New England Review

New Episode of NER Out Loud

A. E. Kulze: On ladybugs and female mystics

“If you don’t think the lives of women hold as much value as the lives of men, for thousands of years, a thousand years later you’re not going to know very much about the women that existed in those time periods.”

Created, edited, and hosted by NER summer interns Andrew Grossman and Kate Sadoff, NER Out Loud episode 21 presents a reading and conversation with A. E. Kulze, author of the short story “The Ladybugs” from NER 43.2 (summer 2022).

After reading an excerpt from her story, Kulze talks about her writing process, the role of the unconscious in forming the whole, and the joy of a perfect editorial cut. She also speaks more broadly about gender and domesticity, the failures of contemporary feminism, and the Desert Mothers, who’ve been largely forgotten to history.

Listen to the new episode on Soundcloud—and subscribe to NER Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher!

Andrew Grossman and Kate Sadoff are Middlebury College students, both English majors with a focus on creative writing, class of 2023.5. As NER‘s summer podcast and publicity interns for 2022, they also produced NER Out Loud episode 20, featuring coauthors Milia Ayache and Amina Hassan and their play “Splits/kin” published in NER 43.2 (summer 2022) as part of the international feature on Lebanese writers.

Andrew Grossman (left) and Kate Sadoff (right)

NER announces new virtual reading series

NER Front Row

New England Review is pleased to announce our new virtual reading series, NER Front Row. This one-hour, free-to-the-public event pairs Middlebury College students with established writers in a unique format that highlights the resonance of literature when it’s performed aloud. Each Front Row event will begin with a student performance, followed by the author’s reading of the same piece. This intimate presentation will provide audiences with a real-time glance into how different readers bring their distinct experience to a single text. The author and student will then engage in a brief conversation that complicates and enriches the space between interpretation and intent. An audience Q&A, moderated by the editors, will follow.

Our NER Front Row kickoff event featuring poet Matthew Olzmann and Middlebury College student Sylvie Shure will be held on Thursday, November 3 at 8 p.m. EST on Zoom. Register here.

Left: Matthew Olzmann. Right: Sylvie Shure

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route, as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines (selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize) and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Sylvie Shure ‘24.5 is a political science and Russian major from California. She is a YoungArts alumna and a reader for NER, and she spends all of her free time writing. 

In partnership with

Literature & Democracy

Serhiy Zhadan

Kharkiv, Ukraine, April 2022. Photo by David Peinado.

“That’s the appeal of writing: you treat the world like a potential text, using it as material, setting yourself apart, stepping out. You can write about anything, literature allows you to do so without demanding anything back. The poetry of life is identical to the poetry of death.”

Ukrainian poet and writer Serhiy Zhadan is one of East Central Europe’s most important contemporary writers. We are proud to present for the first time in English a poem translated by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy, and two prose excerpts from “The Telephone Book of the Dead,” translated by Magdalena Baran-Szołtys.

“Whatever genre he is working in—poetry, prose (including both fiction and nonfiction), or dramaturgy—he has been passionately, persistently, and systematically giving voice to the voiceless,” notes translator Ostap Kin in his introduction. As Magdalena Baran-Szołtys has written, “Serhiy Zhadan writes about realities and feelings that we all have, but which we often only become aware of in all their force through his texts.”

Introduction: On Serhiy Zhadan by Ostap Kin
[Unknown saints have appeared in the city]
Excerpts from “The Telephone Book of the Dead”

This is the second in our “Literature and Democracy” series. This quarterly column, curated by NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey, presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world, beginning with a focus on Eastern Europe.

NER Launch Reading — Issue 43.3

Join us for a virtual launch celebration!

Featuring Neighbor by Aubrey Levinthal

New England Review, in partnership with the Vermont Studio Center, will host a virtual launch party reading for issue 43.3 on Thursday, October 13, at 7:00 p.m. ET on Zoom. Contributors Da-Lin, D. M. Aderibigbe, Katie Moulton, TR Brady, and Iris A. Law will read their work from the issue, followed by a brief Q&A.

Register for the event here. A private Zoom link will be provided. Registration closes one hour before the event begins.

D. M. Aderibigbe’s debut book, How the End First Showed (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and a Florida Book Award, and was a finalist for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poets. He’s the recipient of a 2022–2023 Artist Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission and other fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the James Merrill House, OMI/Ledig House, Ucross, Jentel, and Boston University. His poems have appeared in the Nation, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He’s an assistant professor in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

TR Brady is a poet and fiber artist. Their work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, and Copper Nickel. TR holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the cofounder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor, a new journal of poetry and hybrid text.

Iris A. Law is a poet, editor, and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. A Kundiman fellow whose poems have appeared in journals such as Hyphen, Menagerie, and Waxwing and are anthologized in They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022), she is also cofounder and editor of the literary magazine Lantern Review. Her chapbook, Periodicity, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.

Da-Lin explores time, death, and cultural clashes in her fiction with a dash of weird. She grew up in Asia (Taiwan), grew again in North America (Canada and USA), and is now experiencing growing pains once more in her third and probably-not-final continent of Europe (Portugal). She has won the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship and the James Kirkwood Literary Award. Her works in progress include a multigenerational mystery novel spanning 100 years of Taiwanese history, a short story collection, and a nonfiction book about the pursuit of nirvana. For more, visit Da-Lin.com.

Katie Moulton is the author of the memoir Dead Dad Club (Audible, 2022). Her writing appears in Sewanee Review, Oxford American, the Believer, Electric Literature, No Depression, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Art Omi, Djerassi, Tin House, and other organizations. From St. Louis, she lives in Baltimore.

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