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This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, as part of our podcast series covering The Citizen Jane Film Festival, we had the opportunity to talk to Sara Blecher, the director of Ayanda. The Citizen Jane Film Festival celebrates independent film by independent women and takes place in Columbia, Missouri, every fall. You can find out more information here. Blecher is a co-founder of CINGA Productions, a South African-based production company that has made numerous award-winning films, documentaries, and series, including Zero Tolerance which was nominated for an international Emmy Award. Blecher’s debut feature Otelo Burning was named one of the top ten African films of the decade by CNN. Blecher’s latest movie, Ayanda, is the coming of age story of a South African woman who fights to keep her father’s auto repair shop open in Johannesburg. Ayanda has been distributed in the United States by Ava Durvaney’s Array and is currently available on Netflix. In this podcast, Blecher discusses the difficulties of filming a sex scene, the challenges of being a female film director, and how she created her own version of Johannesburg, among other topics. For information about Ayanda, visit Array’s website. Enjoy the interview! Don’t forget about our annual spring Audio Contest, with winners in the categories of fiction, prose, audio documentary, and humor each receiving an award of $1,000.

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, as part of our podcast series covering The Citizen Jane Film Festival, we had the opportunity to talk to Jennifer Lafleur. The Citizen Jane Film Festival celebrates independent film by independent women and takes place in Columbia, Missouri, every fall. Jennifer Lafleur is an actress who plays the eldest of three sisters in “The Midnight Swim,” which won several independent film awards. “The Midnight Swim” is a psychological thriller that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats with its subtly creepy faux-documentary style. Lafleur is also known for appearing in the independent films “Do-Deca-Pentathlon,” “The Pretty One,” and “6 Years.” While in college, Lafleur was nominated three times for the Kennedy Center: ACTF Irene Ryan Best Actress Award. You can find out more about Citizen Jane on their website. Go here to learn more about “The Midnight Swim.” We hope you enjoy the interview! Did you know that you can now download The Missouri Review to your smartphone or tablet? Search for The Missouri Review in your app store. If you are already a digital subscriber, just sign in to the app with the e-mail address associated with your account.

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, we had the opportunity to talk to Tyehimba Jess and F. Douglas Brown, two poets closely affiliated with Cave Canem. Jess’s first collection, leadbelly, published in 2005 by Verse Press, is an exploration of the blues musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s life. Olio, his next book, is forthcoming from Wave Books in April 2016.  Jess is an Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.   F. Douglas Brown’s first collection, Zero to Three, was published by University of Georgia Press in 2014. Brown, an educator for nearly 20 years, teaches English at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school. You can learn more about him on his website. Don’t forget about our annual spring Audio Contest, with winners in the categories of fiction, prose, audio documentary, and humor each receiving an award of $1,000.

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, we had the opportunity to talk to Ryan Van Meter, author of If You Knew Then What I Know Now. Ryan Van Meter’s essay collection If You Knew Then What I Know Now is now available from Sarabande Books. His essays have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast,Arts & Letters and Fourth Genre, among others, and selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009 and Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. He currently teaches creative writing at The University of San Francisco. For additional information or questions, you can find him at his website. Don’t forget about our annual spring Audio Contest, with winners in the categories of fiction, prose, audio documentary, and humor each receiving an award of $1,000.  Don’t forget, too, to check out our all new app on iTunes and the Android app store!

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, we inaugurate a series of podcasts about the Citizen Jane Film festival. The Citizen Jane Film Festival celebrates independent film by independent women and takes place in Columbia, Missouri, every fall. Photo by Michael Granacki Shattuck is a filmmaker whose first feature, “From This Day Forward,” is currently touring film festivals all over the world. “From This Day Forward” is a documentary that tells the story of Shattuck’s transgender father, Tricia, and her mother, Marcia, who have been married for over thirty years. In addition, Shattuck is the co-creator of the New York Times Op-Docs series “Animated Life,” which animates historical moments of scientific discovery, and is a contributing blogger for the Huffington Post and the Advocate. You can find out more about Citizen Jane on their website. Go here to learn more about “From This Day Forward.” We hope you enjoy the interview! Did you know that you can now download The Missouri Review to your smartphone or tablet? Search for The Missouri Review in your app store. If you are already a digital subscriber, just sign in to the app with the e-mail address associated with your account.  

