New England Review

Meet the Readers

Eric James Cruz

“What obsessions are my fellow writers pursuing?  How are others using language as a means to discover and question the world around them?”

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER? 

My calling is to help young people act upon their humanity by cultivating their intellectual and emotional lives. As a high school English teacher and director of the creative writing and literary magazine program at Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio, Texas, I daily get to see my students grow in their awareness of themselves and the larger world they are coming into. My life is pretty rich: teacher, poet, husband, father. These roles intersect into what I know is a rare life, one in which my labor, passion, and love all inform one another.   

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?

On the advice of my mentor and friend Matthew Olzmann, I got in contact with Jennifer Chang to see if I was a good fit to read for NER. I felt my love for reading poetry coupled with my desire to amplify great work by new and established writers might fit into the ethos of NER. I also wanted to be a reader for NER in order to grow my understanding of the larger conversation happening in poetry at this moment in time. What obsessions are my fellow writers pursuing? How are others using language as a means to discover and question the world around them? These questions interest me greatly, and now, nearly a year into my tenure, I can honestly say that my perspective and appreciation of the work my fellow poets are putting into the world has deepened me in ways large and small.  

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication? 

I have not yet read a submission that later got selected for publication, but I can say that many of the works I’ve read during my time at NER have left me filled with wonder and that stillness that only good poetry can elicit. I’ve had many wonderful conversations with Jennifer about great pieces throughout my time at NER. 

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission? 

My process is very measured because I feel this immense responsibility to read work carefully and deeply. It is insane to me that I get to have a hand in deciding what is and what is not published, so I usually read a submission two to three times to make sure I’ve honored the time and effort put in by an artist. Poems that resonate with me ultimately uncover further complication, nuance, or complexity.  I love poems that investigate the relationship between the exterior and interior worlds we inhabit. Poems that utilize the music of language, the breath of the line, and the rootedness of concrete language as a way to invite the reader into active participation with the work also capture my attention.  

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally? 

The poem “Like a Wide River” by Paul Otremba is one of my favorite poems from NER in the last four years. There is such a beautiful dance between lineation, line spacing, image, and music in the piece; it is a wonderful fusion of content and form.  

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits? 

A trusted poetry teacher of mine once told me that if I ever hoped to be a great poet that I must “daily participate in the life of poetry.” As I’ve thought about this advice over the years, I’ve come to realize that being a great poet is not about the number of publications, awards, or how well known one is a poetry personality; it is about how much one reads, takes opportunities to grow in one’s craft, writes when inspired and when it is just too hard, and, above all else, celebrates the larger community of fellows artists who are on a similar journey to you. Reading for NER allows me the opportunity to practice being a good literary citizen. It also inspires and encourages me to lend my voice to the larger chorus and, however big or small my part may be, appreciate the chance I have to sing within it.  

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend? 

I love to read poetry, science fiction, political theory, and, as nerdy as it may sound, craft essays!  Currently, I can’t put down Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self Regard or Jim Harrison’s The Essential Poems. In both books, I get to engage with the minds and hearts of two artists that are entirely original, fierce, and willing to use the platform of language to interrogate, dismantle, and help reshape the world around them.   

Our staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

Meet the Readers

Tiana Nobile

“I was excited for the opportunity to read what people are thinking and feeling in the age of COVID-19, climate change, political unrest, etc., etc., etc. What are our obsessions, fears, desires, and griefs right now?”

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER? 

I was born in Daejeon, South Korea, grew up in the suburbs outside New York City, and have been calling New Orleans home for the past thirteen years. When I’m not reading for NER, you can usually find me in the kitchen making bread or pasta, going for walks on the bayou, or hanging out with my partner and our cat, Empy.

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?

I can’t believe it’s been almost a year since I started reading for NER! I was excited for the opportunity to read what people are thinking and feeling in the age of COVID-19, climate change, political unrest, etc. etc. etc. What are our obsessions, fears, desires, and griefs right now? I love the insight reading offers into the sense of the moment we find ourselves in.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication? 

Yes! “Thank You for Reminding Me” by Emma Trelles and “Frances” by Burnside Soleil.

