Wandeka Gayle's New Short Story Wins the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award | October 2022
Wandeka Gayle’s new short story, “Walker Woman” receives the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.
Read “The Wish” by Wandeka Gayle in Blood Orange Review’s issue 11.2.
Read Kristine Langley Mahler's essay "Alignment" in Her New book Curing Season | October 2022
Kristine Langley has published a new book Curing Season with West Virginia University Press.
Read details about the book on Kristine Langley Mahler’s website.
Read the piece she wrote for Electric Literature in conjunction with the book launch.
Read Kristine Langley Mahler’s essay, Alignment, in issue 12.1, of Blood Orange Review.
2022 Emerging Writers Contest Results | August 2022
We are delighted to announce our first ever Emerging Writers Contest results, including Mylo Lam (pictured), who won first prize for his poem “Tri Nhan 004 Confesses to Tri Nhan 206 at a Beach.” All winners and honorable mentions will be published in the next issue of Blood Orange Review, in February 2023.
Blood Orange Review new issue 12.2 is available | December 2020
We are delighted to announce our new issue, 12.2, featuring our 2020 contest winner.
Interview with Lois Ruskai Melina | December 2020
Conducted by Writing Through the Body
Lois Ruskai Melina was interviewed in Writing Through the Body about her experience as a writer.
Read the interview here.
Read Lois Ruskai Melina’s short story, Metamorphosis, in issue 9.1 of Blood Orange Review.
The Grammar of Untold Stories | November 2020
Essay collection by Lois Ruskai Melina
Lois Ruskai Melina has published her book titled The Grammar of Untold Stories.
Watch the livestream reading: Lois Ruskai Melina with Paulann Petersen on Annie’s Blooms Books.
Read Lois Ruskai Melina’s short stories, Fire Dance, in issue 11.2 and Metamorphosis, in issue 9.1 of Blood Orange Review. Metamorphosis is the first essay of The Grammar of Untold Stories collection.
Through a Small Ghost | October 2020
Collection of poems by Chelsea Dingman
Chelsea Dingman has published Through a Small Ghost with University of Georgia Press.
Read Chelsea Dingman’s poems, Nocturne in the Aftermath of Violence and When Depression is the Catalyst for Faithlessness, in issue 11.1 of Blood Orange Review.
Arrest Record | October 2020
Essay by Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper has published an essay titled Arrest Record with The Rumpus.
Read Desiree Cooper’s essay, Sex Coffee, in issue 8.1 of Blood Orange Review.
Tigers, by Kim Young | October 2020
Tigers is an exploration of a series of mutigenerational landscapes of the feminine–female adolescence, womanhood, motherhood, and personal revelation.
Read Kim Young’s poem, “I Dreamed of a Tiger”, here in Blood Orange Review, Issue 11.2.
Nikky Finney Wins the Wallace Stevens Award | September 2020
Nikky Finney, the winner of the 2011 National Book Award
Nikky Finney is winner for Head Off & Split and author of Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (2020), has won the 2020 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Read her interview with Kelly Norman Ellis here, or hotbeds and poems from her new volume in Blood Orange Review’s current issue.
Nikky Finney served as Poetry Judge for Blood Orange Review’s 2020 Contest. Read her selections in the upcoming issue of Blood Orange Review, due out in December 2020.
Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories | September 2020
Book by Donna Miscolta
Donna Miscolta has published Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories with Jaded Ibis Press.
Read this interview with Donna Miscolta, conducted by Deborah Kalb.
Read Donna Miscolta’s essay, Comings and Goings, in issue 9.2 of Blood Orange Review.
The New Yorker: Breonna Taylor Can’t Tell Her Story of Police Abuse, but I’m Here to Tell Mine | July 2020
Essay by Sanderia Faye
Sanderia Faye has published an essay in The New Yorker titled “Breonna Taylor Can’t Tell Her Story of Police Abuse, but I’m Here to Tell Mine.” Read it here.
Read an interview with Sanderia Faye, conducted by Erica L. Williams, that was published in Issue 9.2 of Blood Orange Review here.
Hobart: To Know Nothing of Rifles | August 2020
Essay by Caitlin Fredman
Caitlin Feldman has published an essay in Hobart titled “To Know Nothing of Rifles.” Read it here.
