big screen at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival. This short film is one of only 46 shorts [...]

[Read more →]

Visitors to the popular website Poetry Daily can get a taste of the work of poet Todd Boss, who readers and listeners of TMR already know as the poetry winner (and first runner-up) of our inaugural Audio Contest, for his poems “To Wind a Mechanical Toy,” and “Yellowrocket,” respectively. His poem, “To Be Alone Again [...]

[Read more →]

Poets & Writers is one of the few magazines I read cover to cover. I usually start with the classifieds and then make my way to the front. This month, in the Recent Winners section, I found two authors who have been published in The Missouri Review: fiction writer Paul Eggers and poet Jude Nutter. [...]

[Read more →]

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

[Read more →]

Lisa K. Buchanan, who was our first runner-up in the voice-only creative non-fiction category of our 2007 Audio Competition, can currently be heard on the KQED’s “The Writers’ Block” reading her winning entry to Opium Magazine’s 2007 “Bookmark Contest” in which authors had to submit a 250-word story that could be printed on a bookmark. [...]

[Read more →]

On the sleety evening of Saturday, April 12, we had the pleasure of hosting the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reading and Reception. Despite rampant flight cancelations leading into the weekend, Robert, Jude and Otis were all able to join us. We had an incredible pool of submissions for last year’s contest, but our winners’ readings demonstrated the qualities of freshness and heart that won for them these prizes.

[Read more →]

Somehow we’ve neglected to raise a fuss yet over the fact that Paul Guest, one of the poets appearing in our current issue, very recently won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award, which currently comes with a sturdy cash prize of $50,000. Since 1985 it’s been awarded annually to ten emerging writers of promise, in a [...]

[Read more →]

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the first annual Audio Competition. We received 169 entries, and the quality was deep in nearly every category. In the coming days and weeks, we’ll be posting the winning entries on our homepage and packaging the top entries into Podcasts. Our thanks go to Jay Allison of transom.org [...]

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

About rewriting and editing the American playwright Tennessee Williams said, “You have to murder all your little darlin’s.” It’s been known for several decades that the editor Gordon Lish did more than slay a few precious lines in Raymond Carver’s 1981 story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In fact, it [...]

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

On behalf of this year’s Editors’ Prize contest coordinators Jessica Garratt, Stephanie Carpenter and Darren Pine, we would like to thank everyone who entered this year. The quality of entries in all genres was exceptional, making reading fun but deciding on winners and finalists daunting. Around the office, we had many discussions about and re-readings [...]

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

The book world’s abuzz over news of the upcoming novel from James Frey. Perhaps you remember Oprah spitting his name with disdain. Frey wrote A Million Little Pieces in 2003, a blockbuster “memoir” about a hard-drug lifestyle that happened to contain more fiction than the world was happy about at the time. After the Smoking [...]

[Read more →]

There is a disturbing misconception in the air these days that says if only we prepare enough, we can prevent tragedy.  Airports teem with Homeland Security officers.  Every local government has terrorist-response plans in place, as does every school.  We are told that the country is on code yellow, or orange, or, God forbid, red.  [...]

[Read more →]

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

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) [...]

[Read more →]

Each year, The Missouri Review awards the Peden Prize to the author of the “best short story,” as selected by an outside judge. This year, Ed Falco, author of Plato at Scratch Daniel’s, Acid and Wolf Point, picked the Paul Eggers’s story, “This Way Uncle into the Palace,” as the best of the volume year. [...]

[Read more →]

In the past few weeks we’ve had a lot of news from past staff members, authors and others.  Here are some bits and pieces: Former Web Editor and prolific TMR blogger Scott Kaukonen has moved on to an Assistant Professorship at Sam Houston State University.  Scott, a talented young fiction writer who replaced past managing [...]

[Read more →]