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission? 

I’m looking for a piece with emotional resonance, striking imagery, and creative syntax. In terms of process, I read every submission at least once. For the ones that stand out, I wait a week or two before returning to see if they still hold the same impact or if my reading of it has changed or evolved in any way. After the second reading, I’ll go back and read closely once or twice more before making a final decision. This way, I’m sure I feel strongly about a piece before sending it up the ladder.

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally? 

I read both Emma Trelles’s and Burnside Soleil’s poems during my first round of submissions, and both were super memorable. I loved walking through Burnside’s poem, the visceral experience of people interacting with nature. And the diction and sonic qualities of Emma’s poem lit up all of my senses when I first read it.

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits? 

I haven’t been writing much lately, but I am reading a bunch, and it’s been lovely to integrate NER submissions as part of my reading rotation.

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend?

I’m a member of the adoptee collective, The Starlings Collective, and our book club pick this month is Surviving the White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll, which is a memoir about growing up as a black transracial adoptee in rural New Hampshire. Highly recommend! I’m also trying to read more classics this year and just finished Giovanni’s Room, my first James Baldwin – soooo good.

Our staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

Meet the Readers

Marisa P. Clark

“The stories I forward tend to feature characters who live on in my mind long after the story reaches its conclusion; if I keep wondering how they’re doing, that’s a good sign.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER? 
I was born and grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, spent my young adulthood in Atlanta, and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, after I completed my PhD in fiction writing at Georgia State University. I teach at UNM, and I write—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, whatever shows up for me on a given day! Favorite pastimes and preoccupations include spending time with my parrots and dogs, walking (especially at night, in conjunction with stargazing), music, yoga, dreams, Jungian psychology, coffee, and birdwatching from my back and front porches. I look forward to more travel, concerts, and trips to the gym when the pandemic and my related anxiety abate.

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?
I responded to a call for fiction readers that came out in spring 2017, and I’ve been reading for NER ever since. I leaped at the chance because of how much I’ve enjoyed my past work with other literary magazines, Five Points and Blue Mesa Review among them.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication? 
Just one, “The Length in Six Strokes,” by Sharbari Zohra Ahmed, in NER 40.3. And I still think about the one that got away—we were in the final stages of accepting the story when it got picked up by another magazine.

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission? 
Stories aren’t one-size-fits-all, so I’m reluctant to open a submission and “look for” something specific in it. I try to read every story with curiosity, openness, and hope. What journey will this story take me on, whom will I get to meet, where will I get to go, and what will happen along the way? What will surprise me? What will move me? Who will usher me through the events? When I read an especially promising story, I save it to reread later so that I can gauge what sticks with me, what haunts or disturbs or otherwise strikes me. The stories I forward tend to feature characters who live on in my mind long after the story reaches its conclusion; if I keep wondering how they’re doing, that’s a good sign.

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally? 
I’m continually impressed with the quality and range of creative work in the magazine, but admittedly, the published pieces that remain in my memory tend to be by writers I know, like Blas Falconer, Jenn Givhan, Dana Levin, and (watch out, world!) Benjamin Garcia. I also linger over the poetry and prose by the folks whose books have a home on my bookshelves. For personal reasons, one especially memorable essay was Traci Brimhall’s “Archival Voyeur: Searching for Secrets in Amelia Earhart’s Lost Poems” (40.4); I’ve been working on a series of poems about a character named after the aviatrix, and this essay inspired happiness and deeper research.

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits? 
If anything, it encourages me to keep sending out my own work. Reading for NER strengthens my understanding of what goes on behind the scenes of top-tier literary journals. I’ve read a number of strong stories that we aren’t able to publish but that I’m sure will find a good home as long as the author keeps looking. So I keep looking too.

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend? 
You’re risking an essay-length response! It’s summer, so I’m reading only for pleasure, everything for pleasure.

