Hoda Fakhari – Hussain, Your Name Will Always Rest Upon our Lips
There is a lovely synchronicity that happens in submissions sometimes, and we are always building in response to the work we receive: this time, the poems, stories, paintings, and photographs spoke – directly or obliquely – to the tensions and harmonies of this embodied condition. Here you’ll find work speaking to and from our physical and spiritual selves and structures, our beloved ghosts and demons, our vulnerabilities and limits, our dazzling strength and will.
We’re pleased to share the results of the TQ3 Poetry Contest, judged by Alicia Ostriker, who noted that it was difficult to choose from twenty such wonderful poems “remarkable both for precision and elegance of form, and force of meaning.” Many thanks to all of you who sent work, and made our choices so difficult. We have published many contest entrants this round, as far more than twenty of the poems we received spoke in voices we could not un-hear.
We have invitations for you, for TQ4: creative nonfiction about your living pedagogies, another Prose Open judged by EJ Levy, and open submissions as ever. Our six week reading period for the fourth issue runs from April 15 – May 27, 2014. We look forward, too, to selecting our “Best of Tupelo Quarterly” print anthology pieces, once we receive this first year’s final round of submissions: the book is scheduled for late 2014/early 2015 production.
Please help us welcome new Associate Editors Lisa Ampleman, Wesley Rothman, Christina Stoddard, Dawn Lonsinger, Brandon Som, Andrea Applebee, Jennifer Perrine, Kayla Sargeson, Marcela Sulak, and Jaime Brunton, whose artistic sensibilities, energy, enthusiasm, tech savvy, and gratefully-received time has come during an intensely busy and successful spring for all of us: we have new books, new conferences, new babies, new jobs, new places, and – thanks to the excellent new people joining in to help us – a new issue.
TQ3 represents, for me, a year of building: from nothing, whole worlds you helped us create. Thank you.
– Jessamyn Smyth