The Arkansas International

Hey everyone! ☀️ 😎 🏖️ Hope you had a wonderful and relaxing summer. We have great news to celebrate the end of summer and usher in the fall. We are extending our deadline for our themed issue: Arkansas Literature! We want to highlight the voices that make up our beautiful state's literary landscape. Send your work if you are a writer with personal ties to the state of Arkansas. We are looking for Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Translations, and Comics that highlight the voices that make up the literary tapestry of our state. We are so overjoyed to read what you have!

You can submit here: https://www.arkint.org/themed-submissions

HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR FRIEND UCHENNA AWOKE❗ 🎉 🎉 for making it on the Amazon Editors' Picks for best fiction and literary books of July! His novel is an incredible read and well worth pouring over while you avoid July's heat🏖️ 🌄

You can snag your own copy here: https://books.catapult.co/books/the-liquid-eye-of-a-moon/

Hey y'all! 💙 We are NOW ACCEPTING submissions for our C.D. Wright Emerging Poet's Prize! If you are an emerging poet who is still finding your way in the world, we want to hear from you and help your work find a place in the literary landscape. 🎉 🌟

If you do not yet have a full-length book, send your pieces our way and share your words with a team that is so deeply excited to discover your writing. Remember that all poems sent for this prize are considered for publication in our magazine! We are greatly looking forward for a chance to expand our family of great poets and writers.

You can check out further rules and restrictions here: https://www.arkint.org/cd-wright-prize

Hey everyone! Our Henry Dumas Fiction Prize contest is now LIVE. SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN!❗ ❗ ❗

We are looking forward to reading your work! All submissions will be considered for our print magazine so make sure to send in your best stuff. It may found a home with us at the Arkansas International. This is a prize geared toward highlighting emerging writers. We are open to writers who work in English and have not yet published a full-length book. Make sure you don’t include a cover letter, name, or any contact information in your document!

You can look at further rules, requirements, and information on how to apply here: https://www.arkint.org/prize

Hey y'all! We are now open for submissions on our Fall 2025 Themed Issue. Our theme is Arkansas Literature! We will be focusing on highlighting the literary voices of Arkansas and publishing writers who are from or have deep ties to the vibrant cultural landscape of the nature state.

We accept previously unpublished work in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, translation, and comics! Make sure to include information in your cover letter about your relationship to Arkansas.

You can read more about our requirements here: https://www.arkint.org/issue-announcement

And our submittable is here: https://acwlp.submittable.com/submit

We know that Arkansas is a site for truly incredible works of art and our magazine has devoted itself to cultivating the ties between the state and the international literary community because we believe fully that we have so much to offer the world in terms of our vibrance, our elegance, our charm, our devotion to beauty in all its forms. We are diamond mines and Ozarks, we are riding the backs of giants like Maya Angelou, Charles Portis, and Frank Stanford. If you are a writer with ties to Arkansas, we want so badly to help share your voice with the world. We hope that you will let us! At the International you will find readers who look to your work with love and excitement, endeavoring to see the brilliance of your writing and fighting tooth and nail to bring it the recognition it deserves.

Our Lit Night is TOMORROW! We are going to have a blast with snacks, refreshing drinks, and great company to celebrate the release of Issue 15.

You will also have a chance to listen to readings by our wonderful contributors, including the brilliant Michelle Ashmore!

So be sure to come on over to Mount Sequoyah between 5 pm and 8 pm so that you can celebrate with us. You can get tickets on eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-lit-night-with-the-arkansas-international-tickets-881686466957

Hey everyone-- make sure to mark May 16th on your calendar for our Arkansas International LIT NIGHT! We will have drinks, snacks, and author readings including from our friend and contributor Uchenna Awoke!

The event will be from 5 pm to 8 pm at Mount Sequoyah, we hope to see y'all there!

Get your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-lit-night-with-the-arkansas-international-tickets-881686466957

Calling all lit lovers! Join us for "A Lit Night" to celebrate the launch of Issue 15.
Get tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-lit-night-with-the-arkansas-international-tickets-881686466957 ~
Join us to celebrate the launch of Issue 15! Readings by contributors, food, & drinks! Get tickets at:
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Celebrate the launch of Issue 15 with us! Our spring 2024 Lit Night will be at Mount Sequoyah in Fayetteville, with authors readings, drinks, & snacks.
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Get tickets for Arkansas International's Lit Night!
WHAT: Celebrating the launch of Issue 15, featuring readings by local authors, drinks, and snacks
WHEN: Thursday, May 16th from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.
WHERE: Parker Hall at Mount Sequoyah in Fayetteville
Suggested donation: $15
Get tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-lit-night-with-the-arkansas-international-tickets-881686466957

🥂 🎉 Join us in celebrating Dallas's new Poet Laureate, Mag Gabbert! 🌟
Mag is a contributor and friend to the International and we are delighted to see her getting some well-deserved recognition. We hope y'all take a minute to send her your congratulations and read some of her work!

