Posts by Travis Kurowski

Travis Kurowski began Luna Park in 2007: traviskurowski.com.



Changes for Luna Park

Yesterday marked the four-year anniversary for Luna Park, beginning back in January 2008. (LP began as a Blogspot blog in July 2007.) There is now a lot of good content in the archives, thanks largely to the fantastic efforts of Marcelle Heath—wearing various editorial hats over the years with LP—and also thanks to everyone who helped

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Seven Great Lit Mags from 2011

Best of lists are by definition failures. They are subjective and, in most cases, arbitrary. But they can be useful for the conversations they create (often born from disagreement) and their recognition of quality; they bring attention to things. Though the media is awash with similar lists for albums, books, film, restaurants, and much else, I

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Is Something Missing from the Pushcart Prize?

I am a big fan of the Pushcart Prize anthologies; I own the first 1976 anthology, the 25th anniversary edition, and each one from the past six years. Pushcart editor Bill Henderson is something of a hero of mine, a feeling probably held by much of the literary publishing world; I use his book The

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#Occupy Publishing

Yesterday I received two copies of the first issue of OCCUPY!, an Occupy Wall Street inspired newspaper from the editors of n+1. More than many, perhaps, I tend to see literature in periodical form—by which I mean magazines, journals, newspapers, zines, etc—as an essential part of literary history and culture, in a tradition stretching back to

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What Were the Best Lit Mags of 2011?

Luna Park will be posting its first Best Lit Mags of the Year list next month. I am both nervous and anxious to finish the list—nervous for obvious reasons, and anxious because I don’t remember seeing such a thing before for lit mags. If such a list existed in 1978, the first issue of New

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Edgar Allan Poe’s Literary Journal

This past October 7th was the 162 anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death in Baltimore, just 45 minutes away from where I am writing this (and where there still exists a struggling Edgar Allan Poe House). I once heard that—along with the many magazines, literary and otherwise, he edited and wrote for—Poe had also planned

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Where Are All the Lit Mag Apps?

Earlier this October, my wife bought me the new iPhone—a phone whose great power seems to be absorbing chunks of my time. I lost entire days the other week. One thing I spent a great amount of time doing was searching for literary magazine apps. I didn’t find that many. Here’s what I have on

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Hi There Writers

I got this charming email the other day from Dave Housley—a founding editor of Washington DC’s Barrelhouse magazine—and thought I’d pass it on, as it seemed a pleasant, informative, honest response to the “submission curiosity” most writers feel: Hi There Writers, This is Dave Housley from Barrelhouse. If you’re receiving this, then you have an active fiction submission

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Luna Digest, 7/5

It’s been some months since the last Digest post; here’s a recap of some spring & summer news: Literary magazines come and go at a rapid clip. For example: Charles McGrath once noted “the typical lifespan for a literary magazine appears to be roughly that of a major household appliance.” And when asked what the darkest moment

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Writing the Other: Michael Copperman and the Ethics of Representation

Running across Michael Copperman’s short story “It”—and his accompanying craft essay “Race, Authenticity, Culpability”—in Copper Nickel‘s new online venue COIN reminded me why I read literary magazines. Life is hectic. Motivations can get confused. Students and neighbors alike look at me quizzically when I tell them what I’m reading—the new issue of Conjunctions at the moment—and

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