In the past couple of months, I’ve finished Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s Crow Planet; Meg Day’s Last Psalm at Sea Level; Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers; an Amelia Earhart biography called East to the Dawn, by Susan Butler; One Art (Elizabeth Bishop’s collected letters) and her complete poems (both rereads); The Thing about Jellyfish, by Ali Benjamin (loaned to me by my 11-year-old friend Charisma); W.S. Merwin’s Garden Time; and Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Year of the Snake. Right now I’m reading Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, and up next are Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, Lauren Hough’s Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, and Louise Glück’s Meadowlands. I’m also finding a lot to enjoy in NER 42.2.

Some recent books that have had an especially powerful and lingering impact on me are Jericho Brown’s poetry collection The Tradition; Alexander Chee’s memoir How to Write an Autobiographical Novel; the novels Jubilee by Jenn Givhan and Under the Rainbow by Celia Laskey; and the middle-grade graphic novel Snapdragon by Kat Leyh.

I recommend them all!

Our staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff read

Meet the Readers

Rick Canning

“…on a lucky day you read a story that truly deserves an audience. And if you can help it find that audience, you feel a little glow.“

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER?
I started out in Oklahoma City, born and raised there. In my twenties and thirties I moved around quite a bit, the way people who have energy and ambition tend to do, Texas, Georgia, etc., for graduate school and work and family. There was a prolonged stay in New Hampshire, where I made the acquaintance of the New England Review. For the last five years or so I’ve lived in the ocean playground of Canada—Halifax, Nova Scotia.

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?
Carolyn Kuebler published a story of mine in 2007, and we stayed in touch over the years. In 2014 (I think) she contacted me about becoming a reader, and I was happy to say yes. I’ve been on staff ever since.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication? 
Yes, and that’s gratifying. You read a story, you feel strongly that it deserves an audience, and you play a small part in helping it find one; you can’t help but be pleased. During my first year with the magazine, I had a run of luck and two or three stories I recommended made it into print. Then there was a long barren stretch. I was still reading and recommending some strong stories, of course, but for whatever reason, they weren’t making that final cut. There are so many stories, and so many good ones, it’s bound to ebb and flow in that way. 

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission?
When I get a new batch of stories, I try to read a couple every day, usually in the morning, when my brain is as clear as it’s going to be. And that’s pretty much it for my reading process: a cup of coffee and a desktop computer. What I’m looking for is of course a story that knocks me out. A story that knows what it’s trying to do and does it. I’m drawn to writers who are in control—word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page—the whole way through, though without making too much display of that control. Of course too much control can be suffocating, or capricious, a simply boring. But I want to feel I’m in good hands, and that’s usually apparent very early in a story. I also look for humor; I may tend to grade on a curve for stories that make me laugh.

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally? 
Unfair question! There’s too much!  But I can single out Ella Martinsen Gorham’s “Protozoa” (39.4).  Funny, smart, purposeful—just a bang-up piece of writing; in fact it was included in the 2019 edition of Best American Short Stories. I take a tiny extra bit of pride in it because I was first reader of that piece. As I mentioned above: on a lucky day you read a story that truly deserves an audience. And if you can help it find that audience, you feel a little glow. Well, if that story goes on to win a prize or recognition (and a yet wider audience), then your head starts to swell. Or mine does. I carried a copy of Best American Short Stories around with me for a month and made all my friends buy me drinks!

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits? 
Reading for NER has made me more humble, I’d say. There’s a lot of talent out there, a lot of strong stories. In a more practical way, it’s made my stories shorter, not because long stories can’t be good, or even great, but because lit mags can publish only so many stories per issue. The longer the story, the longer the odds it faces. Also, I’ve gotten to the end of many stories and thought, If only it were two (or three or four) thousand words shorter. In other words, the piece is longer (in my opinion) than it needs to be, sometimes significantly longer. So I try to take that to heart. Start faster: that’s another lesson that a few years of reading submissions has driven home. 

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend? 
I bounce between fiction and nonfiction, history mainly, whatever takes my fancy. Louis Menand’s recent book about Cold War culture, The Free World, is very good. He’s a clear writer, a good explainer, and has a sense of humor. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also smart. On the fiction side, in recent years I’ve been reading more thrillers and mysteries. I’m a fan of Mick Herron’s Slough House books. The first is called Slow Horses and there are five or six others featuring the same characters. They’re funny, sharp, and very well plotted.

Our staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

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