• Spring Feature 2016

  • Feature

    • TCR's 20th! 20th anniversary reading
      at AWP Los Angeles:
      Laure-Anne Bosselaar,
      Yusef Komunyakaa,
      Jeremy Bass
The TWENTIETH Anniversary Reading

Click Video to Play

The Cortland Review's 20th anniversary celebration reading, featuring Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Yusef Komunyakaa, and poetry and music by Jeremy Bass.

The Cortland Review is 20!
Our 20th anniversary celebration at AWP was a stellar event with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Yusef Komunyakaa and Jeremy Bass, and we're bringing it to you, live again, online as our April Video Feature.

The Cortland Review was born when Guy Shahar, already a classically trained musician and an undergraduate studying sound engineering, volunteered to help the Academy of American Poets transfer old sound reels to CD's. With sound equipment on one side of the room, his computer on the other, he had the audacious thought that somebody should be publishing poetry in audio. He bought a book, taught himself HTML, called himself an editor and Voila! We were The Cortland Review. Issue 1 had 3 poets and got 3 hits. Issue 2 had 5 poets and got 7 hits, and The Cortland Review was off and running, until three re-designs later, we are now 20 years old and have been twice-distinguished by Forbes Magazine as Best on the Web, are read free in 51 countries and get upwards of 200,000 to 500,000 hits a month.

Behind what you see on your screen, some pretty amazing people are working to make The Cortland Review a reality on your computer, all of them volunteers and some for a very long time. Please meet...

JENNIFER WALLACE, poetry editor since 2001, lives in Baltimore, where she teaches poetry and creative writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She's published four books: The Want Fire (Passager Books, 2015), It Can Be Solved By Walking (CityLit Press, 2012), Minor Heaven, one of four chapbooks featured in Desire Path (Toadlilly Press, 2005), an artist book collaboration with Katherine Kavanaugh, One-Hundred Footsteps (2011), with a new collection coming from Paraclete Press next spring. She loves taking photographs, mostly of birds and buildings and objects. The photograhs in It Can Be Solved By Walking are her own. Her two sons, Brian and Daniel, are both artist/writers living in Brooklyn. THANK YOU, JENNIFER!

ELIZABETH CORNELL, PhD, fiction editor since 2002, is director of communications for Fordham IT at Fordham University, where she manages the department's internal and external communications. Prior to that, she was a post-doctoral fellow in English at Fordham, where she taught American literature and composition. She's a contributing editor to the Digital Yoknapatawpha Project at the University of Virginia Library's Digital Media Center and manages the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Facebook page. She's delivered dozens of papers, including her current project, exploring the responses of modern American writers to the popular reception of Einstein and the theory of relativity. She's recently published in South Central Review and Mississippi Quarterly. THANK YOU, ELIZABETH!

AMY MACLENNAN, managing editor since 2005, started "helping out," she calls it, because she was "crazy in love with the audios, poems, art, even the editors" and later "the videos and everything else in TCR." She has two chapbooks--Weathering (Uttered Chaos Press, 2012) and The Fragile Day (Spire Press, 2011)--and all kinds of magazine publications, including Broadsided Press, Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, Folio, Hayden's Ferry Review, Linebreak, Naugatuck River Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, River Styx, Spillway, The Oregonian, The Pedestal Magazine and Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place. Since 2014, she's edited and curated the very fine Cascadia Review. Her first full-length collection, The Body, A Tree, is forthcoming from MoonPath Press in Kingston, Washington. Happiness for Amy is poetry and hiking. THANK YOU, AMY!

DAVID RIGSBEE, contributing editor since 2007, has just published Not Alone in My Dancing: Essays and Reviews, comprised mostly of pieces written for The Cortland Review as contributing editor. The Takeaway (a chapbook) is forthcoming from Lapwing Publications in Belfast, and This Much I Can Tell You was just accepted by Black Lawrence Press. David has published 20 books and chapbooks, critical works on Carolyn Kizer and Joseph Brodsky (whom he has also translated) and coedited two anthologies, including Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-century Southern Poetry (University of Virginia Press). He's an Academy of American Poets award winner, has a Pushcart Prize, has won the Black River Poetry Prize, the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award and the Pound Prize. He graduated UNC Chapel Hill, has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins, a Masters in Philosophy from Hollins College and a PhD in Modern Poetry from the University of Virginia. THANK YOU, DAVID!

