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We are pleased to announce The Florida Review‘s new Editor!

David James Poissant is the author of the novel Lake Life, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the story collection The Heaven of Animals, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. He is the former Co-Editor of Sonora Review & the former Fiction Editor of The Chattahoochee Review.

We’re excited to see how Jamie continues to grow and redefine the journal, which has remained a literary biannual in regular print publication since its inaugural issue in 1972.

We are pleased to share our nominees for this year’s Best of the Net anthology. Over the past year, we have published many excellent stories, poems, and essays on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, from writers emerging and established alike. Click the links below to read each work. We wish our 2022 nominees the best!

POETRY

“Prayer with Burning Barn” by Amorak Huey

“Elegy for Recording the Light” by Erin Slaughter

“If Death Is Another Dimension” by Aruni Kashyap

“Grief is a Sudden Room” by Margaret Ray

“A Patient’s Family Asks What Do I Know” by Eric Tran

“Analog” by Yasmina Martin

FICTION

“The Lunch Party” by Jemimah Wei

“Fugues” by Ruth Joffre

NONFICTION

“Somewhat Involved” by Will Howard

“Mother Tongue” by Pragya Agarwal

The Florida Review is pleased to announce the winner and runners-up for the second annual Humboldt Poetry Prize. The Prize, which is funded by an anonymous donor in honor of Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), recognizes the best poems with an environmental focus published in the previous year in The Florida Review and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. The winner receives an award of $500, and each runner-up $250.

This year’s winner and finalists are:

• Lizzie Hutton for “Holiday 2,” winner (TFR 44.2, Fall 2020)
• Margot Douaihy for “The Murder Hornet,” runner-up (Aquifer 7 December 2020)
• Kimberly Quiogue Andrews for “Animal Spirits,” runner-up (Aquifer 23 November 2020)

The winning poem will be reprinted in Aquifer in April of this year; the runners-up will be reprinted in The Florida Review’s Spring 2022 Issue.

This year’s judge was David Keplinger, author of six collections of poetry; winner of Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Cavafy prizes; the Colorado Book and Emily Dickinson awards; recipient of two NEA fellowships; and Professor of English at American University. He had this to say about the winners and runners-up:

Lizzie Hutton’s “Holiday 2” tells a story both inviting and threatening, of a Christmas on the Gulf of Mexico, somewhere in the “cushioned here and now, these privileged / boundaries.” While this world along the shoreline was lavished with gifts and light and merriment, somewhere else a violence was playing out—which moves the speaker to question, with Darwin, the use of poetry. In the end the thing itself, the poem we have of it, affirms something remarkably poignant about knowing things could be otherwise; how the sun and the holiday, for this knowing, assume a more tenuous fragility in the heart.

In Margot Douaihy’s “The Murder Hornet,” the “efficient killer,” the murder hornet, is compared to the enormity of the speaker’s heart. “Size has its advantages,” the poet writes, but the metaphor deepens, and the poem beautifully complicates, as the pull of addiction is soon revealed to be devouring the speaker, rather than any prey. What is stunning here is the moment “the robin / thought I was a chair or tree,” when, in such a state of peace, the heart of devouring disappears, or it expands and expanding becomes a part of everything.

I admire so much the voice of Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’ “Animal Spirits,” which puts me in mind of certain lines of George Oppen I love—I think of “Route”— and the way, reflecting on the old idea that the brain is the seat of the soul, the poet writes, “The brain a bull. The world a bull with its hooves on the world. // O beast that could be gentle. Asleep in the beige autumn of the shaken head.…” What arises in this poem is simultaneously a sparkling intelligence and a sense of history and responsibility, an awareness of the “grinding sludge of machinery” that follows optimism and enterprise in capitalist societies.

Congratulations to the winner and finalists! More info about the prize and its namesake are below.

The Humboldt Poetry Prize

Each year, one winner and two runners-up will be chosen from work published in The Florida Review and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online during the previous calendar year. Candidates will be identified from all categories of works published—those that stem from general and contest submissions, as well as from solicited work that we have published.

