NER Award for Emerging Writers 2021

Announcing the Finalists

February 16, 2021

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

Su Cho (41.1)
Justin Danzy (41.3)
Lydia Paar (41.4)
Kate Petersen (41.3)
Laura Schmitt (41.2)
Samyak Shertok (41.4)

This award provides a full scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference—the exact details of which are still to be determined for 2021—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 March.

Congratulations to all six finalists!
We are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in 2020.

Su Cho

Writer’s Notebook

July 17, 2020

Every suburb and city I have lived in was marked by racism. But as a child, I associated those moments with the place—that it’d be better the next place we went—because surely, it couldn’t be like this everywhere.

NER poet Su Cho (“Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana” NER 41.1) remembers the anger that came to her as a child being taught English, the hope that things would be better if that feeling could be poured into a poem, and how the ABCs and the American Dream are not so simple as they’re made out to be.

I was a talkative child, though it is hard for my present self to believe it. Apparently,