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, we had the opportunity to talk to Michael Czyzniejewski, author of I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life. Besides I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life, Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of two more collections of stories: Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books, 2009), and Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions (Curbside Splendor, 2012).  In 2010, he received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his fiction.  He is an assistant professor at Missouri State University and Managing Editor of Moon City Review.  He lives in Springfield Missouri, with his family. You can find Czyzniejewski’s latest collection at the Curbside Splendor website.  We hope you enjoy the interview! Don’t forget about our annual spring Audio Contest, with winners in the categories of fiction, prose, audio documentary, and humor each receiving an award of $1,000.  Don’t forget, too, to check out our all new app on iTunes and the Android app store!

  This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, we had the opportunity to talk to author Jami Attenberg, whose novel Saint Mazie was recently released. Besides Saint Mazie, Attenberg is the author of three other novels: The Kept Man, The Melting Season, and The Middlesteins, which was a New York Times bestseller. She is also the author of the short story collection Instant Love. In addition, she is a prolific writer of personal essays for publications and online sites such as Salon, Vogue, The Rumpus, and The Hairpin. You can find out more about Attenberg and her writing on her website. We hope you enjoy the interview! Don’t forget about our fall contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. We’ve extended the deadline to October 15th!

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to bring you the humor category runner-up from our  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest,  Erin Drew’s “This is how I thought things were done…sorry.” Erin Drew is on pace to get her MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing from The University of Baltimore next May, a program which she adores. She has been published in Welter Literary Magazine and has been a featured storyteller at The Stoop Storytelling Series in Baltimore.  Erin wasn’t born with the ability to “get embarrassed.” Therefore, her stories usually cause general uneasiness for all. Don’t forget about that submissions are open to our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. Enjoy Erin Drew’s “This is how I thought things were done…sorry.”

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to feature the prose runner-up in our  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest, Robert Morgan Fisher for his entry “Vox Rex.” Robert Morgan Fisher’s fiction has appeared in 0-Dark-Thirty, The Huffington Post, Psychopomp, Golden Walkman Magazine, The Spry Literary Journal, 34th Parallel, Carnival, The Snake Nation Review, The Seattle Review, Spindrift, Bluerailroad and other publications. He’s written extensively for TV, radio and film. Robert holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, where he now works as a Book Coach. He also develops courses and teaches for Antioch’s online I2P Program. In addition to fiction, he’s had several literary essays published and he often writes companion songs to his short stories. Both his music and fiction have won many awards. Robert also voices audiobooks. You can find our more about him at www.robertmorganfisher.com Don’t forget about that submissions are open to our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. And please enjoy our excellent runner-up in prose, “Vox Rex” by Robert Morgan Fisher!  

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to bring you the poetry runner-up from our  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest,  Kai Carlson-Wee. Carlson-Wee has rollerbladed professionally, surfed north of the Arctic Circle, and traveled across the country by freight train. His work has appeared in Narrative, Best New Poets, Tri-Quarterly, and The Missouri Review, which selected a group of his poems for the 2013 Jeffery E. Smith Editor’s Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco, and is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University. Don’t forget about that submissions are open to our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. And please enjoy the poems of our fantastic runner-up in poetry: Kai Carlson-Wee.

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to feature the audio documentary runner-up in our  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest,  Abigail Keel for her entry “Heartland, Missouri.” Abigail Keel recently graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism where she studied Radio and Multimedia reporting. While in school she worked at KBIA News, the NPR affiliate in Columbia, Mo, and still works part-time there. She’s interned for a few audio-centric organizations including Third Coast International Audio Festival. She loves longform radio work–whether she’s making it or listening to it on her favorite podcasts. Abigail’s piece about Heartland, Missouri has also won 2 Regional Murrow Awards and an award from the Public Radio News Directors association. In her free time she likes to grow vegetables and then eat them. Don’t forget about that submissions are open to our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. And please enjoy our fantastic runner-up in audio documentary: Abigail Keel’s “Heartland, Missouri.”