Caitlin Feldman is the runner-up in Blood Orange Review’s 2020 Nonfiction Contest. Read her essay in Blood Orange Review’s upcoming issue, due to be released in December, 2020.
2020 Contest Winners and Runners-Up Announced | July 2020
Winners:
Poetry: Maurisa Li-A-Ping
Fiction: Kenneth Carroll
Nonfiction: Dara Mathis
Volume 12.1 is Live! | June 2020
Featuring Nikky Finney
Our new issue offers a few of Nikky Finney’s new Hotbeds from Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, as well as an interview with Finney. An exciting range of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction accompanies Finney’s work. Dive in!
Volume 11.2 is Live! | January 2020
A New Design
It took a little bit of patience and a lot of time on everyone’s part, but we finally have a new design for our website. Please call in sick, plug in your laptop, sit down in your favorite chair, kick up your feet, hang out, dig in. And—as always—support writers. Read their bios. Buy their books. Cheer them on. And on and on . . .
A Note About the Artwork in Volume 11.2 | Jan 2020
Most of the artwork in Volume 11.2 was gathered from visual art MFA students, Siri Margaret Stensberg, Stephanie Broussard, and Kelsey Baker, at Washington State University. We also received work from Sarah Hussein, an artist from Damietta, Egypt. If you would like to have your work considered for one of our upcoming issues, please submit on our Submittable page at the link below.
Inaugural Contest Winners Announced | August 2019
Winners
Poetry: Benjamin Bartu | “Do You Love Here”
Nonfiction: Austin Maas | “Trigger Finger”
Fiction: Joel Streicker | “For the Bounty Provided Us”
Interview with Bryan Fry and CMarie Fuhrman | July 2019
For years now, I’ve been going to the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference at Centrum. It’s a ferry ride and a scenic drive 60 miles from Seattle. Located on a peninsula on a larger peninsula, the surroundings are beautiful, the faculty stellar, and the participants fun to be around. Every year, I meet remarkable people. Though I’d met Bryan Fry, Editor-in-Chief of Blood Orange Review, a few years ago enroute to AWP, it was his first time at PTWC. On the first night of the conference, he introduced me to CMarie (Cindy) Fuhrman, co-editor with Dean Rader of the newly published anthology Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations.
AWP Collaborative Off-Site Reading | March 2019
Crab Creek Review, Willow Springs, and Blood Orange Review
Featuring Jericho Brown, Sayantani Dasgupta, John Goodhue, Jade Hurter, Susan Moore, Tamara Sellman, Dujie Tahat, Joe Wilkins. Special appearances by University of Idaho MFA alumni, including Blood Orange Review founding editors H.K. Hummel and Stephanie Lenox.
Camille T. Dungy's Guidebook to Relative Strangers | May 2018
Reviewed by Artress Bethany White
I, like many Americans, recently read that Erica Garner, the daughter of slain African American police suspect, Eric Garner, died shortly after giving birth. She named her son Eric, after her father who was killed in a street bust for selling loose cigarettes. In the aftermath of her father’s death, Erica became an outspoken activist. In turn, her sudden death at the age of twenty-seven, after becoming a new mother, foregrounds the price many people of color pay for striving to survive in America . . .
Interview with Sanderia Faye | December 2017
Conduted by Erica L. Williams
I met Sanderia Faye years ago at the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Summer Writers Workshop in Washington, DC in a class led by novelist Agymah Kamau. It’s where she first revised portions of the novel that would later become Mourner’s Bench.
Faye and I became close friends during our week-long residency and before departing she gifted me a wood-scented candle to aid creativity. Throughout the years the candle has served as fuel to my creative fire, a symbol of our connection as writers of color and the artistic community of our origin . . .
Interview with Rita Wong | May 2017
Conducted by Linda Russo
I met Rita Wong because I wanted to buy her book. She had just read from undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015) as a keynote speaker at the 2015 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference in Moscow, Idaho. The poems in undercurrent convey a strong bioregional sensibility with their emphasis on Indigenous and place-based knowledges. As she read, it was as if she was speaking a language that I both understood and longed to understand, as though perhaps these two languages were entwined. I needed that book . . .