Criteria set for the prize include:

• Probing the capabilities and needs of wild animals and challenging their exploitation;
• Exploring wild animal/human relationships;
• Experimenting with and imagining the subjective life of wild animals;
• Interrogating the poetic use of animals simply as metaphors;
• Investigating natural processes, biospheres, and their complexity; and/or
• Pondering awe in the face of nature and/or how to inspire such awe.

Each winner will receive an award of $500; each runner-up an award of $250. In addition, with each poet’s permission (or that of any subsequent book publisher), the poem will be reprinted. Works originally published in Aquifer will be reprinted in the print Florida Review, and vice versa.

Alexander von Humboldt 

The new prize commemorates the legacy of the visionary German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Humboldt’s fascination with natural processes started in childhood, when he earned the nickname “the little apothecary” and continued throughout a fifty-year career as a famous public figure, in which he investigated the fields of botany, minerology, geology, isothermal mapping, meteorology, and geodetic and geomagnetic measurement. During the Napoleonic Wars, he set off to explore Central and South America and, with a French botanist, covered 6,000 miles by foot, horseback, and canoe, studying astronomy, topography, flora and fauna, and the Earth’s geomagnetic field and barometric pressure, as well as mapping 1,700 miles of the Orinoco River. They measured the river phenomenon now known as the Humboldt (or Peru) Current.

Humboldt also succeeded in marrying science and aesthetics, promoting the belief that every element of nature is dynamic and interconnected, and that these forces should be apprehended with both head and heart. In thirty volumes published during his lifetime—and filled with detailed illustrations and lyrical descriptions—Humboldt taught that nature, properly understood, stimulates the imagination as well as the intellect and is a source of beauty and consolation. His close friend Goethe noted that “with an aesthetic breeze” Humboldt lit science in a “bright flame.”

As the first scientist to identify climate zones and view the Earth’s ecology as interconnected and ever-changing, Humboldt anticipated the deleterious impact on wildlife and the biosphere, and he frequently decried the careless environmental destruction of Europe in the colonies. Even as his fame and wealth diminished later in life, Humboldt assisted many young scientists in embarking on their careers. References to his ideas appear hundreds of times in Charles Darwin’s writings, and he profoundly influenced John Muir and generations of conservationists and nature writers.

We at The Florida Review hope to continue to encourage those writers concerned with the human relationship with our planet and with the beauty and power inherent in the Earth in the tradition of the writing of Alexander von Humboldt.

The 2022 Editors’ Prizes are now open for submission! The Florida Review accepts, each year between January 1 and April 16, submissions to our three Editors’ Awards contests in Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction.

Each winner receives publication in the journal and $1,000 (upon publication). All entries are considered for publication. The entry fee includes a 1-year subscription to The Florida Review. 

You can find further guidelines and submit your work on our Submittable page.

We’re thrilled to be featuring the 2021 winners and finalists in our upcoming Spring Issue!

PREVIOUS YEAR’S WINNERS: 

Fiction:

Winner:

“The Archivist,” Austyn Wohlers

Runners-up:

“Gifted & Talented,” Clancy Tripp

“Marthe, Once Maria: A Story of Murder,” Ann Harleman

Nonfiction:

Winner:

“Good Lands of Mercy,” Lee Gallaway-Mitchell

Runner-up:

“Hero Dreams,” Yiming Ma

Poetry:

Winner:

“Your Bitter Girl,” Morgan English

Runners-up:

“Daguerreotype (n.),” John Sibley Williams

“Days of 1985” & “A Boy’s Own Heaven,” David Groff

Congratulations to The Florida Review’s nominees for the annual Pushcart Prize!

The Florida Review

Darius Atefat-Peckham, “I Learn a Language I’m Too Afraid to Speak”

Victoria Maria Castells, “Boy Bands”

Jay Hopler, “love & the memory of it”

Katerina Ivanov Prado, “To Be Good”

Arien Reed, “The Ballad of a Married Trans Man”

MH Rowe, “Vampire Swim”

Aquifer: The Florida Review Online 

Jinwoo Chong, “Fish Run”

Ruth Joffre, “Fugues”

Peter Kispert, “The Second Story”

Khalisa Rae, “Full Moon to Monday”

Hannah Stephenson, “Stanley’s Bowl”

Tobey Ward, “Mother Pass”

The Florida Review is pleased to announce the winner of the 2020-2021 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award: Jill Talbot, for her short story collection, A Distant Town. 