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to feature our final winner of our  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest.  The winning submission to our new Humor category was Jaime Lowe’s “Chicken Cutlets, Cleavage & Compromise.” Lowe quit modeling after thirteen years in the business to pursue careers on the other side of the lens as a writer and photographer. She earned her B.S. in Photojournalism from Boston University and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, WIRED, Slate and BUST, among others. Her photographs have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Francisco. She is currently working on a book of short stories and her first feature-length film. In the following weeks we’ll be featuring the contest runners up in each category.  And don’t forget about that submissions are open to our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. Enjoy our winner in humor, “Chicken Cutlets, Cleavage & Compromise,” by Jaime Lowe!

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to feature another winner from our  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest.  The winning prose submission was Alison Byrne’s “Leaving Los Angeles.” Byrne is a graduate of the Transom Story Workshop and has an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. She works in documentary video and audio, and loves crafting social-issue-driven stories with a humorous bent. Alison once spent a month walking 500 miles across Spain along the Camino de Santiago but is equally delighted by lounging in her hometown at the Jersey Shore. She’s soon launching a podcast called “Snobs,” about people who know too much about things, which she’ll voice from the Park Slope, Brooklyn, bedroom that she shares with one-eyed cat named Fez. You can learn more about her at www.alisonbyrne.com. Check back next week for our final winner, this time in the humor category, and then in the weeks to come for our runners up.  And don’t forget about our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. Enjoy Alison Byrne’s “Leaving Los Angeles.”

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to feature another winner of our  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest.  The winning poetry submission was Kevin McIlvoy’s “Notes on his poems by a guy who observed them in their natural habitat.” McIlvoy has published four novels (A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, Hyssop) and a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and many other literary magazines. His short-short stories and prose poems have appeared in The Collagist, Pif, Kenyon Review Online, The Cortland Review, Prime Number, r.k.v.r.y, Waxwing, and other online literary magazines. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He has taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing since 1990; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1981 to 2008. He has served as a fiction faculty member at national conferences, including the Ropewalk Writing Conference (Indiana), the Rising Stars Writing Conference (Arizona State University), the Writers at Work (Utah) Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writing Conference (Vermont). He has been a manuscript consultant for University of Nevada Press, University of Arizona Press, University of New Mexico Press and other publishers. He served on the Board of Directors of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. His collection of prose poems, short-short stories and short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, will be published by Four Way Books in 2017. Check back in the weeks to come for our other winners in humor and audio documentary and for the runners up in each category.  And don’t forget about our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. We hope you enjoy our winner in poetry, “Notes on his poems from a guy who observed them in their natural habitat,” by Kevin McIlvoy.

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to feature the first of our winners of the  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest.  The winning audio documentary submission was Karen Brown’s “Lance and Nina: A Story of Addiction and Redemption.” Brown is a longtime health reporter at New England Public Radio (WFCR), where she has produced national radio documentaries on traumatic stress, bipolar disorder, hypochondria, and other mental health issues. She also freelances for NPR, The Boston Globe, New York Times Online, and other outlets. She was a Knight Fellow in Science Journalism at MIT and Rosalynn Carter Fellow in Mental Health Journalism. She lives with her husband and teenage twins in Northampton, Massachusetts. In the coming weeks we’ll be featuring our other winners and runners up.  And don’t forget about our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000. We hope you enjoy our winner in audio documentary, “Lance and Nina: A Story of Addiction and Redemption” by Karen Brown.

On this week’s Soundbooth Podcast, from The Missouri Review we are excited to feature the third installment from our Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reception, a reading by Andrew Cohen, from his 2014 Editors’ Prize winning essay “Ronaldo.” Submissions are already open for our 2015 Editors’ Prize Contest, and we hope to have the chance to read some of your finest work in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Introducing Andrew is The Missouri Review’s Associate Editor Evelyn Somers. Cohen is an Instructor of English at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. His essays have appeared in Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Normal School, North American Review and elsewhere. Two of his essays have also been selected as “Notable” by the Best American Essay Series.

This week on the Soundbooth Podcast, we are continuing to bring you the public reading by our 2014 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize winners.  We wanted to be sure and share poetry prize winner Alexandra Teague’s reading with you to close out April’s Poetry Month. The Editor’s Prize reception where we get to meet each year’s prize winners and hear them share their work with the public  (and, of course,  the accompanying weekend of fun in Columbia) is one of the staff’s favorite weekends of the year.  So often our correspondence with contributors is electronic, and so this is a welcome exception where we get to thank them for sending us such fantastic work. We hope you enjoy Alexandra’s reading of her prize-winning poems! Photo credit Dylan Champagne Alexandra Teague is assistant professor of poetry at University of Idaho and editor for Broadsided Press.  She is the author of Mortal Geography (Persea 2010); winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and 2010 California Book Award Gold Medal in Poetry; and the author of The Wise and Foolish Builders, which centers around the supposedly haunted nineteenth-century Winchester rifle heiress Sarah Winchester (Persea, April 2015).  

Every year, thanks to the generosity of Jeffrey E. Smith, we are able to bring all of our Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize winners to Columbia for the weekend to celebrate with the staff and to read their award winning works. The reception for the prize winners is our big event of the year, and it is a chance for us at TMR to get together with the members of the Columbia and University of Missouri community to thank them for their continued support of the magazine.  Last Saturday’s event was a smashing success, and our winners read their work to a packed room of current and former staff and the aforementioned writing and arts community here in Columbia.  In the next few weeks, TMR’s  Soundbooth Podcast is excited to air the winners’ readings at the Editor’s Prize reception. We’ll begin this week with our Editor’s Prize winner in Fiction, Rachel Swearingen, reading her award winning short story, “How to Walk on Water.” Swearingen’s stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, American Short Fiction, Witness, and elsewhere. Her work has garnered several prizes, including a 2012 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University, and has taught creative writing and American literature at WMU and Kalamazoo College. Visit her online at rachelswearingen.com.

  With only 8 days left until the extended March 29th deadline for our 2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest, we thought we’d reach way back and bring you a work we featured as a part of one of the early years of this contest–2007. Some of the categories of our Audio Contest were different eight years ago, but one of the consistent categories has been Audio Documentary, and in 2007 the 2nd Runner-Up was the piece we are sharing with you again today, Ken Cormier’s “The Secret Piano’s of Manhattan.”  And check out our past winner’s page to listen to other voices from contests past! This year, we are sending out a special call for your best radio reporting for our Audio Doc category–which has been running a bit behind the other categories in submissions thus far. Of course, we would also like to hear your best submissions of poetry, prose, and humor for our other categories.  Submission fee for the contest is up to you, and prizes of $1,000 will be awarded to the winner in each category.   So here it is, nostalgically, from 2007 and our contest’s early years. Click below to hear “The Secret Piano’s of Manhattan” by Ken Cormier

    A few weeks ago on the podcast, we featured an example of one sort of humor submission we’d love to see sent in to our newest category in the 2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest, the anecdotal radio essay ‘Consider the Jellyfish.” This week, we are excited to share with you another former submission that we feel captures an entirely different subgenre within this new Humor category—Ben Grund’s satire “EndPR.” Time is running out to submit to the Audio Contest for a chance to win one of four $1,000 prizes, so send us your best work in prose, poetry, audio documentary, and humor.           Ben Grund grew up in New Jersey, raised between Saturday morning cartoons and Sunday morning church. His early life was plagued by important questions, such as: How did the sacrifice of Jesus work? Did he take all of the sins into his body and then explode, like the Hulk swallowing a nuclear warhead? These questions were simultaneously philosophical, goofy, irreverent, and genuine and when his Sunday school teachers didn’t answer, Ben started writing stories to make sense of them. After graduating with a major in Religion and a minor in Film Studies from Colorado College, Ben went on to work in film and television, working as a production assistant while writing screenplays. Ben enjoys telling stories that explore morality, religion, mythology, and human nature while balancing irreverence with respect, satire with sincerity, philosophy with grounded human struggle, and goofiness with real drama. In his spare time, he enjoys poker, martial arts, and pretending to know things about scotch. Thanks again for joining us on this week’s Soundbooth Podcast, don’t forget to check out the 2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest, and we hope you enjoy “EndPR.”