You can read some of her poetry in Issue Fourteen, which you can order on our website!

📢 Sneak Peek for Issue 1️⃣ 5️⃣ ❗ ❗
We are delighted to share one more sneak peek from Issue 15! This time we are highlighting the nonfiction essay "Slow Burn" by the wonderful Carli Cutchin. Cutchin's writing is a remarkable exploration of grief and the memory of those we love.

You can see read this work on our website here: https://www.arkint.org/carli-cutchin
And we hope you all are ready to read even more incredible writers with the release of our fifteenth issue!

Hey everyone! We have another Sneak Peek just for you! 💙 💚 🧡 💜 💗
Issue 15 is just around the corner, and we are looking forward to sharing the wonderful works of all the poets, translators, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers that have contributed! We are highlighting three of Andrea Cohen's poems "Review" "The Sorrow Apartments" and "Life and Death." Make sure to read them today!
You can read Review here: https://www.arkint.org/andrea-cohen-4
The Sorrow Apartments here: https://www.arkint.org/andrea-cohen-sorrow-apartments-1
Life and Death here: https://www.arkint.org/andrea-cohen-sorrow-apartments-1
Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for more news on Issue 15's upcoming releases!

🗞️ BREAKING NEWS📰
We have another Sneak Peek locked and loaded just for y'all! Check out Amy Newman's masterful translation of the poem "Path" by Antonia Pozzi! Newman's translation captures all the discordant feelings that come with walking through the beauty of nature as melancholic thoughts buzz quietly in the distance. It is very exceptional work, and we are so delighted to share this piece with y'all.
Issue 15 is going to be incredible, and we are looking forward to seeing everyone's reactions to the work we have put together in collaboration with some wonderful artists! You can check out our sneak peek of Amy Newman's translation here: https://www.arkint.org/antonia-pozzi-path
Stay tuned for more news on our Issue 15 release!

👀 👁️‍🗨️ S N E A K PE EK👁️‍🗨️ 👁️
Are y'all as excited as we are for issue 15? You can go on our website right NOW and read a sneak peek of our upcoming stories! Today we are drawing special attention to Uchenna Awoke's incredible fiction piece "Frankincense and Myrrh!" If you are excited to read this brilliant story, make sure to go and check out our website! ❗ ❗ ❗
You can read the story right here: https://www.arkint.org/uchenna-awoke.
Don't wait up, read now!

🗞️ BREAKING NEWS📰
We have another Sneak Peak locked and loaded just for y'all! Check out Amy Newman's masterful translation of the poem "Path" by Antonia Pozzi! Newman's translation captures all of the discordant feelings that come with walking through the beauty of nature as melancholic thoughts buzz quietly in the distance. It is very exceptional work and we are so delighted to share this piece with y'all.

Issue 15 is be incredible and we are looking forward to seeing everyone's reactions to the work we have put together in collaboration with some wonderful artists! You can check out our sneak peak of Amy Newman's translation here: https://www.arkint.org/antonia-pozzi-path

Stay tuned for more news on our Issue 15 release!

👀 👁️‍🗨️ S N E A K PEAK👁️‍🗨️ 👁️
Are y'all as excited as we are for issue 15? You can go on our website right NOW and see read a sneak peak of our upcoming stories! Today we are drawing special attention to Uchenna Awoke's incredible fiction piece "Frankincense and Myrrh!" If you are excited to read this brilliant story early make sure to go and check out our website! ❗ ❗ ❗

You can read the story directly right here: https://www.arkint.org/uchenna-awoke.
Don't wait up, read now!

📢 ❗ ❗ ❗ Contributor and friend of the Arkansas International Ghassan Zeineddine’s debut short story collection Dearborn is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction! Please join us in celebrating his monumental achievement. 💜 📙 🧡

Ghassan is a brilliant writer and we have been so delighted to watch his career blossom in recent years. This award is just another opportunity to showcase what a tour de force Dearborn is and how overjoyed we are to cheer on his successes and victories.

Read Ghassan Zeineddine’s short story “Yusra” from Issue Twelve here: https://www.arkint.org/ghassan-zeineddine?fbclid=IwAR1_fvO4aHaXgB0PDP63FyRfBwmGic3v0q7E1EvvxUXTrUUFiRtHCpAsnew

✨✨ Join us in celebrating our incredible Writer-at-Risk resident Uchenna Awoke for his upcoming novel The Liquid Eye of a Moon.🌕

We at the Arkansas International are so excited for this remarkable piece to reach y’all! And we are not alone! Uchenna is one of Publisher Weekly’s 10 Promising Fiction debuts! LitHub has named the novel as one of its Most Anticipated Books of 2024 and has been listed as one of Brittle Paper’s Most Anticipated African Books of 2024. ❗

Y’all are officially invited to join in celebrating Uchenna’s monumental accomplishments by checking out his incredible work yourself.
Pre-Order a Copy for yourself! https://books.catapult.co/books/the-liquid-eye-of-a-moon/

We had so much fun at AWP!! ❗ ❗ ❗ ❣️

Thank y'all for coming out and chatting with us at our booth in Kansas City. ♥️ As always, we were delighted to meet our readers, our friends, our colleagues, our fellow magazines, and just finding time to enjoy our community of writers and translators. 🌟 We learn so much from y'all every year, and our staff had a blast. As a gift, look through pictures taken in and around our (beautiful) booth, ran and maintained by our best and brightest.

Look out for us next year! We want to meet as many of you as possible (and we always have candy!)🍬 🍭 🍬

🎉 Join us in celebrating our nominee for Best American Essay, Ayşe Papatya Bucak and her essay “Documented.” Bucak’s essay is a delight and a triumph.
We here at the Arkansas International have felt a tremendous amount of joy and pride in publishing this piece and sharing our love for Bucak’s writing. 🍾 ✨

“Documented” is an essay that lovingly renders the story of Bucak and her family’s life as they transition back and forth from Turkey and the United States. Bucak shares these stories with both beautiful (oftentimes hilarious) prose and photographs, both highlighting and invigorating the other. “Documented” is a remarkable portrait of a family. The piece embraces the beauty and contradiction that comes from recollection, contested family lore, and a history that glides across language and national lines.
We are so happy to nominate Ayşe Papatya Bucak’s essay for Best American Essay, and glad to have an opportunity to share our excitement with y’all!

You can read “Documented” in our fourteenth issue, which you can find here: https://www.arkint.org/issue-fourteen

✨ Today we are highlighting one of our nominations for Best American Essays: Xiaolu Guo and her essay "On Translation." ❗ ❗ ❗

Xiaolu Guo's essay is a powerful piece that examines her relationship to the complexities that lie between the untranslatable and the need to translate in her own work and beyond. Her language is wonderful and draws attention to how the act of translation, including self-translation, is an act of creation and negotiation between ideas and identities. We believe that her work is an exemplary essay that demonstrates the values that excite us most: what it means to truly write in an international world, across languages and through translations. We are excited and honored to nominate Xiaolu Guo's work for Best American Essays, and we hope you join us in celebrating her achievements!

You can read this essay in our fourteenth issue of the Arkansas International, which you can find here: https://www.arkint.org/

📚✨ Come visit us today at the Arkansas International booth at AWP! ✨📚
🖋️📖 Starting at 1:30 PM, two brilliant Issue 14 contributors, Sebastián H. Páramo and Mag Gabbert, will be hanging out with us and signing broadsides of their work.
We're rolling out the red carpet! Don't miss out on these incredible author signings – see you there!

📖 We are so delighted to share our Best American Essays nominations for 2023! 📖
🎈 🍾 🥂🎉 🎉 🎉
Everyone join us in celebrating our contributors Xiaolu Guo and Ayşe Papatya Bucak! We believe their incredible work reflects the incredible potential in essay writing and we are delighted by the opportunity to promote their pieces.✨

The pieces by these two essayists insist on enriching and complicating notions of living in international and cosmopolitan communities, exploring their relationships to the languages of their families and themselves. We find that our nominations are beautiful reflections of our love for the literary arts in an international context, and we are honored by all the opportunities we have been afforded to share these works and sing their praises. 🎶

PUSHCART NOMINATION WEEK📢
DAY 6🎉

We are finishing our week of nominations by taking some time to celebrate the work of Silas House and his short story “Foxgloves.”

Foxgloves explores the feelings of a young man needing to navigate a turbulent emotional landscape as he begins to grow out of his hometown and his grandfather’s struggle with memory both drifting away and becoming suddenly very present.

The two build a connection to the past and future as his grandfather recalls Rufus, a beautiful man whom he loved long ago. Silas’s writing is elegant and sensitive, always attending to the emotional states of his characters without ever sacrificing his lyrical prose.

Read this story HERE: https://www.arkint.org/silas-house

This is the end of our week of nominations! We have had such a blast going through these pieces and remembering the exhilaration that comes with reading through a beautiful piece and sharing it with our readers. We are incredibly proud of all of our nominees, and are delighted to share their work with y’all!

