Polyphony WE

  • Polyphony Web Edition
  • Polyphony Web Edition, 2010 Summer Edition
  • Polyphony Web Edition, Winter 2010/2011
    This Edition of Polyphony W.E. is the first volume in our new publication format. From this point forward, every piece of work accepted by our student editorial board will be published here in four quarterly volumes. On occasion we will publish special editions of the magazine to highlight topics or authors of interest. The print edition of the publication will represent the very finest of these already highly selected works.

    This change is the result of two important realities, the first being that you, our audience, are wired for the digital world—and we want to meet you where you read. Secondly, increasing paper publication costs puts a significant financial strain on a lit mag of our size. We value what we do and the contribution that young writers make, and we'd rather put our resources into more innovative endeavors. We hope you'll agree.

    This Polyphony W.E. volume also presents the winners of the 2010 Claudia Ann Seaman Awards for Young Writers. The winners are Joshua Schnessl for his poem, "A Regular Entropy;" Jessica Carlaw for her short fiction work, "Yellow;" and Jessica Renfrew for her non-fiction piece, "White Horse." Each category also has at least one honorable mention winner. Congratulations each of you for your fine work!

    Three award-winning writers, Travis Nichols, Simone Muench, and Angela Bonavoglia selected the winners in the poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. We thank them for their enthusiasm, and for their belief in the importance of nurturing young talent. The attention and encouragement of young writers' by adults who make their living by the written word gives our contributors reason to believe that their voice is important and is being heard. There is nothing more important to us. We also thank the Claudia Ann Seaman Foundation for it's continued support of our mission and for encouraging artistic excellence.

    About the Judges

    Judge for Poetry: Simone Muench

    simone-muench-2Simone Muench is the author of The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize; Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize and New York Times Editor’s Choice; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Disappearing Address co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, forthcoming). She is a recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, a VSC Fellowship, 49th Parallel Poetry Award, AWP Intro Journals Award, PSA’s Bright Lights/Big Verse Contest and others. She has work published, or forthcoming, in The Believer, Poetry, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly. Muench directs the Writing Program at Lewis University, and is an editor for Sharkforum.

    Judge for Fiction: Travis Nichols
    travisnichols

    Travis Nichols is the author of two collections of poetry, Iowa, and See Me Improving,  and the novel Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder. He edits the online magazine Weird Deer, and regularly contributes to The Believer, Paste, The Stranger, and the Huffington Post. His writing has appeared in a wide range of magazines and journals, such as the Boston Review, Crowd, Lungfull!, and Denver Quarterly. He lives in Chicago where he is an editor at the Poetry Foundation.



    Judge for Creative Non-Fiction: Angela Bonavoglia

    angela2-210-exp

    Angela Bonavoglia is an author and award-winning journalist. A former contributing editor to Ms., her work has appeared in the Nation, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and the Women's Media Center. Bonavoglia is also the author of The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, which was featured on Oprah, and Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church.

  • Polyphony Web Edition, Winter 2011/2012
    There is little that can prepare one for the brutality of watching a friend die of cancer. The slow, cruel consumption of the body by an unwelcome invader has given us—rightfully so, I now understand--metaphors of battle and war. Capable of both a full cavalry assault and a stealth terrorist attack, cancer demands a physical, emotional and intellectual vigilance that distills our relationships and focus to their most essential. While the outside world continues to move along at it's usual daily pace, the world of those affected by cancer seems to spin on an axis that at one turn is frighteningly fast and at another numbingly slow, creating a strange warped perspective on everything else. For a time, Rafael Torch, a teacher and a writer, seemed to outwit his cruel opponent. But as the fall progressed, it was clear that no amount of medical savvy or fortitude would be able to change the course of his horrible little war. On December 12, 2011, we said goodbye to a dear friend, just 36 years old.

    It is with this story that I beg your forgiveness for magazines mailed out too late, web updates overlooked, and a lost season of Polyphony W.E. I hope that you will understand that there are times in life when one must simply Be There. These are the times that most inform our life experience and that give meaning to all that we endeavor to create. I hope you'll join me in welcoming 2012 and celebrating the eight writers here who so eloquently explore what it means to be human.

     

    Elizabeth Keegan
    Executive Director

  • Polyphony Web Edition, Fall 2010
    The response to our "Sneak Peak" at Volume VI was out of this world! So to satisfy our readers and to showcase more fine work, we have published ten additional pieces from PHS Volume VI. To read every last work we suggest, of course, that you purchase a copy today!
  • Polyphony Web Edition, Summer 2011

     

    Many of you may have suffered through this summer's July heat wave. Across the U.S., more than 30 states recorded record high temperatures and across the southern part of the country, record low rainfall. In Boston just a week ago the thermometer on my car read 102 degrees in the shade! You might think to yourself right now, uh oh, I feel a global warming lecture coming on--and that might be appropriate, actually. But what I really want to point out is that it isn't just the weather that is hot these days. Our contributors are HOT! In fact, I'd argue that the pieces published in Polyphony H.S. Volume VII will stand up against any of the best literary magazines in the country. Full stop. We are on to something BIG here: we are showcasing the best of our literary future. The young writers that we publish are the writers that we will be reading in our book groups in five or ten years. This knowledge is what fuels the work of our incredibly dedicated editorial staff and the adults that support them.

    This year's submissions hit a record high—50% more than last year--from more students across the globe than ever before. Polyphonyhs.com is being viewed by students from China and Russia, and from every country in between. Nothing could be more satisfying. The most important thing to us is to celebrate young writers who are committed to craft and to giving voice to the occasions of their lives—with intelligence, skill, and great beauty. To all the submitters who trust us with work, once again we thank you.

