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The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize published by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" [1] published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are invited to submit up to six works they have featured. [2] Anthologies of the selected works have been published annually since 1976. It is supported and staffed by volunteers.
The founding editors were Anaïs Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Newman, Daniel Halpern, Gordon Lish, Harry Smith, Hugh Fox, Ishmael Reed, Joyce Carol Oates, Len Fulton, Leonard Randolph, Leslie Fiedler, Nona Balakian, Paul Bowles, Paul Engle, Ralph Ellison, Reynolds Price, Rhoda Schwartz, Richard Morris, Ted Wilentz, Tom Montag, Bill Henderson [3] and William Phillips. [4]
Many guest editors have served this collection over the years. They are listed in each edition that they edited. More than 200 contributing editors make nominations for each edition. They are listed on the masthead.
Each edition of the Pushcart Prize includes a complete index of presses and writers reprinted in the anthology since 1976. More than 2,000 writers and 600 presses have been selected.
Among the writers who received early recognition in Pushcart Prize anthologies were: Kathy Acker, Steven Barthelme, Rick Bass, Charles Baxter, Bruce Boston, Anne Carson, Raymond Carver, Joshua Clover, Junot Diaz, Andre Dubus, William H. Gass, Suzanne Kamata, Seán Mac Falls, William Monahan, Paul Muldoon, Tim O'Brien, Lance Olsen, [5] Miha Mazzini, [6] Peter Orner, Kevin Prufer, Kay Ryan, Mona Simpson, Ana Menéndez, Ladette Randolph, Kaveh Akbar and Wells Tower. [7]
The Pushcart Prize anthology has earned national recognition. Kirkus Reviews praised it as "must reading for anyone interested in the present and future of America's arts and letters". [8] Pushcart Press was awarded the 1979 Carey Thomas Prize for Publisher of the Year by Publishers Weekly . [9]
The Pushcart Prize series was honored with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2005, [10] and the Poets & Writers/Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award in 2006. [11]
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American nonprofit organization with more than 700 members. It is the professional association of American book review editors and critics, known primarily for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, a set of literary awards presented every March.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels, as well as a short story were adapted into films.
Ploughshares is an American literary journal established in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, Ploughshares has been based at Emerson College in Boston. Ploughshares publishes issues four times a year, two of which are guest-edited by a prominent writer who explores personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. Guest editors have been the recipients of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, National Book Awards, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and numerous other honors. Ploughshares also publishes longform stories and essays, known as Ploughshares Solos, all of which are edited by the editor-in-chief, Ladette Randolph, and a literary blog, launched in 2009, which publishes critical and personal essays, interviews, and book reviews.
Joan Murray is an American poet, writer, playwright and editor. She is best known for her narrative poems, particularly her book-length novel-in-verse, Queen of the Mist; her collection Looking for the Parade which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition, and her New and Selected Poems volume, Swimming for the Ark, which was chosen as the inaugural volume in White Pine Press's Distinguished Poets Series.
Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher.
Katharine Weber is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop and elsewhere. She held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College from 2012 to 2019.
Prairie Schooner is a literary magazine published quarterly at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with the cooperation of UNL's English Department and the University of Nebraska Press. It is based in Lincoln, Nebraska and was first published in 1926. It was founded by Lowry Wimberly and a small group of his students, who together formed the Wordsmith Chapter of Sigma Upsilon.
Milkweed Editions is an independent nonprofit literary publisher that originated from the Milkweed Chronicle literary and arts journal established in Minneapolis in 1979. The journal ceased and the business transitioned to publishing. It releases eighteen to twenty new books each year in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Milkweed Editions annually awards three prizes for poetry: the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Jake Adam York Prize, and they are a partner publisher for the National Poetry Series. In 2016, Milkweed Editions opened an independent bookstore.
Pushcart Press is a publishing house established in 1972 by Bill Henderson and is perhaps most famous for its Pushcart Prize and for the anthology of prize winners it publishes annually.
Patricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.
Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.
Pushcart Prize winner and Best American Short Stories author Mark Wisniewski's third novel, Watch Me Go, received early praise from Salman Rushdie, Ben Fountain, and Daniel Woodrell. Mark's first novel, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, was praised by the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly. Wisniewski's second novel, Show Up, Look Good, was praised by Ben Fountain, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Psychology Today's Creativity Blog, Jonathan Lethem, Christine Sneed, Molly Giles, Richard Burgin, Kelly Cherry, Diana Spechler, DeWitt Henry, and T.R. Hummer.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic. She has experimented with different styles of writing, including writing obituaries for parts of her life, including her parents and herself, in Obit, letters in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and a Japanese form known as waka in The Trees Witness Everything. In all of her poems and books, Chang has several common themes: living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. She has also written two books for children.
Terry Randolph Hummer is an American poet, critic, essayist, editor, and professor. His most recent books of poetry are After the Afterlife and the three linked volumes Ephemeron, Skandalon, and Eon. He has published poems in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, The Literati Quarterly, Paris Review, and Georgia Review. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship inclusion in the 1995 edition of Best American Poetry, the Hanes Prize for Poetry, the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence, and three Pushcart Prizes.
Ramón Arroyo was an American playwright, poet and scholar of Puerto Rican descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture, and homosexuality. Arroyo was openly gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.
Richard Weston Burgin was an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic. He published nineteen books, and from 1996 through 2013 was a professor of Communications and English at Saint Louis University. He was also the founder and publisher of the internationally distributed award-winning literary magazine Boulevard.
Steve Kistulentz is an American novelist, poet, and screenwriter. He is the founding director of the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida. He is no longer serving as the Poet Laureate of Safety Harbor, FL. after admitting to transmitting child pornography.
Arthur Vogelsang is an American poet, teacher and editor.
Bill Henderson is an American author, editor and publisher best known for his memoirs and the Pushcart Prize series.
Stuart Barnes is an Australian poet.