Congratulations to NER poet Wayne Johns for the selection of “Delirium” for the 2014 edition of Best New Poets. “Delirium” first appeared in NER 33.4.
Congratulations, as well, to all fifty emerging poets who will appear in this year’s anthology, NER contributors Richie Hofmann, C. L. O’Dell, and Jacques J. Rancourt among them!
Read the complete list of this year’s poets here.
As many of our online readers already know, at the end of this summer NER’s poetry editor C. Dale Young will be leaving his post after nineteen years on our masthead. His last issue as poetry editor, due out in October, will feature 20 poems he selected over the years and highlight the range of work and joy of discovery he brought to the magazine. C. Dale began reading poetry for NER as a medical student in the mid-nineties, 
continued on as associate editor, and then became poetry editor in 2000. We have been incredibly fortunate to have had such a passionate and discerning editor selecting work for our pages for so many years, and we salute C. Dale for his versatility, reliability, and dedication. We will miss him in ways we can’t yet imagine!
But we are equally fortunate to be able to announce that our new poetry editor wil
l be Rick Barot. Rick is not only an accomplished poet but he is also a devoted reader and teacher of poetry with wide-ranging taste and vision. He served as a reader for NER for a number of years, in between publishing his poetry and essays in our pages. (Read his most recent essay, The Image Factory.) He begins as poetry editor in September.
Rick has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Threepenny Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, where he is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, PLU’s low-residency MFA in creative writing. Sarabande will publish his third book of poems, Chord, in 2015.
We look forward to working with Rick in his new role, and to bringing our readers an ambitious and exciting selection of poetry in the issues to come.
We are pleased to congratulate NER contributor Victoria Chang on being awarded a silver medal in the California Book Awards. The California Book Awards are among the oldest literary awards in the United States, and were one of the first to recognize the talent of John Steinbeck, who received three Gold Medals between 1935 and 1939.
Chang was recognized for her new collection, The Boss (McSweeney’s Poetry Series), and is the first Asian-American poet to win an award in the organization’s long history. She is the author of two other books of poetry: Salvinia Molesta (2008) and Circle (2005), which won the Crab Orchard Review Open Competition Award. She has been featured in several issues of NER, most recently in 33.1.
Congratulations to Victoria!
Order a copy of The Boss from McSweeney’s.
The new issue of NER has just been shipped from the printer, and a preview is available here on our website. A startling array of new voices is accompanied by new works from established authors, in this first issue from editor Carolyn Kuebler.
New poems by Elizabeth Spires, William Fargason, Troy Jollimore, David Hernandez, Kelli Russell Agodon, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Elizabeth T. Gray Jr., Carl Phillips, Rachel Richardson, Campbell McGrath, and Melissa Stein appear alongside new fiction from Glen Pourciau, Ricardo Nuila, Laura Lee Smith, David Guterson, Polly Rosenwaike, and Steven Heighton.
In essays, Jehanne Dubrow walks with Phillip Larkin, Francis-Noël Thomas examines Flemish painting, Rüdiger Safranski writes of Richard Wagner’s work to create a revolutionary “mythos,” Joshua Harmon takes us for a spin with the Cocteau Twins, Kathryn Kramer learns from her father in and out of the classroom, and Larry I. Palmer integrates the Phillips Exeter barbershop of the 1950s. Translations of prose by Valeria Luiselli, Juan José Saer, and Esther Tusquets reveal three very different Spanish-language authors from three countries, and cover artist Raïssa Venables contributes a photograph that disorients even as it invites readers inside.
See the full table of contents, and order a copy today. Or better yet, subscribe!