Editor’s Note by Kristina Marie Darling


 
It is an honor to introduce Tupelo Quarterly’s fourteenth issue. In addition to featuring new work by Sasha Steensen, Julie Carr, Jim Daniels, Aaron Coleman, and many other gifted creative practitioners, we are excited to celebrate the winners, finalists and semifinalists of our TQ14 Poetry Open Prize, judged by Denise Duhamel; the TQ14 Prose Open Prize, judged by Nick Flynn; and the First Annual Tupelo Broadside Prize.

Because it is our practice to hold competitions open to all styles of poetry, and all prose forms, including hybrids of genres and mediums, we read the eight-hundred entries for our three contests with sheer delight. Thank you to everyone who entered our competitions. We are grateful to you for trusting Tupelo Quarterly with your work, and even more grateful to be reminded of all that is possible within a poem, narrative, or prose experiment. Please join me in congratulating D. Gilson, whose poem was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of our Poetry Prize; Robin Clarke, selected by Nick Flynn as the winner of our Prose Open Prize; and Laura Lauth, Anne Marie Rooney, and Susan Tichy, who were awarded the First Annual Tupelo Broadside Prize. These winners were chosen from a number of outstanding submissions, which included previous winners of the Aga Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, former finalists for National Poetry Series, and former editors of nationally circulated publications, among many other prior awards and honors. Because the entries for our Poetry Prizes outnumbered our prose submissions, we have chosen to only name finalists for the Prose Open Prize in order to maintain the high artistic standards of the magazine.

Additionally, we are delighted to feature work that crosses disciplinary and genre boundaries. In our Collaborative and Cross-Disciplinary Texts offerings, it is a pleasure to showcase video poems, poems adapted into experimental films, text and image collaborations, visual essays, sculptural poems, work in the book and paper arts, and much more. I continue to be astounded and heartened by the many forms that collaboration, and artistic innovation more generally, can take.

Additionally, our Editorial Features and Editors’ Selections both continue Tupelo Quarterly’s unique practice of affording a glimpse of the curatorial hands shaping the magazine. Here, you will encounter interviews, conversations, and critical prose pertaining to work that is important and formative to our editors’ own artistic practice. Tupelo Quarterly is, more than anything, a record of a community, its conversations, its confluences. Welcome, and enjoy!