Blood Oranges and Slow Miracles in Poetry | December 2016
Blog By Maria Maggi
On December 1st, Blood Orange Review, an online literary journal at Washington State University, announced its newest edition, Volume 8.2, was now live. That edition includes a poem of mine called “As If We Were Solid and Did Not Go On Forever.” This poem is about an experience I had over 20 years ago that I mentioned in the post Return to Elk Creek. The blog post I wrote a few years ago celebrated my return after 20 years to find I was able to do the whole hike and get down to rest my feet in the cool rushing water. Here’s what I had to say about writing the poem in that post . . .
Interview with Sayantani Dasgupta | December 2016
Conducted by Nadia Chaney
I first met Sayantani Dasgupta seven years ago at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. She was sharp-tongued, self-assured, and kind of Cheshire-like. She had the subtle ability to appear and disappear during heated conversations about writing quandaries such as the responsibilities of memoir or the momentum of flash fiction. There were morning freewriting sessions at seven A.M. and she would show up like a panther, wide awake and hungry. Many of the conference participants were happy to socialize, but Dasgupta was clearly devouring the opportunity to hone her writing skills . . .
"Soul Singing": On Etheridge Knight | December 2016
Essay by Robert Wrigley
In the autumn of 1973, I had a stack of poetry books checked out from the library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where I would complete a BA in English the following summer. The stack of books (all of them those familiar slender volumes) was about seven times the height of the meager pile of poetry books I actually owned. This pained me. I was enamored, enraptured, and swept away by poetry. All I wanted to do was write poems; I stole as much time as I could from my studies to do so, but it wasn’t enough for me. If I wasn’t writing, I wanted to be reading poems, and I wanted to be reading poems by poets writing now, which is to say, within a decade or so of 1973. Those poems were not what I was reading in my classes. The Lovejoy Library at SIUE had a very good collection, but I wanted my own . . .
Interview with Lee Ann Roripaugh | May 2016
Conducted by Linda Russo
In April of last year, I had the pleasure of being introduced to the work and person of Lee Ann Roripaugh. We were reading our poetry as participants in “Poetry of the Plains, High Desert, and Prairie,” a panel at the AWP conference in Minneapolis. Lee was seated to my right, and I can recall an almost emerald vibrancy about her, though I know this is because she read a poem looking (in the manner of Wallace Stevens) at the Vermillion River that runs through southeast South Dakota, where she lives . . .
Preview Volume 8.2: The AWP Volume | April 2016
A New Design
Featuring work from Lee Ann Roripaugh, Kim Barnes, Desiree Cooper, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Brenda Hillman, Rebecca Gayle Howell Nathanial Mackey, Rachel Morgan, and more.
Blood Orange Review Logo Contest | March 2015
Winner | Kelsey Johnson, DTC major, Washington State University
Kelsey Johnson will receive a small honorarium and an invitation to work with Blood Orange Review during the 2015-2016 academic school year. Our design team plans to work with Johnson’s logo to create a new style sheet for the BOR website. Stay tuned!!
Interns, AWP, Small-Press Education | Spring 2011-Current
Small-Press Publishing as an Educational Tool
As part of our larger educational mission, our editorial staff are committed to training undergraduates in the field of small-press publication at the highest level.
BOR & WSU Partner for Internship Program | April 2010
We are pleased to announce that a selection of exceptional students from the Washington State University English Department have joined the Blood Orange Review team as editorial interns. In order to qualify for this internship, candidates were required to go through a rigorous editing and interview process. We selected the top five of these candidates: Grace Carlson, Deven Tokuno, Maddie Starkovich, Caitlin Woelfel, and Simmone Quesnell . . .
Interview with Brian Turner | November 2009
Conducted by H.K. Hummel
In February 2009, I happened to attend two AWP panel discussions that included poet Brian Turner. He spoke with quiet openness, and he read his work with gravity and honesty. I was intrigued by what he had to say about poetry in wartime, and I was especially interested in what he just briefly touched on-our responsibility toward the war veterans coming home . . .
Blood Orange Review Publishes Volume 1.1 | April 2006
From “Our Story”
When H.K. Hummel and Stephanie Lenox founded Blood Orange Review in 2006, they wanted to make an inclusive space in contemporary literature, “to create a home for emerging and established writers” where readers might discover narratives, voices, and forms that challenged expectations with bold and startling artfulness. They built the journal from their respective kitchen tables in Tempe, Arizona and Port Angeles, Washington, and quickly found an international reading audience . . .