Talbot’s chapbook will be released in Spring 2022. The contest was judged by Coyote Shook, whose chapbook Coyote the Beautiful was last year’s winner and is available for sale.

Shook had this to say about our winner:

“The stories in A Distant Town stayed with me long after I finished reading them. They felt like familiar songs that break your heart by reminding you of the lonely world they exist in, not unlike Crystal Gale or Johnny Cash playing on the radio as one drives over miles of open highway in a western state. I felt like I’d known the author long before I read their work, as though we’d been patrons of the same Christmas-light-decorated roadside bar for years and tipped our glasses to each other even though we weren’t formally introduced. The motif of music and jukeboxes was fitting for this collection, because when the last words evaporated into my mind, I was eager to fish some quarters out of my pocket and hit play again.”

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, The Paris Review Daily, and The Rumpus and has been recognized four times in The Best American Essays. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.

The Florida Review congratulates Jill and thanks all the amazing writers who submitted their work. The full list of finalists is below, and the 2021-2022 contest is now open!!

Finalists

Cole Closser, “Too Many Rooms”

Lena Crown, “Dead Coloring”

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, “Subnivean”

Eleanor Garran, “Against Appearance”

Amina Gautier, “Breathe”

Mark Keats, “Notes for the Afterlife”

Reyes Ramirez, “Brown Eyes, Silver Screens”

Katherine Seltzer, “Amelia”

Kara Vernor, “More Sex”

We’re delighted to share our nominees for this year’s Best of the Net anthology! Thank you so much to all of the amazing authors and artists who have contributed to Aquifer: The Florida Review Online over the past year. We had so many unbelievable pieces to choose from.

FICTION

“The Second Story,” by Peter Kispert

”The Addition,” by Marissa Higgins

NONFICTION

”Mother Pass,” by Tobey Ward

”Mozzy,” by Marisa Crane

POETRY

”There They Are,” by JinJin Xu

”Full Moon to Monday,” by Khalisa Rae

”Longing,” by Okwudili Nebeolisa

”Garbage Day,” by Todd Dillard

”The Night My Numbers Tripled,” by Anne Barngrover

“Person of Interest,” by MICHAEL CHANG

 

Annual Editors’ Awards 2021 Now Open!

The Florida Review accepts, each year between January 1 and April 16, submissions to our three Editors’ Awards contests in Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction.

Each winner receives publication in The Florida Review and $1,000 (upon publication). We also frequently recognize and publish one or more finalists in each genre.

You may also wish to read our general submission guidelines and/or familiarize yourself with our magazine to find out more about what kind of work we publish.

• For prose, submit up to 25 pages (6,500 words) (double-spaced Word doc preferred, but will also accept pdf).
• For poetry, submit up to 5 poems (single-spaced Word doc preferred, but will also accept pdf).
• This is a blind-read contest. The manuscript should have only the title(s) – not the writer’s name or other identifying information on any page. Submit a cover letter (in Submittable) or a cover sheet (if mailed) that includes the manuscript title(s) and the writer’s name, email address, phone number, and mailing address.
• Entry fee of $25 includes a one-year subscription to The Florida Review.
• All submissions will be considered for publication.
• Simultaneous submissions are fine if withdrawn immediately upon acceptance elsewhere.
• Make sure to select the correct contest category in Submittable.

You can find the categories to submit on our Submittable page.

Why do we do this? While the process is gradual and tedious, it is crucial to acknowledge the importance and carefulness of each step in the editorial process and the contributions of those who work within it — writers and editors alike. We appreciate all submissions that we receive here at The Florida Review and welcome diversity, challenges, and risks. We hope to continue to support both the efforts of experienced and emerging writers by providing a platform for them to have their works published.