Bill Caraher |

Over at my personal blog, I often bundle a few short posts together on something called “Three Things Thursday.” I mostly do this because it’s alliterative and who in the 21st century doesn’t love alliteration?

So here’s a little festival of stuff for your Thursday enjoyment:

Thing The First

We have reopened submission in poetry and non-fiction! Of course, we’re always reading fiction. If you’ve been working on stuff during The Time of COVID, we’d love to read it and consider it for a the spring 2021 issue.

If you’re wondering whether your work would fit into what we’re doing at the Quarterly, I encourage you to download our latest issue, for free, and check it out. You can download it here.

If you’re curious about who submits and who is accepted at the Quarterly, check out this post that digs a bit into the data from the last issue, but also know that we’re eager to hear new, different, and underrepresented voices. To that end, it’s always free to submit to North Dakota Quarterly. 

Thing The Second

I want to offer a quick word of congratulations to our sister-project, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. The Digital Press is a small, scholar-led, open access press that has some overlap with the editorial board of North Dakota Quarterly and who will work with NDQ in the near future on a book series.

We’d like to draw your attention to their newly published book: One Hundred Voices: Harrisburg’s Historic African American Community, 1850-1920 edited by Calobe Jackson, Jr., Katie Wingert McArdle, David Pettegrew. The book is a companion piece to the new Commonwealth Monument in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania which commemorates the capital city’s significant African American community and its historic struggle for the vote.

Even if you have no connection to Harrisburg or the black community there, I promise you’ll find something compelling in these pages. If you’re not convinced, check out the poem, “To Usward” by Gwendolyn B. Bennett that serves as the book’s invocation. Even if you’re still skeptical, the book is a free download (or as a paperback available for $10 from Amazon.com.)

Congratulations to everyone involved in this project!

Thing the Third

In keeping with efforts to celebrate the right to vote, I was thrilled to learn about the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19. This project has commissioned 19 new works by women composers that debuted with the Philharmonic in February just before COVID-19 disrupted our world.

What I didn’t realize was that the Academy of American Poets also contributed to this project by commissioning 19 poems by women writers. You can read and listen to the poems here or download the-19 page book here.

~

Bill Caraher is the editor of North Dakota Quarterly.