Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The Largest Tampa Review Is Now Shipping . . . .

"Magic Carpet" by Robert Zakanitch hangs near the entrance to Scarfone Hartley Gallery.

Tampa Review 43/44 is the largest hardback issue to date. In fact, at over 150 pages, this double issue is mythic! From cover to cover, there are literary and artistic surprises at every turn, including some playful touches from the editor. It opens with “Exit,” a work of visual art by Scott Treleavan. And it ends with “Dog Days,” by Gilbert Allen, giving an ironic nod to the heat and humidity in which the final design and editorial work on the issue were completed.

Robert Zakanitch, whose influential art has helped shape both Color Field painting and the Pattern and Decoration movement, evokes the mythic imagination in works from his Magic Carpet series, like the one that appears on our cover.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Ira Sukrungruang Wins First Anita Scharf Award

Ira SukrungruangIra Sukrungruang of Brandon, Florida, has been named first winner of the Anita Claire Scharf Award from Tampa Review. His book of poetry, In Thailand It Is Night, will be published in Spring 2013 by the University of Tampa Press and the poet will be invited to read on the University of Tampa campus after the book is published next year.

The Anita Claire Scharf Award is given to support publication of a book of poetry submitted to the annual Tampa Review Prize competition that significantly exemplifies the interrelatedness of visual and verbal art and the interconnections of global culture.  The award is named in honor of the founding editorial assistant, and later associate and contributing editor, of Tampa Review who helped define the aesthetic and global values that are part of the journal’s mission.


“This is a manuscript that Anita would have urged us to publish,” said Richard Mathews, editor of Tampa Review, who worked with Scharf on the journal for more than seventeen years. “Ira has written poems that resonate with love for visual art and the natural environment, with appreciation for the balance and ecology of life. His poems are full of learning and attention to detail without ever being pedantic or arrogant.

“These poems delight us and invite us in,” Mathews said. “We feel comfortable and welcome into a clearly global culture in which Buddha and karma and reincarnation are as natural as patting a dog on the
head or visiting McDonald's for a snack.”



Friday, August 24, 2012

Introducing the Anita Claire Scharf Prize


Anita Claire Scharf was the founding editorial assistant of Tampa Review. She completed an English major at the University of Tampa, where she was also known for her creative writing, especially her poetry, and for her work on behalf of environmental preservation of Tampa Bay and its surrounding wetlands. She was an energetic advocate on behalf of literary and artistic cultural causes, and after graduation she contributed her energy and insights to literary publishing at the University of Tampa.

In 1987, Tampa Review, the faculty-edited literary journal of the University of Tampa, decided to add fiction, nonfiction, and art, with a complete redesign and expansion of the journal, founded in 1964 as UT Poetry Review and dedicated to the publication of poetry. Anita conceived the idea of using a drawing of one of the University of Tampa minarets being unveiled as an image to represent the launch of the expanded and re-designed journal. Two senior art students, Kathy Quesneil and Joang Van Bui, did the drawing of a minaret that was being reconstructed and restored at the time, and the first announcement for the unveiling of the new, enlarged journal appeared in early 1988, the year that Tampa Review 1 was published.

Anita's dedication to poetry, visual art, and ecology are values recognized through the new Anita Claire Scharf Awards, which will be given in her memory. The winner, chosen from the manuscripts submitted to the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, will receive book publication by the University of Tampa Press and the winning poet will be invited to unveil the book and give a reading from it at the University of Tampa. The prize will be awarded for a manuscript that significantly exemplifies or explores the interrelatedness of visual and verbal art and the interconnectedness of global cultures.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Poet Jennifer Key Wins 2012 Tampa Review Prize


Jennifer Key, of Pinehurst, North Carolina,  has been named winner of the 2012 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Key receives the eleventh annual prize for her manuscript entitled The Old Dominion. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes book publication in Spring 2013 by the University of Tampa Press. This will be Key’s first book.

 Jennifer Key teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where she serves as the editor of Pembroke Magazine. She was the 2006-2007 Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and was educated at the University of Virginia where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Her work has won the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading, The Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction, and Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Writers. Her poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Callaloo, and elsewhere. 

Tampa Review judges commented that The Old Dominion “spoke to us with exceptional, insistent images and ideas—a collection of continuously engaging poems and peak experiences” in a “gorgeous debut collection.” 

“Key’s confident, self-assured voice guides the reader through both sweeping and specific landscapes,” the judges said. “The poet’s deft hand at her craft, and her keen, unexpected details make the reader perfectly comfortable on every plane.
“Yet, for all that confidence, Key reminds us that confidence and certainty are not dominion,” they wrote.  “A line from the last poem of the book reads, ‘Lord, can anyone rescue us from ourselves?’  The question remains unanswered, lingering in the reader’s mind. . . .  Fact is, the invention of everything in Key’s world—knowledge, identities, memories, even the invention of poems themselves—is under siege while safely protected in this poet’s immense talent.”

A selection of poems from The Old Dominion will appear as a “sneak preview” in one of the next issues of Tampa Review, the award-winning hardback literary journal published by the University of Tampa Press.  Key’s book will be published during National Poetry Month in April 2013 and launched with a reading tour of Florida sponsored by the Florida Literary Arts Coalition.

The judges also announced seven finalists:  
Amorak Huey of East Grand Rapids, Michigan, for “If the Devil Ever Asks”; 
James May of Decatur, Georgia, for “The Names We Give”; 
Doug Ramspeck of Lima, Ohio,  for “Original Bodies”; 
Thomas Rhinehart of Bellevue, Washington, for “A Shape Plans Faintly”;  
Anna Ross of Dorchester, Massachusetts, for “If Storm,”;  
J. D. Smith of Washington, D.C., for “The Killing Tree”; and 
Kathleen Spivack of Watertown, Massachusetts,  for “Their Tranquil Lives.”

This year the Tampa Review Prize judges also were given the opportunity to select a winning manuscript for a new book publication prize, the Anita Claire Scharf Award.  The announcement of that winner will be forthcoming within a few weeks.
The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry is given annually for a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review, who are members of the faculty at the University of Tampa. Submissions are now being accepted for 2013. Entries must follow published guidelines and must be postmarked by December 31, 2012.

Complete guidelines are available at www.ut.edu/tampareview or by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, University of Tampa Press, 401 West Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, FL 33606.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Announcing the Launch of an Online Companion: Tampa Review Online


The Founding Editors of TROn

top right (left to right): Shane Hinton, Gregg Wilhelm, Resa Alboher, Jose Carmona, Derry Smith, Cooper Levey-Baker, Kossiwa Logan, Connor R. Holmes

second row (left to right): Andi Tomassi, Catherine Duncan Moore, Bradley Woodrum, Perpetual Murray, Martin Fulmer, Andy Taylor, Kurt Stein

missing from photo: Brittany Connolly, Cheryl Isaac, Katherine Lockwood, Travis Kriger, Michael Hardcastle

Last January during the inaugural residency of the low-res MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Tampa, students began work to create an online partner for our long-standing literary journal, Tampa Review.  

In just a few months, they have designed the website, solicited submissions, and worked out the other logistics of running an online magazine. They set a goal to complete their editorial work within ten days from the start of their second residency and to get the first content online at the closing ceremony. And with a growing editorial staff of new students they took these challenges head-on as they worked together in committee to finalize the launch of the brand new site: Tampa Review Online, or as we’ve nicknamed it—TROn.

At the helm of this launch are co-editors Andy Taylor and Bradley Woodrum, a poet and a fiction writer, who have coordinated  the editorial contents while finessing the technical aspects of the website by developing an advanced custom WordPress template. 


What sets TROn apart from the print version of Tampa Review?

TROn Editors: We are able to offer a space for all digital artistic mediums. We publish different content, without the page limits of the printed journal. And whereas the Tampa Review publishes bi-annually, TROn endeavors to publish bi-monthly in much smaller batches. We believe the variety and timing are more in line with an internet audience.


What sets TROn apart from other online literary journals?

TROn Editors: Many online journals still adhere to a print schedule because they’ve come out of the print world. We were born into the online world, and therefore we are not locked into a rigid publishing schedule. Also, as a new publication, we have the openness of an organization that has not established a predominant voice. We aim to accept artists of all aesthetic values and levels of notoriety.

What were some of the obstacles of design, launch, & overall process?

TROn Editors
: Given our ambitious launch date, we had six months to design and build a website, define our online identity, and solicit and process submissions. We can’t speak highly enough of our editors. We had a difficult time coordinating the project while we were spread out across the US. It took many late-night emails and much group discussion, but we made it.

When does TROn launch officially?

TROn Editors: Right now!


Wednesday, June 13, 2012

SPECIAL PRE-PUBLICATION OFFER!

Pre-Order Now
LEARN THE UNTOLD STORY OF DIGITAL TYPESETTING. This book has now been published. It can be ordered at this link.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Tolbert Lanston was a man obsessed with the idea of creating a machine that would provide automated typesetting yet preserve all the nuances of excellence in typography and fine printing. This new book by Richard L. Hopkins is the first to tell the full story story of the man and the company that created and manufactured Monotypes for three-quarters of a century. 

An American Civil War veteran, Lanston has remained a poorly documented hero of the typographic revolution. His Monotype System was the very first digital concept put into daily use in typesetting plants across the globe. The Monotype was a groundbreaking precursor to the computer revolution in the typesetting industry, though it was introduced over seventy years before computerized typesetting systems were developed.  

With insight and appreciation, Hopkins presents the achievements and documents the fascinating history of one of America's milestone inventions. As the founder of Monotype University, founder of the American Typecasting Fellowship, and lifelong typecaster and letterpress printer, Richard Hopkins tells the story as no one else could, informed with authority and experience.

Order the limited edition of Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: An Affectionate Retrospective by Richard L. Hopkins now at significant savings—a special pre-publication price of $60.00 ($75.00 after August 31, 2012). Limited to 300 copies, Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype is a sewn, hardcover book, 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches, printed in full color, with more than three hundred photos and illustrations, 192 pages, plus several appendices and index. This limited edition includes an original, signed, 24-page letterpress keepsake booklet, Going with Goudy to Philadelphia, composed on the Monotype and printed in several colors by the author. 




Friday, May 18, 2012

Tampa Review Profile: Julie Iromuanya

For the past year, fiction writer Julie Iromuanya has been one of the two fiction editors at Tampa Review and a judge for the Danahy Fiction Prize. She has also taught First Year Writing and creative writing courses here at the University of  Tampa. 
Julie just completed her first novel, Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, and her short stories and excerpts from her novel have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Passages North, The Cream City Review, and other journals. Before she slips away next year for an appointment at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago—where she will have the opportunity to teach fully in her fields of creative writing/fiction and Africana literature—we want to introduce her to those of you who haven't had a chance to meet her.
Our questions for Julie caught up with her in the midst of a summer trip through Europe.
What are you doing right now?
Right now as I type I’m on a train from Paris to Madrid. I love trains, but not this particular one. We’re cramped in a stinky four-person sleeper cabin. It’s a little bit claustrophobic and the view is blinded by one of our many bags propped on the windowsill. But I think under this grime is a really good story. Trains are fascinating to me because we’re all strangers coming from and going to different places, but for one single frame in the story of our lives we’re in the same place and it happens to be such an intimate place.  In addition to that, one of the things that struck me during my travels were the various local demonstrations—marches, encampments, even festivals. I took some awful, blurry photos that I don’t think can really grasp the energy of these different movements so I think instead I’ll write a story.

Do you remember your first short story?
I really don’t remember my “first” short story. What I do remember is writing and typing up a lot of stories that involved green slime when I was a kid—and trying, unsuccessfully, to get them published. When I was about eight or nine I even sent one off to Putnam Press and Bantam Books. I wrote a cover letter telling them that my favorite writer was Ann M. Martin and I was in the third grade in Mrs. Cederholm’s class and that I had four siblings. Putnam Press swiftly rejected my efforts with a form letter explaining that they did not read “unsolicited works.” I still remember pulling out my dad’s giant red Merriam-Webster to find the definition of “unsolicited.” When I was in the fifth grade, I made my first venture into writing a longer work, a “novel” entitled Mathew’s Journey. I spent months writing this novel and every week Mrs. Gauthier would have the class sit in a circle so I could read them the latest chapter. I think about it now: What a great teacher to allow such a shy kid a few moments to share her work with her class. It’s strange that I devoted so much of that year to writing that novel—typing it too—and all I can remember now is that it was about a boy who encounters ghosts.

What was it like teaching in Tampa and editing the Tampa Review?
I love the diversity of the student body at UT. Sitting in my freshmen writing classes, I was surrounded by students from all over the globe—the Caribbean islands, Albania, Kenya, Eritrea, Puerto Rico, Morocco, Kuwait, Denmark, Sweden, India, to name a few. On several occasions I witnessed moments when students would stop to ask questions about other parts of the world and find peculiar commonalities. I still remember a Ukrainian student who recognized the African American slave era folk tales that we were studying as the very stories that his grandfather used to share with him when he was growing up in Ukraine.  That was pretty cool. With my creative writers, I really love the talent and interest they have for writing, literature, and even the culture of writing. The Open Mics, conferences, visiting writers series, and the student journal are all student initiated and I love that so many students identify, not just as students, but as writers, and I think that’s so important for developing writers.


What's the most important thing you try to get across when teaching or introducing a new student to writing fiction?
I think we need to read and revise constantly, but I also think it’s important for new writers to develop a thick skin. Rejections come with the work we do, but we still have to press on. I tell my classes this routinely. Then I usually remind them that our artist friends, the actors, get rejections right to their faces but we writers get a typewritten slip in the mail that politely declines our work; it could be worse.

Could you comment on the story behind your piece Only in America? It’s going to be published in the next issue of Tampa Review, and we accepted it long before we had met you—before we knew you would one day come to teach at the University of Tampa . . .
“Only in America” is taken from a couple chapters in my novel, Mr. and Mrs. Doctor. In this section, I set out to develop Job and Ifi, the married couple’s relationship through their child, Victor. Most of the main conflict and tension pivots around Victor. Job and Ifi are counterpointed. They have very different ideas about how they see America at this point in the novel and it’s acted out through the choices they make about how they’ll raise him. I think this is the story of many immigrant families in America—the choices that couples must make about their children because so much of their future is invested in them. The thing is, Victor’s a kid, so he senses the tension in his parents’ relationship but he doesn’t really understand why. So I thought it’d be interesting to tell parts of the narrative from his point of view to develop some interesting dramatic irony. And then he’s also a little bit spoiled and he’s a little bit of a tyrant, so he enjoys mischief. He’s a cyclone from the moment he is introduced in “Only in America.”

How much of your own cultural background was used or reflected in that story?
Coming from an immigrant family—my parents are Nigerian immigrants—I understand some of the questions that immigrants have to ask themselves as they settle into a new land. In terms of the small, tangible details of the story, I remember developing this fascination with artifacts of Americana during garage sale season, just going through piles and piles of kitsch and leafing through this junk in search of a prize. Some of those objects that Victor discovers—the snow globes, the skates, the abacus—are things that I remember from such hunts. I think of an immigrant in some ways as having the same sort of childish fascination with the stories such objects tell about the new culture. I don’t know if people still go to garage sales as much as they did in the eighties, but it was an event. So the immigrant feels out of place at the garage sale, fully immersed in the new culture, but in terms of imagining the world of the immigrants, I tried to place them at the gatherings where immigrants feel the most at home and I remember from growing up that the moments when immigrant voices were the loudest happened to be at big cultural celebrations (birthdays, for example) and pickup games of soccer in the middle of the summer. Although it’s not so much the case with Americans, soccer has a funny way of uniting the various immigrants.


An Interview With Newly Appointed Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen

Poet Lance Larsen (at microphone) with Utah Gov. Gary Herbert. Photo by Trent Nelson
Why does poetry matter?  There's a great quote by William Carlos Williams that touches on this question. “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” This suggests to me that without poetry something in us perishes.  Poems help us cultivate Intuition, honesty, emotional vibrancy—call it what you will.  It wakes us up to the mystery of our own lives.  In the right hands, it is as elemental as air or water. It is also a good dirt, in which we bury that which we hope will grow.

Of all the genres a writer can choose, why choose poetry? Truth be told, the boundaries between genres are breaking down, and many writers work in more than one field.  For instance, besides poetry, I write personal essay and memoir. That said, poetry seems especially well tuned to what cannot be articulated directly—what one feels breaking through between lines, between words.  Poetry is both the most solitary of the literary arts but also the most communal. After 9 / 11 it's what readers reached for. Poetry seems supremely suited to telling emotional truths more piercing than straight fact, more dazzling than the most inventive of fictions.

How would you say that Utah has shaped your poetry? It has shaped my poetry in the same way that my formative years in Idaho have shaped it, and two years in Chile, and five years in Houston, and visits to England, France, Italy, and Spain: all these landscapes have insinuated themselves in subtle ways into my thinking and perceptions, my syntax and grammar. I frequently write about liminal places, where suburbia bumps up against the wilds.

