Stuart Dybek Reading at WMU Tonight

Thursday, November 19 at 8:00 p.m., award winning writing Stuart Dybek will read on Western Michigan University's campus.

Stuart Dybek is the author of numerous books, including I Sailed With Magellan,The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Among Dybek’s numerous awards are a $500,000 2007 MacArthur Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Prize, a Lannan Award, aWhiting Writers Award, an Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, several O.Henry Prizes, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University and a member of the permanent faculty for Western Michigan University’s Prague Summer Program.

Dybek was also the judge for Third Coast's 2009 fiction contest. Stu's selection "Winter-Over," by Ashley Shelbey, can be found in the Fall 2009 issue out now. Remember there's still time to enter this year's fiction and poetry contests!

Two Weeks Till Contest Deadline

Just a reminder that Third Coast's Poetry and Fiction Contest deadline is fast approaching! Our December 1 deadline is now a postmark deadline, which means you've got exactly two weeks left to polish your poems and stories and send them our way.

Contest winners receive $1000 and publication in Third Coast's 15th anniversary issue (which is already looking sharp, we must say).

The illustrious Ann Beattie will be judging our fiction contest, with David Wojahn judging poetry. Check out the full contest guidelines here.

What the Editors Are Reading

This month our editors are reading:

• Interview with a Ghost, Tom Sleigh
• Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road
• Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup
• Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory
• A Fans Notes - Frederick Exley
• Losing Season, by Jack Ridl (poems)
• Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski
• Stupid Hope by Jason Shinder
• Versed by Rae Armantrout
• Special Orders by Ed Hirsch
• Black Sabbatical by Brett Eugene Ralph
• Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa
• Oranges and Peanuts for Sale by Eliot Weinberger
• The Book of Seventy by Alicia Ostriker
• Hard Times by Charles Dickens
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• It is Daylight by Arda Collins
• All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman
• Derek Walcott's "Omeros"
• "Ali & Nino"
• Kiterunner
• This is Not a Book, Keri Smith
• Alice Hoffman, "The Witch of Turo"
  
• Plays: David Ives's Sure Thing
• Shakespeare's Othello
• A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, adapted by Tony Kushner, originally by S. Ansky
• The Tenth Man, Paddy Chayefsky
• plus an assortment of Arthur Miller and Tony Kushner plays.

Top 10 Books of the Year

Earlier this month, Publisher's Weekly posted their picks for Top 100 books this year in several categories, as well as a new feature to this year's list: their Top 10 picks that stood out from the rest.

As Alicia Suskin Ostriker points out on She Writes, every single title chosen for the Top 10 was written by a man. Perhaps the thing that is of even more interest than the gender of the writers is the similarities of their subjects (and in turn the subject's genders). Ostriker writes:

It was a little dismaying to read the descriptions of the books, which you can do at http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6704263.html, and realize how very much it was shaped by "boy" subjects. "Gritty, mostly honest-hearted ex-heroin addict protagonist Ricky Rice!...Rebellious Yankee son of a father who fell victim to the Depression!...[T]he men who built America’s intercontinental ballistic missile program in the 1950s and ‘60s!...Two 40-ish men seeking love and existential meaning!...Grann’s vigorous research mirrors Fawcett’s obsession with uncovering the mysteries of the jungle!...Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls manual competence!..." That's six of the ten.

Read Ostriker's full article "Publishers Weekly Versus the Rest of Us" here.

Over on the Editorial Ass(istant) blog, Moonrat, herself an editor states that she sees this all male top ten list as indicative of two factors in publishing:

1) Not enough books by women are being published relative to the total number being published
2) The books by women that are published are getting less marketing money relative to their counterparts by men, and are therefore catching fewer people's eyes

Read full article here.

Planting Words, Harvesting Snow: A book release celebration

On November 10, at 7:00 p.m. in the Kalamazoo Public Library (Central), Jennifer K. Sweeney, winner of the 2009 James Laughlin Award for the most outstanding second book by an American poet, and Chad Sweeney will read from their newest books. Event open to the public.

"Jennifer K. Sweeney's How to Live on Bread and Music is a remarkable achievement from the hand of a poet with a subtle and compassionate mindfulness."
— Afaa Michael Weaver

"The poetry of Chad Sweeney is exuberant, imagistic, and prophetic. . . . a poetry of awakening, of coming into knowledge."
—Paul Hoover

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of How to Live on Bread and Music, winner of the 2009 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Perugia Press Prize. She is also the author of Salt Memory, which received the Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Nominated
four times for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in Southern Review, Spoon River, Crab Orchard, Hunger Mountain and Passages North where she won the 2009 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. She teaches poetry and writing privately, serves as assistant editor for DMQ Review and lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry: Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVox, 2007). He is the editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds (City Lights, 2009) and coeditor of the literary journal Parthenon West Review. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily and elsewhere. He is working toward a Ph.D. in literature/creative writing at WMU where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press.

Read the article here.