It is with enormous pleasure that we announce the finalists for the sixth annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. 

Leslie Bazzett (40.2)
Cassandra J. Bruner (40.3)
Ina Cariño (40.3)
Anne Liu Kellor (40.3)
Emily Pittinos (40.1)
D. J. Thielke (40.3)

This award provides a full scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is given annually to an emerging writer who offers an unusual and compelling new voice and who has been published by NER in the past year. The winner will be announced in February.

Congratulations to all six finalists!
We are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in 2019.

We’re delighted to announce that Middlebury College has been approved for a $10,000 Art Works grant to support the publication and promotion of the New England Review and its “NER Out Loud” programs in 2020. 

The Art Works funding category supports projects that focus on public engagement with, and access to, various forms of excellent art across the nation; the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence; learning in the arts at all stages of life; and the integration of the arts into the fabric of community life.

Sign up here for news about NER and its authors, and to get poems, stories, and essays delivered straight to your inbox.

For more information on projects included in the Arts Endowment grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.

Copies of the winter issue shipped to subscribers this week, and samples have just been posted online. Order your copy today—in print or ebook—and discover first fictions by Kira Procter and McKenna Marsden, a new English translation of Chinese poet Shang Qin, and 13 poets new to NER. Also, in nonfiction:

• John Guare talks about luck, joy, and persistence in his life as a playwright, in an interview with Nathaniel G. Nesmith
• Traci Brimhall looks for clues among Amelia Earhart’s lyric fragments 
• Gregory Johnson returns to the packinghouse of his Tennessee childhood
• Ben Miller finds salvation among the cat poems, railroad ditties, and unfinished haiku of Davenport’s Writers’ Studio  
• Molly Gallentine visits the former Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded
• Sean Hill encounters the Confederate battle flag, from the Dukes of Hazzard to a Montana science museum
• Owen Wister reflects on Ulysses S. Grant’s divided personality

And much more! See the full table of contents, or better yet, subscribe and get a copy in print or ebook today.