ANNA CATONE, poetry editor since 2009, has published poems in Boston Review, Commonweal, Flyway, The Los Angeles Review, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. She graduated from Princeton University and earned her M.A. at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English and her M.F.A. at Sarah Lawrence College. She has worked for arts organizations (PEN American Center and the Poetry Society of America) and also in publishing for David R. Godine, Publisher and for The New Yorker. She has taught English and creative writing at the college and graduate level in a number of places, most recently at Boston College. Anna lives with her family north of Boston. THANK YOU, ANNA!

CHRISTIAN GULLETTE, poetry editor since 2009, received his M.F.A. in poetry from the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Scandinavian literatures and languages with a focus on representations of race and sexuality in contemporary Swedish literature and film. He has recently been selected as a finalist for the Iowa Review poetry prize and a semi-finalist for the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest. His poems and translations from the Swedish have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Meridian, Colorado Review, and Smartish Pace. He is at work on a libretto for an original, full-length ballet for San Francisco-based company, Post:Ballet. THANK YOU, CHRISTIAN!

DAVID MOODY, audio and production editor since 2010, answered the call when The Cortland Review needed a web editor--someone to clean up the website's coding, edit its audio files, and generally make things perfect. Under the recommendation of poet David Kirby, then FSU-graduate student David Antonio Moody applied to join the TCR team and was accepted with open arms. Now, with a doctoral degree from FSU, David is a writing instructor at Arizona State University. Formerly an editor for Southeast Review, Juked and Saw Palm, David was the recipient of a 2014 AWP Intro Journals Award. His recent poetry appears in The Carolina Quarterly, Ghost Ocean, Bacopa Review and Columbia Review. Born into a small river town designated Florida's only "dying city," David once joined and performed in the Jack Haskin's Flying High Circus. THANK YOU, DAVID!

DALLAS LEE, news column editor since 2012, is a writer with a career in various newsrooms (primarily The Associated Press and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and as a speechwriter and scriptwriter. His poetry has appeared in The Boiler Literary Journal, Starry Night Review, Connotation Press, Mixtini Matrix and Reach of Song, the Georgia Poetry Society Anthologies of 2013 and 2014. He is author of The Cotton Patch Evidence: The Story of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Experiment (Harper & Row), the interracial religious community that survived violence and isolation during the civil rights movement and then emerged as the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity. Dallas and his wife Mary Carol, also a journalist, live in Atlanta and Jupiter, Fl. They have three children and six grandchildren.
THANK YOU, DALLAS!

RICK TRACY, photography editor since 2013, a New Jersey native, currently living in Randolph, New Jersey, initially attended New Jersey Institute of Technology's school of architecture. After a long detour, he returned to the arts, specifically, graphic design. After years of graphic design, he got into photography to get reference material for his painting. Then an opportunity arose to shoot product photography and do retouching for Philips, his employer. When his division moved to Hong Kong, he finished his Fine Arts degree at Montclair State University. He continued photography for Philips and expanded to other areas. Now he shoots all types of photography as well as video. He is married with four grown children, and enjoys riding his motorcycle. THANK YOU, RICK!

CHARD deNIORD, contributing editor since 2014, was appointed Poet Laureate of Vermont on November 4, 2015. His five books of poetry include InterstateInterstate, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), which the Boston Globe named one of the top ten books of poetry in 2011 and Night Mowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). Professor of English, he teaches English and creative writing at Providence College. His book of essays and interviews with senior poets, Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton and Robert Bly, titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century American Poets, was published by Marick Press in 2012. He is the co-founder of the New England College M.F.A. Program in Poetry and a trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz. THANK YOU, CHARD!

ERIC BERLIN, assistant editor since 2015, just finished teaching a craft course called "The Poetics of Prayer," examining the musicality of language from the perspectives of six different religions. In February, he presented a paper at the 44th Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, entitled "George Carlin as a Case Study in Projective Verse." And at the NeMLA convention in March, he presented a paper called "Widening the 'I' through the Mask of Meter: A Poetics of Stand-up." These projects stem from his fascination with poetic patterning in contemporary oral literature. Just recently, he was awarded a Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and his poem "Night Errand" won first place in the UK's National Poetry Competition. On the side, he's working on a series of interviews with poets and musicians. THANK YOU, ERIC!

This is the all-volunteer Cortland Review. If you know one of these fine people, tell them THANK YOU. If you like what we do, please go to our Facebook page, like us and leave a message telling us why or simply leave your good wishes. You are why we do this. We look forward to the next 20 years.

Cheers,
Ginger Murchison
Editor in Chief
a scrap of linen, a bone (Press 53, 2016)