crawling through my emails like Wile E Coyote through the desert where the mirage is inbox 0.

Every magazine editor I've introduced Alaa to has written me back a wondering email (or WhatsApp), days or weeks later, saying, something like, "I love Alaa." or "She is amazing." She is. She is. She is.

Our newest issue is now available for purchase! Featuring work by @feliciazamorapoet.bsky.social, @nadeemzaman.bsky.social, @mlynxqualey.bsky.social, @kgapoetwriter.bsky.social, @abbiekiefer.bsky.social, @riggstah.bsky.social, and more. Order the issue here: prairieschooner.unl.edu/issue/winter...

We're pleased to share the winners of our annual literary awards for work published in Prairie Schooner in 2024. Winners include @threnody.bsky.social for the Lawrence Award and @mlynxqualey.bsky.social for the Virginia Faulkner Award. Read more on our blog: prairieschooner.unl.edu/digital-scho...

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When I can't remember the word "murder"

so pleased to be in the same issue as Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. 💚

please read this painful, beautiful testimony I’m trying not to be a nag but it arrived on my TL below some editorial being shared for rage bait and like. we could share things like this instead. not “we can do both” miss me with that. trash smell will always overpower what’s good when we “do both”

🙄 women join an industry, salaries plummet, men leave. what is the term for it? "men drain" or something?

A small discussion of publishing & Palestine.

The kicker... this "AI" generated summer reading list full of fake titles "appears in print opposite a house ad for the Sun-Times that exhorts readers to 'Donate your old car and fund the news you rely on.'" www.axios.com/2025/05/20/a...

💚Springtime Travels around the World: Translated Children’s Books Out This Spring and Summer wordswithoutborders.org/read/article...

Sorry, Francis will always be my Woke Marxist Pope.

An urgent series of WhatsApps from one of our writers in Gaza who is living in a tent with her diabetic mother, and there is neither a reliable food supply nor reliable medicine, what hell is this, what hell, what hell.

Those clients who only pay up for the previous project when they have a new book they want you to agree to edit. 🫠

why at these hybrid events am I always ogre-sized? I look like I might turn and eat poor Maria.

Buyer's remorse that I made my persona literature/translation instead of making it women's basketball.

I’ve known, loved, marched with trans friends since I came out 45 years ago. The ugly campaign to erase them, and the fact that it includes gay men and lesbians, including friends, is devastating. Their erasure will be ours; same-sex marriage, equality, diversity and freedom are in the firing line

One thing I had definitely not understood about the rising tides of fascism is how much of a boost it gets from opportunism & grifterism.

Beautiful piece by author-publisher Husam Maarouf.

You are missed, you are missed, you are missed.

really had no idea that, to the ultrarich, "groceries" and a "grocery bag" were such foreign matter that they might code them as "old-fashioned."

Slowly but surly.

Someone accidentally typoed that I was helping them slowly but surly and I thought . . . hm, yes, probably.

Love to the ocean cats.

Was fortunate to talk to the eloquent &, well, extremely likeable Omar El Akkad for Bulaq yesterday, (whose 2017 novel "American War" featured way-way back in Bulaq episode 16. Episode coming soon, get his book where books are got.

recording an episode of BULAQ with Omar El Akkad today, but we love you (and Omar) so it will not be three hours.

Well, depending. I would love to wake up and find that everything I wrote before, let's say, 2018 was magically gone.

I need to find an extra half-day a week that's just for emails / correspondence. If you see one, lmk.

aside from why anyone needs to "sit down" to listen to a podcast, are Joe Rogan podcasts really three hours? God save us. also I love the contrast between the familiar "men/dudes" and the biologizing "females."

Anyone get too anxious to open a letter from an editor because they're expecting something awful, but then it's really light edits & you have to chide yourself for worrying? This time, I worried myself over it for days & it literally said "no changes." Also: I will do no differently next time.

just added "expected in December PLEASE" to my spreadsheet in case that helps.

lol they are charging students $25 for a textbook of AI slop.

I’ve been following the situation in Syria obsessively and I daren’t believe what I’m seeing. The black evil of the Assad regime overshadowed our lives since before I was born in a way the West has always refused to see. So many disappeared. Now the demon’s gone and his torture chambers broken open.

Scenes from those being released from Sednaya Prison, my aching heart.

A video showing the toppling of dictator Hafez al-Assad’s statue in the city of Tartus.

Is there a freelancer prayer for requesting that your clients pay up before the end of the year? 🙏 *had one experience this year of (finally) being paid for writing done in 2015, since someone at the mag decided they wanted me to write for them again.

No, no. If I hate a book, it's a bad book, it's for no one, don't read it, don't prod it with a ten-foot pole. (I mean, I'm just lukewarm on most books, or maybe lukecold. Hating is rare.)

❤️

Had such a good time with this one.

Thank you, City Lights, for bringing out this book from this beautiful human being & far-seeing writer.

Usually we do a holiday gift list but this year I'm just exhausted by the idea of routinized gifts, I guess.

or as our friend Caustic says:

So this exceedingly stupid "Spine" endeavor is just an expensive self-publishing platform that asks authors to pay for shitty AI covers & shitty AI editing? (I do hope that they offer shitty AI translation, for what is a mud-flavored cupcake without its rotten cherry.)

Is BlueSky as monolingual as it seems or do I just not know how to search it properly?

publishers: no more "a blend of east and west," thanks o.

Utterly horrific: The vandals in the Sisi government have given notice to the Egyptian National Library (Dar al Kotob) to evacuate its premises without any designated place to move to, so its building can be turned into a hotel. gate.ahram.org.eg/daily/News/2...

So pleased (and surprised! I'd forgotten!) to be in this collection. Looking forward to getting a copy at some point & reading everyone else's essays.