Our First Double Issue is Here!
Dear Readers,
We are so thrilled to share our double issue! We've combined our summer and fall issues, plus the winners and runners-up of the 2024 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, to kick off the new year with a ton of incredible writing.
Opening the issue is Ronald Cumming's essay on Austin Clarke's legacy: "Growing Up with Austin: Notes on Post/colonial Pedagogies."
We're so proud to present the fiction and poetry winners of this year’s prize—congratulations to all our winners and runners-up, and thank you to all who submitted!
Fiction
Winner: “Paradise Lost” by Ash Kaul
Runner-Up: “Mom Camp" by Véronique Darwin
Poetry
Winner: “hybridity as a phantom body" by Jordan Redekop-Jones
Runner-Up: “Ballad of an Indonesian Jackal" by Julianna Putri Tan
In fiction, read "no tiger" by Mara Aguilar Egan, "Stars That Wooed Each Other the Length of the Sky" by Su Chang, "Zoo Animals" by Benjamin Johnson, "Double Storey" by Phoebe Wang, "Close All Your Eyes" by Jenna Bly, and "Mother Killer" by Kailash Srinivasan.
Our poetry section features "To the red-winged blackbird who dive-bombs me at 6 am" by Y.S. Lee, "Achieved Dissonance" and "The Road Novel's Final Scene" by Jessi MacEachern, "Burndown" by Tolu Oloruntoba, "Final Boy Dreams of Being a Crop-Top in a Slasher" by Stephen S. Mills, "The Work" by Guy Elston, four excerpts from WOKE MIND VIRUS by MLA Chernoff, "cordage" by Daze Jefferies, "the cripple lamb who cried they were falling & no one came to pick them up" by Liam Strong, "What To Wear, The Black or the Yellow" by Erin Wilson, and "Typhoon Season" by Christine Rivero-Guisinga.
This issue's essays include "Some Kind of Chain" by Tara McGuire, "Without Borders" by Rhiannon Catherwood, "Chasing Ghosts" by Kawai Shan, and "Associative Study of a Blade" by Afton Montgomery.
Our interviews section features conversations between Vanessa Godden and Camila Saldeco, Zehra Naqvi and Sumaiya Matin, Colleen Coco Collins and Sarah MacDonald, and Eve Tagny and Tamara Jones.
Last but not least, read reviews of Benjamin C. Dugdale's The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux by Tom Prime, Vi Khi Nao and Sarah Burgoyne's Mechanophilia by Bridget Huh, Christophe Bernard's The Hollow Beast by Roz Milner, Sadi Muktadir's Land of No Regrets by Salma Hussain, Kate Black's Big Mall by Andrew Sampson, and Angel B.H.'s All Hookers Go to Heaven by Joelle Kidd.
Congrats to all of the amazing writers featured here!
We're sad to share that this is our last issue with the wonderful Katherine Gear-Chambers as our Publicity Manager; thank you so much for all your incredible work, Katherine, and all the best in your future endeavours!
Wishing you a wonderful 2025,
The Ex-Puritan Editors