Good morning, folks. Welcome to summer, officially, or to winter if that applies to any of you. Here's what we've been doing this week:

Our reviews editor Diane Josefowicz wrote about The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive by Marcia Douglas (New Directions).

And our summer flash fiction series continued with "One of the Lies I Tell My Children (#23)" by Ruth Joffre, a writer we're pleased to publish for the first time. You'll find more of Ruth's writing at https://www.ruthjoffre.org/.

Then Emily Greenberg shared some research notes for her recent story collection Alternative Facts (Kallisto Gaia Press). Learn more about that book and Emily's other writing at https://emilygreenberg.net/. 

Elsewhere, some exciting news from our friends at Barrelhouse:

We're accepting pitches for a new book series, For What It's Worth: short (25-30K words) works of creative nonfiction that have some pop-cultural "thing" at their center and combine elements of memoir and cultural criticism. Essentially, we want you to write about your pop-cultural obsession, but in a way that ultimately helps to illuminate something about your own life experience.

On Monday, our editors will share some reading suggestions for the summer, so make room on your shelves.

And we are now open to submissions for guest editor Nicholas Claro to consider for publication in fall.

Finally, I will be traveling for a few weeks for work and will be writing and scheduling these newsletter earlier in the week than I usually do, to account for limited web access at times. So apologies in advance if that causes any hiccups on the Saturdays ahead or if I'm slow to reply to an email.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer