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"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.

Ira Sukrungruang Wins First Anita Scharf Award

Ira 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.”