Are there any specific poems that you feel are especially in tribute to or reflective of Utah? In my forthcoming book, Genius Loci, the following poems reflect my evolving sense of place: “Americana,’” “Backyard Georgics,” “Witching for Water, Etc.,” “Tabernacle,” “Owning the Snake,” “Like a Wolf,” and “Late Morning Salvage.”

What funny stories have happened since the appointment? Nothing funny of late, though I’m sure all I have to do is wait.  The former poet laureate, Katherine Coles, has a story worth repeating.  On her first morning as Utah’s poet laureate, she received a phone call at 5:30 a.m. from an older gentleman.  Luckily, she was already up.  Her sense was that he’d been waiting since 4:00 a.m. to phone.  What he wanted to know was this: what should he do with the poems of his deceased wife.  Her response was right on the money: make copies of them at Kinko’s and distribute to family members.

What do you feel the next 5 years will be like? How does one prepare for something like this? Busy, and with lots of frequent flyer miles registered on my odometer.  The poet laureate is a kind of itinerant preacher of the word (lower case), or a Johnny Appleseed of the literary artifact.  In either case, it’s not so much shoe leather I’ll be wearing out, but the tires on my Toyota Corolla.  The only preparation is to write lots of poems and to memorize the counties in your home state.  I have some homework to do concerning the latter.  Concerning the specific duties I’ll take up: one learns by doing.

What is your advice to young poets? The usual things: read yourself silly; keep a journal; treat writing like a vocation not an avocation, which means sitting your butt down at least an hour or so a day; don’t quit your day job just yet; become an aficionado of something, whether it be quarter horses, Andrei Tarkovski films, Chinese porcelain, or the art of hybridizing daylilies.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Congratulations to Lance Larsen! Tampa Press Poet Named Utah Poet Laureate.

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, right, announced Lance Larsen as the state's new poet laureate on Thursday, May 3, 2012, at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City.


University of Tampa Press poet Lance Larsen was appointed Poet Laureate in ceremonies earlier this month by the Utah Governor. Lance, who won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection entitled In All Their Animal Brilliance (University of Tampa Press, 2005), will serve a five-year term as Utah’s Poet Laureate. The University of Tampa Press will be publishing his fourth collection of poems, Genius Loci, this fall and also previously published his third book, Backyard Alchemy, in 2009. You can read details of the appointment in the Salt Lake Tribune at this link. And you can hear a short reading by Lance at the Utah Division of Arts website.

Titles from Lance Larsen published by the University of Tampa Press include: Backyard Alchemy and In All Their Animal Brilliance. Larsen's forthcoming book of poetry Genius Loci will be available in Fall 2012.


Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Caladesi Island Cookbook Satisfies Taste for Local Foods and History

An appetite for regional cooking and a taste for local history will both find satisfaction in an appealing new cookbook from the University of Tampa Press.   
         
From main courses like “Smoked Fish Pioneer Style” and “Hog Island BBQ Ribs” to sweet treats such as “Sea Foam,” and “Belleview Hotel Prune Whip,” the Caladesi Cookbook offers tempting recipes for seafood, salads, vegetables, breads, and desserts.

Title: Caladesi Cookbook: Recipes from a Florida Lifetime, 1895-1992
Author: Myrtle Scharrer Betz | Compiled by Terry Fortner & Suzanne Thorp
Price: $15 Paperback  (ORDER HERE
)

Lights Out In Paradise // An Evening with John Blair


Last week during John Blair's Florida reading tour, celebrating National Poetry Month and the official release of his Tampa Review Prize poetry collection, The Occasions of Paradise, the Texas poet arrived at the University of Tampa's Scarfone/Hartley Gallery for his campus reading.

The stage was set amidst the gallery's striking current art exhibit and many eager fans and readers arrived early to grab a seat. And yet no sooner did the poet set foot on campus than the lights went out. (Reportedly due to a squirrel who fought his last fight with a power transformer down the block). It was quite a scene as emergency measures took over, and like a plot device out of The Thomas Crown Affair, all the museum doors magnetically began to close with a loud release of their latches – sealing the room in darkness.

And yet the night of poetry went on. Propping open the emergency doors, all attendees pitched in to move the seats from inside the gallery to the early-evening-lit vestibule outside its doors. John Blair, with Kindle in-hand, read from his prize-winning collection with the charm, passion, and wit found in his books — stopping often for asides or annotations and to tell some of the many stories which helped to shape these poems.

