Recently chosen as a NewPages Editor’s Pick, Inside My Pencil by Peter Markus (Dzanc Books, March 2017) recounts poetry lessons taught to children in Detroit public schools. Markus, an award-winning writer and a writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit, sees the magic children hold inside their pencils and shares it with readers in this nonfiction book.
We start with Markus on his first day in the schools and then continue on to read his lessons on similes, metaphor, on the verb to be, the power of imagination. In prose that is poetic in itself, he brings us into the classroom and feeds us lines his students came up with in response. The creativity and imagination of the kids is a joy to read. In one chapter they define what beauty is, and in another, they turn love into metaphors, each line a beautiful display of the magic inside their pencils.
Inside my Pencil is available from the Dzanc Books website where readers can learn more.
The Santa Fe Writers Project hosts their 
The Spring 2017 issue of 
Lawrence Foundation Prize
Erin McIntosh is the featured artist in this 70th anniversary issue of 
“Forgetten” by Jane Zwinger on the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of 
The cover of 
The Drowning Gull
The April 2017 broadside collaboration from Broadsided Press is “
The winner of the 2016 FIELD Poetry Prize, Chance Divine by Jeffrey Skinner, was published at the end of last month. The editors, David Young and David Walker, selected the collection from a group of submissions they say was one of the strongest in the prize’s 20-year history. However, Chance Divine made an impression, the editors “coming back to it with increasing admiration. It’s a notably ambitious book, unafraid to ask large questions about contemporary physics, poetry, and faith, and the relationships between them—but with a wit and inventiveness that lead to unpredictable, exhilarating results.”
Photograph “Paula/Window #1” by Roger Mullins on the cover of v16 i2 of 
A detail of “The History of Nature” by 
And for a dose of humor, Issue #49 of 
In 2015, on the anniversary of his wife’s death as a result ovarian cancer, Hyong Yi wrote 100 love notes and, along with his two children, handed them out to random passers by on the streets of 
This historical tome edited by Anselm Berrigan has just been released from Wave Publishing: “
Editor Chris Agee included a handwritten note with v9 n2 of 
The cover photograph for the Spring 2017 issue of 
The Spring 2017 cover photo of 
While the ship in the bottle is the focal point of 
September 30, 2017 marks the seventh annual global event of 
“
In her feature article for the 
Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
Odd Bloom Seen from Space by Timothy Daniel Welch will be published in April 2017. Winner of the 2016 University of Iowa Press’s Iowa Poetry Prize, Odd Bloom Seen from Space, according to the publisher, “looks at the self amid the ashes of fleeting exultation and uncertainty.” The poems in this debut collection offer wisdom and surprising humor, making for a collection that is “gorgeous, original, and baffling.”
Bauhan Publishing LLC hosts the 
Each year, the Cleveland State University Press holds the Open Book Poetry Competition, the Essay Collection Competition, and the First Book Poetry Competition (all three open until March 31, 2017). The three 2016 winners are set to be published at the beginning of April 2017.
In mid-April, Gallic Books will be publishing Hell’s Gate by Laurent Gaudé. Gaudé’s The Scortas’ Sun is the winner of the Prix Gouncourt, the French literary award given to an author of the best imaginative work of prose each year. Hell’s Gate is a thrilling story following a father as he chases redemption for his murdered son. It explores “the effects of bereavement and grief on a family, and the relationship between the living and dead.”
Dear America,
The winner of the 2016 Orison Poetry Prize, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom by Rebecca Aronson, will be published next month on April 4, 2017. Hadara Bar-Nadav, who selected the winner, calls the collection, “[e]xplosive, turbulent, haunting magnetic,” saying that “[m]ortality and death undergrid Aronson’s fantastical visions, where a child becomes a seagull, a woman turns tarantula, and a house threatens to fill with blood.”