PUSHCART NOMINATION WEEK🥂 ❗
DAY 5🐍
We are honored to nominate Sean Theodore Stewart’s short story “Flat Rattle Boomtown” for a Pushcart Prize!

‘Flat Rattle Boomtown” is a tale about music, living and drinking your way through an economic boom that can never last, and the peculiar relationship between a man and his snake. Stewart’s story is a lovely exploration of how grief twists and coils around our hearts, forcing us to contend with who we are by understanding what has been lost.

This story is a wonderful treasure, and we are incredibly proud to nominate it for this prestigious prize!

You can read this story in Issue 14 of our magazine, which you can find HERE: https://www.arkint.org/issue-fourteen

PUSHCART NOMINATION WEEK🎊
DAY 4🙌
Congratulations to Sebastian Páramo! We are nominating his wonderful poem “The Lost Portrait” for a Pushcart Prize. We are delighted by the opportunity to share and highlight Páramo’s work.

“The Lost Portrait” is a riveting poem that expertly weaves together the anxiety of growing with the tangled web of emotions that comes with navigating the memory of a parent and the grief that comes from their loss. Questions of isolation, obligation, legacy, and how all these ideas relate to the possibility of love and carve out a future.

You can read the poem in Issue 14 of our magazine, which you can find HERE: https://www.arkint.org/issue-fourteen

PUSHCART NOMINATION WEEK🎉 🎈
DAY 3️⃣
We hope you will join us in celebrating Cory Stockwell and his nomination for a Pushcart Prize for his translation of Swiss poet Grisélidis Réal’s poem “Canticle of Imprisonment.”

Stockwell’s masterful translation captures the haunting, suffocating aura of being caught in a prison system designed to estrange a prisoner from their humanity. Réal’s work writing is radical and beautiful, capturing how incarceration traps and disintegrates the spirit. Slowly at first, and then all at once. We are all grateful for Stockwell’s work in sharing Réal’s writing in English and hope you all take some time to be dazzled by her brilliance!

You can read this poem on Issue 14 of our magazine which you can find HERE: https://www.arkint.org/issue-fourteen

PUSHCART NOMINATIONS WEEK❗
🌟 DAY 2🌟
We invite you all to join us in celebrating translator Sasha Dugdale! We are nominating her translation of Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Menagerie” for the Pushcart Prize.
Mandelstam’s poem is a provocative meditation on the shifting tensions of war and peace during Europe’s turn from the 19th to 20th century.

The piece weaves remarkably concise visuals with a magnificent sense of scope and significance. Dugdale has lent her considerable literary talents to ensure that the poem’s language sings, always ensuring that the language compliments the poem’s atmosphere and tone. We are so excited to share this piece with everyone, and make sure to take a second to congratulate Sasha Dugdale on her monumental achievement.

You can read this poem in our fourteenth issue, which you can find HERE: https://www.arkint.org/issue-fourteen

PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINATION WEEK
✨ DAY 1✨
We are so happy to share that we are nominating Xialou Guo’s beautiful essay “On Translation” for the Pushcart Prize! 🏆

Xialou Guo’s essay is a beautiful exploration of the complex dynamics between languages, cultures, and the process of writing while navigating those currents. Her writing is insightful and elegant, demonstrating all the negotiations inherent to the process of self-translation. Guo’s essay is a gem, and we feel so lucky for the honor of sharing her work with y’all!

Guo's essay is part of our fourteenth issue, which you can find HERE: https://www.arkint.org/issue-fourteen

We hope you join us in celebrating Guo’s incredible artistic achievements! 🥂

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that six incredible contributors from The Arkansas International have been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize! 🌟

Congratulations to Xiaolu Guo, Sasha Dugdale, Cory Stockwell, Sebastian Paramo, Sean Theodore Stewart, and Silas House for their remarkable work that continues to inspire and challenge us. Your stories and poems are not just words on a page, but windows into the most profound parts of the human experience.

As we celebrate this honor, we want to extend our deepest gratitude to all our readers and supporters. It is your engagement and passion for literature that energize our mission to bring forth the best of global writing.

We are honored to announce that The Arkansas International Literary Magazine Inc. has been awarded a generous grant of $10,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts! 🎉✨
We cannot express how grateful we are for this incredible support. This grant will empower us to continue our mission of putting local and global literary voices in conversation and create som**hing truly extraordinary.
A huge thank you to the NEA for believing in our project! And thank you to our amazing readers and contributors—this wouldn't be possible without you. We can't wait to dive into the exciting work ahead and share it with all of you. Stay tuned for updates on this amazing journey!