This was the final reading in the annual Writers at the University series, sponsored by the Department of English and Writing in the College of Arts and Letters in collaboration with the Florida Literary Arts Coalition. The series, free and open to the public, will resume with the start of the Fall 2012 academic year.

Host Richard Mathews introduces John Blair, inviting him to the podium
without light or microphone as the sun begins to set and daylight fade.



Friday, February 17, 2012

Mark Krieger Wins Sixth Annual
Danahy Fiction Prize

Mark Krieger of West Bend, Wisconsin, has been selected as winner of the sixth annual Danahy Fiction Prize by the editors of Tampa Review. He will receive a cash award of $1,000 and his winning short story, “Scar,” will be published in Tampa Review 43/44, forthcoming in summer 2012.

Krieger's fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Tampa Review, Shambhala Sun (nonfiction), KNOCK, and THEMA. Other works have been finalists for the 2010 Narrative Winter Story Contest and the 2009 Danahy Prize.

His education in writing is informal: simply, the countless hours, months, and years he has spent with a pen and his imagination working on the craft, getting feedback from friends, and studying admired works on his own.

“I've never cared much for formal education,” Krieger says. ”I've always been too much of a Huck Finn, a loner, and a bit stubborn. From a very young age, I've always preferred doing things my own way and relying heavily on my instincts. It’s the hardest path, but the best I think.”

He finds it hard to explain the origins of ”Scar.”

“I don't know where the story came from, outside of the research I've done involving hard scrabble street kids and crime in general, ” he says. “It is the darkest story I've ever written. Each time I'd returned to it after letting it sit, I had to fight the moralistic urge to change matters. In short, I wanted to change the ending. But when push came to shove, I found myself emptying office garbage cans and futzing around with the arrangement of my rock collection on my desk. In other words, what is commonly known as writer’s block, I've found to be old trusty instinct letting me know (semi-sarcastically), through immense un-inspiration, to drop the pen and back away from the story. It's done.”

Krieger goes on to say, “Good storytelling, for me, is like dreaming or meditating. It can't be forced. You have to get out of your own way, letting go of agendas and desires and just let the dream come of its own. If you come to the dream and try to push it along lines it doesn't naturally want to follow you'll lose the power of its message.”

Friday, January 27, 2012

Moving Days: Part Three

Photograph by Alina Ryabovolova. Carl Mario Nudi (left), TBAS Letterpress Coordinator, at the Vandercook 4 with Nathan Deuel (right).
It was a sticky summer day not that long ago when the necessity of moving the Tampa Book Arts Studio became apparent. The nuances of the move had seemed daunting when laid out on blueprint paper and tiny measuring-tape-markings blocked out on an empty stone floor. And for weeks, as this move progressed, it was the slog of many to endure – and many to whom we are all grateful. Though now on a grey Florida winter afternoon and after at least a hundred-tons of precise pushes, pulls, and slight nudges – it is safe to say that the new Tampa Books Arts Studio has been reborn at 214 North Boulevard, Tampa, Florida.

[Continue to the TBAS Blog to Continue Reading]

An Editor's Honor

Jeff Parker, UT MFA Director (left) / Richard Mathews (right) 
Photograph by Alina Ryabovolova
A new research article in the 25th Anniversary Issue of Sensations Magazine, a literary journal published in Lafayette, New Jersey, lists our very own Richard Mathews as one of the four longest-serving literary magazine editors currently active in America. With him and sharing this honor are Barney Rosset of Evergreen Review and two others. The full article with official rankings of the top-50 editors is available in the latest issue at http://sensationsmag.com. The research was conducted by long-standing publisher and executive editor of Sensations Magazine, David Messineo.

Details from the Sensations Magazine Press Release:
"Written by Publisher David Messineo, our new published research article "50 Over 25 - Honoring the Longevity of America's Literary Magazine Editors and Poetry Reading Series" offers a detailed list of currently active (35) and retired or deceased (15) American litmag editors, poetry editors, and fiction editors who have offered 25 or more years of service to America's writers.  Two independent book publishers who have been active in the poetry/fiction publishing genre for 25+ years, and 5 others expected to reach 25 years of service by 2015, round out the first portion of the article.  A detailed list of the longest lasting, still active poetry reading series in America — all operating 25 years or more — closes out the article.  The article is published in Sensations  Magazine Issue 49, Part 2, Winter 2011."