    Thank you, as well, to the editorial staff that graduates this year. Our gratitude is great and our belief in you greater still. We all know that few are getting rich in the arts, but that there is great fulfillment and satisfaction in making the world a better place. Don't kid yourselves; through your devotion, your insight, and commitment to the process of nurturing young literary talent, you have contributed to the betterment of our world. Your work can be seen and felt on every page of Volume VII, perhaps our finest collection yet. We will miss you, but look forward to the great things that you will achieve. You are:

    Co-Editor-in-Chief
    Shelby Brody, Barnard College

    Genre Editors & Executive Editorial Committee Members
    Christopher Alessandrini, Harvard University
    Cameron Langford, Princeton University
    Emily Pate, Wake Technical Community College then University of North Carolina
    Elissa Watters, Dartmouth College

    Genre Editors
    Ellen Coatney, Carroll University
    Paul Hinkes, Yale University
    Jordan Spears, The U.S. Naval Academy

    Second Readers
    Adrian Chiem, Second Reader, Yale University
    Dana Koglin, Second Reader, Indiana University

    First Readers
    Marie Lambert, First Reader, Amherst College
    Alison Marqusee, First Reader, Haverford College
    Hannah Bernhard, First Reader, Smith College
    Catherine Sibert, First Reader, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

    ~Elizabeth Keegan, Executive Director

  • Polyphony Web Edition, Volume VI Sneak Peak 2010
  • Polyphony Web Edition, Spring 2011

    Here in the Midwest, spring is finally beginning to reveal itself after a long and frigid winter. The days are longer and the riotous early morning bird activity demands that even the groggiest among us shake off hibernation and get a move on! Spring and summer are our busiest time at Polyphony H.S. with the submission deadline in April, our new creative writing and college essay workshops, editor training and the push to summer publication.

    We continue to experience record high submission rates, with more submissions than ever from abroad. This month we received our first submissions from Vietnam and China (as well as from eleven other countries), proving once again the value of our work and that that young creative voices know no geographic or cultural boundaries.

    Importantly our national editorial board continues to grow to support submissions. Currently 75 teen editors from around the country and the world devote countless hours providing thoughtful review of each and every piece submitted. In a very real way, our process reflects our deeply held belief that nurturing young literary talent—both writers and editors—is the most important thing we do. We hope you agree.

    Happy Spring!

    Elizabeth H. Keegan
    Executive Director

  • Polyphony Web Edition, Spring 2012

     

    The Claudia Ann Seaman Awards for Young Writers
    Winners 2011

    It is with great pleasure that we introduce to you the 2011 Winners of the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards for Young Writers. The winners and runners up were selected from the nearly 2000 submissions to Polyphony H.S. during the Volume VII submissions year. The final selections were made by award-winning writers in each genre area. On behalf of the Claudia Ann Seaman Foundation, we thank the following judges for their time and thoughtful commentary on the winning pieces. They are:

    Christine Sneed

    christinesneed2Christine Sneed is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at Indiana University and has published stories in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Pleiades, Glimmer Train, Massachusetts Review, Meridian, Other Voices, Greensboro Review, River Styx, Phoebe, South Dakota Review, and many other journals.

    Stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New Stories from the Midwest, "Twelve + Twelve"; Pleiades, "A Woman on a Corner"; The Southern Review, "Beach Vacation"; Notre Dame Review, "The Goddess Complex"; TriQuarterly Online, "The River"; The Literary Review, "Roger Weber Would Like to Stay"; Barrelhouse, "Ladylike"; Massachusetts Review, "Litany: Four Men"; and American Literary Review, "The Driver."

    She has been awarded an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in poetry and has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, along with a 2010 Los Angeles Times book prize, first-fiction category, for her story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry. She lives in Evanston, IL and teaches creative writing and literature courses at DePaul University in Chicago, and creative writing for the University of New Orleans' low-residency MFA program.

    Laura Van Prooyen

    lauravanprooyenThe author of Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press 2006), Van Prooyen's recent work is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and the tenth anniversary anthology: Best of 32 Poems. She is a recipient of grants from the American Association of University Women and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and also has been awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize for her creative work. Van Prooyen earned an M.F.A. in Poetry at Warren Wilson College, and she lives in San Antonio. Her second collection of poems, Resist, has been a finalist in book competitions and remains under submission.

    S.L. Wisenberg

    slwisenbergpicSandi Wisenberg is the author of two collections, The Sweetheart Is In, and Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions, and The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, based on her blog. She grew up in Houston and lives in Chicago. Her M.F.A. is in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; her B.S. is in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism. She was a feature writer for the Miami Herald and has published prose and poetry in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tikkun, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and many other places. Her anthologized work is in Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations (Writer's Digest) and Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton) and Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology (Bedford/ St. Martin's). Her nonfiction has more or less recently appeared in Lilith, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, the Pinch, Crab Orchard Review and Colorado Review, Common Review and The Progressive. Her fiction (excerpts from her novel-in-progress) can be found in Prairie Schooner and the Seattle Review and more is forthcoming this spring in Fugue. She was a blogger for The Huffington Post and is one of two co-directors of Northwestern's M.A./M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. She also teaches in the University of Chicago's Graham School of General Studies, in the certificate program in creative writing. Until recently she was the creative nonfiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine. She's received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was the graduate faculty recipient of the 2006-2007 Distinguished Teaching Award, presented by Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies.