The current issue of Mosaic, the twelve-year-old quarterly edited by Ron Kavanaugh in New York City, contains a series of lesson plans and a reading list for secondary school educators to use in the classroom. The new feature, produced in conjunction with the Literary Freedom Project, is aimed at encouraging the use of work from writers of African descent in teaching subjects such as history, social studies, and English.
New Ohio Review, the three-year-old biannual publication edited by Jill Allyn Rosser in Ohio University's creative writing department, now features audio recordings of contributors reading their work from the journal on its Web site. Recent offerings include clips of poets Stephen Dunn and Kim Addonizio (with cello accompaniment by Thea Lawson) and nonfiction writer Brenda Miller.
Shortly after the Massachusetts Review celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last year, editor David Lenson announced that, after eight years, he would step down as one of the editors of the quarterly. He is succeeded by Jim Hicks, who teaches comparative literature at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where the journal is published.
Monkeybicycle, the biannual magazine founded in 2003 and acquired by Dzanc Books in 2007, is following the lead of pioneering literary journals such as Electric Literature and Narrative, offering its issues in Kindle format. And to keep the journal's online content lively (it's updated twice a week), the editors are currently considering submissions of one-sentence stories as well as the poetry and fiction under 1,500 words that they typically publish.
The third issue of the LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts, a biannual journal published out of the English department at the University of Nevada in Reno, will be released early this year and will include work from the winners of the second annual Sparrow Prizes in Poetry and Prose. The editors of LBJ, which was launched in 2008 to encourage "an appreciation and practice of environmental literature" and "collaboration between scientists, conservationists, and artists," will consider poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on an avian theme through April 15 for upcoming issues.
The latest issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the twelve-year-old journal published by Dave Eggers that is notorious for its innovative packaging (one issue was delivered in a cigar-type box, another as a stack of mail), was released late last year in what some might consider the not-so-innovative format of a "one-time only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper." Called the San Francisco Panorama, the issue is "an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do."
Launched three months ago as "the first literary magazine for your iPhone," Scarab has already featured work from poets such as Tony Hoagland, David Rivard, Charles Simic, and Chase Twichell. Each issue of the journal, which is available exclusively through iTunes for $2.99 (20 percent of which is divided among the contributors), includes poetry, fiction, essays, and an interview, along with audio recordings of the authors reading their work.
