| ATTENTION readers who love to come through at the last minute to save the day: this is the FINAL day of our annual Member Drive. Our goal is 600 active members by Dec. 1, which will help us safely plan to cover our bare minimum web hosting, tech, and related subscription expenses for 2024. We are so appreciative of the 470 of you who have stepped up so far! If you haven't joined us yet, please consider being part of the community (and getting some perks for yourself!) NOW. |
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New Poetry & Columns
Rumpus Original Column Voices on Addiction: "I'm Not Eating" by Jasmin Lankford
"'I promise I’m not trying to die,' I tell my therapist, and she nods. We both know I’m lying."
Rumpus Original Essay: "Debtors to a Mercy We Never Begged For" by Michael Todd Cohen
"I had imagined, as a child, that I was picked out of something like a hardware store."
Rumpus Original Essay: "Letter to My Mentee (October 26, 2023)" by Youssef Rakha
"Instead of your body in pieces—maybe that’s why—I see you in your ancestral land, among the olive groves."
Kateri Kramer's Sketch Book Reviews: White Magic by Elissa Washuta
"The essays that make up White Magic by Elissa Washuta are bold, inventive, bewitching, and oh-so-raw."
Rumpus Original Essay: "Ghosts in the Mirror" by Kimberly Rooney 高小荣
"I search for signs of change, signs I am growing into the faces of my birth parents. I have yet to find anything more than my own desire." |
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Interviews & Reviews
Emma Bolden interviews Elisa Gonzalez about her poetry collection Grand Tour
"A huge, huge part of my poetic process is just millions of pages of paper."
Lauren Booker reviews Pip Adam's novel The New Animals
"...a genre-jumping and layered novel, by turns hilarious and humane, then spiky with frustration and heartache."
Phyllis Grant interviews Kim Foster about The Meth Lunches
"If I’ve learned nothing else from writing this book, it’s that food is one of the best ways to invite people in."
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| This year, The Rumpus's gift guide is focused on supporting literary organizations and businesses. Shop at a local bookstore, donate to a literary nonprofit, buy some lit themed merch! Discover all of our editor-in-chief Aram Mjroian's gift ideas in our 2023 Gift Guide. |
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| Upcoming Events & Conversations |
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Show Us Your Desk: Tuesday, Dec. 12 with Athena Dixon
Greg Mania's next guest for Show Us Your Desk is Athena Dixon, author of The Loneliness Files.
Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her work is included in the anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol.2: Black Girl Magic and her craft work appears in Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction. Athena is an alumna of VONA, Callaloo, and Tin House and has received a prose fellowship from The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a Second Book Residency from Tin House. She writes, edits, and resides in Philadelphia.
In The Loneliness Files, Athena talks directly to people who feel lonely and disconnected despite all of the ways we are hyperconnected today. Her honesty about her feelings is a lifeline to anyone who finds themselves unmoored and uncertain of themselves in the post-COVID era.
Tune in to The Rumpus Live on Instagram Tues., Dec. 12 at 3pm PST / 6 pm EST to see Athena's desk! |
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Small Press Sunday: Dec. 3 with Milkweed Editions
THE RUMPUS presents: Small Press Sunday hosted by Janet Rodriguez! Small Press Sunday is an inside look at the presses who make your favorite books, including interviews with publishers and editors and insight into why manuscripts are chosen and how books are ushered from submission to bookstore shelves. Our next small press is Milkweed Editions!
Milkweed Editions seeks to be a site of metamorphosis in the literary ecosystem. They take risks on debut and experimental writers, invest significant time and care in the editorial process, and enable dynamic engagement between authors and readers.
Make sure to follow The Rumpus on Instagram and tune in on 12/3 at 3:30pm PT/ 6:30pm ET for a conversation with Milkweed's Publisher and CEO Daniel Slager. |
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In case you missed the news on GIVING TUESDAY. The Rumpus received a generous gift from a donor who agreed to match up to $3,000 in all donations received that day. The bad news is that we've only raised $1,088 ($2,176 with the match!). The good news is that the donor is giving us a few more days to rally support. Can you help us claim the remaining $1,992 by donating now through Monday, December 4?
This is our 1st every match and it means $25 becomes $50, $50 becomes $100, $3,000 becomes $6,000! Here's how your donations help the The Rumpus's mission of supporting risk-taking writers: $50 covers one contributor $100 pays 2 contributors $400 covers 1 month of our current contributor pool funds $3,000 doubled by the donor match = $6,000 covers our current donor contributor pool for all of 2024! If we receive $3,000 in donations by midnight, Monday Dec. 4, we will receive the full match! Help us ensure we don't miss out on this major opportunity and leave unclaimed funds on the table. Your support now through Monday in any amount matters x 2! |
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Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
How to Be a Good Savage by Mikeas Sánchez, translated by Wendy Call and Shook
x Milkweed Editions |
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For our September 2023 - August 2024 selections (and possibly beyond!), we’ll focus on great new poetry collections AND hear from the indie publishers behind the books with our new Indie x Indie Poetry Book Club format!
Join by midnight Dec. 15th, to receive our January Poetry Book Club pick How to Be a Good Savage by Mikeas Sánchez and join our subsciber-only conversation with translators Wendy Call and Shook.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of October and you'll also be invited to an exclusive online video discussion with the book's author + the author's editor + a Rumpus Editor and fellow book club members. Subscribers are encouraged to join in the chat with their questions before and during the conversations. These will take place on the Rumpus' Crowdcast channel and will remain available to subscribers for 1 month after they take place.
About November's Poetry Book Club selection: How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love. Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground. About December's featured indie press: Just as the common milkweed plant is the site of metamorphosis for monarch butterflies, Milkweed Editions seeks to be a site of metamorphosis in the literary ecosystem. They take risks on debut and experimental writers, invest significant time and care in the editorial process, and enable dynamic engagement between authors and readers. They operate as a nonprofit to pursue these ends without overbearing financial pressure. And yet, though profits aren’t their primary focus, helping their authors succeed certainly is. Just so, since their founding in 1980, they’ve published over 350 books of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and now have over four million copies in circulation. They believe that literature has the potential to change the way we see the world, and that bringing new voices to essential conversations is the clearest path to ensuring a vibrant, diverse, and empowered future. |
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| Interested in advertising in The Rumpus e-newsletter or on therumpus.net? Contact Monica at [email protected]. |
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| Letters in the Mail (from authors!) |
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Letters in the Mail from authors is a Rumpus subscription in which you receive an actual, postmarked letter from one of our favorite writers in your IRL mailbox twice a month. All letters are non-promotional, include a creative prompt, and have a return mailing address in case you'd like to write the author back!
Up next, author letters from . . .
December 1: Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Bloodand Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2018. Her reportage is the 2022 winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art. Her animations have been nominated for three Emmys and won an Edward R. Murrow Award. Currently, she is a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library researching the history of the Jewish Labor Bund. (subscribe by November 30)
December 15: Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, is out now from Soft Skull Press. |
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Reader Support Keeps The Rumpus Going! |
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| Founded in 2009 in San Francisco, CA and now based in Asheville, NC with readers and editors all over the US and abroad, The Rumpusis one of the longest-running independent online literary and culture magazines. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Often, we are an emerging writer's first notable publication, which is something we’re really proud of. We believe that literature builds community—and if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Our Membership and subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, help keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability. |
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