News

We are pleased to share Rebekka Rafnsdóttir's essay "A Girl on the Hunt," the inaugural recipient of the Bette Howland Nonfiction Prize. The prize, given annually to a student at the New School in New York City, was established by Honor Moore, who first met Bette Howland in 1977: "​In the winter of 1977, I went to the MacDowell Colony for the first time. I had just had my first work—a memoir-as-play called Mourning Pictures—go public on Broadway.... The play had been a hit in a Massachusetts summer theater and closed quickly in New York, and though it was to be published in an anthology, I was having a hard time emerging from what was an up-down whiplash experience. At MacDowell I met a woman writer about eight years older than me—at the time, she seemed much older!—who had just published a memoir of her time in a mental hospital—the book was called W-3. We became friends—long talks in what I remember as her very dark writing studio—her typewriter in a pool of light. She was the first woman writer to encourage me."

October 16, 2017 byRebekka Rafnsdóttir

**The A Public Space Fellowships will be announced on our News page on Wednesday, February 21.**

We are pleased to announce that applications will open on September 15 for the 2018 Public Space Fellowships.

September 8, 2017

A conversation on editing with Emerging Writer Fellow Jai Chakrabarti and his mentors, Mary-Beth Hughes and Elizabeth Gaffney.

July 20, 2017

We are pleased to announce our 2017 Emerging Writer Fellows.

February 15, 2017

We are pleased to announce that applications will open on October 1 for our 2017 Emerging Writer Fellowships.

September 22, 2016

The first year I taught freshman rhetoric at Iowa, a young woman announced at the beginning of the semester that she was from a Catholic, white supremacist background.

August 12, 2016 by Yiyun Li

These stories deal in large-scale deceit and betrayal, there are painful things at work in this fiction, but much like the scene I described above, Jamel Brinkley regularly finds ways to pierce through the dramatic and find the subtle and humane lurking within.

July 15, 2016 by Victor LaValle

I began reading Elizabeth Gaffney’s short story with a wince of parental recognition. Pets are hell, and having to explain their traumatic demise to a small, tear-stained child usually leads to an existential crisis, followed by the dubious consolation of hunting down some equally doomed replacement.

June 2, 2016 by Sasha Saben Callaghan

In celebration of the forthcoming publication of So Much for That Winter by Dorthe Nors, the next A Public Space Book with Graywolf Press, we're excited to share this excerpt from "Days," one of the two novellas in the collection.

May 20, 2016 by Dorthe Nors

In which a small group—poet, historian, and reporter—search for the last two words missing after a five-year search for all of the words in the Langston Hughes poem “Island.”

May 4, 2016 by Robert Sullivan

A. N. Devers talks with debut author Sara Majka about the Wu-Tang Clan, Alice Munro, and the intimacy of fiction. Cities I’ve Never Lived In: Stories by Sara Majka, is the newest A Public Space Book, with Graywolf Press.

February 16, 2016 by A. N. Devers

February 9, 2016

We are pleased to announce that applications are now open for our 2016 Emerging Writer Fellowships.

October 1, 2015

Whenever I visit Kolkata, India, the city of my birth, nostalgia follows me through the streets. I notice which of the older buildings have become new malls, which of the sweet shops known for their condensed milk squares have now been replaced by modern confectionaries or worse, a Baskin-Robbins, which of the old cow-claimed roads have been cleared to make room for apartments. My travel journals are full of these observations and the memories that come with them.

July 7, 2015 by Jai Chakrabarti

Throughout the summer and into the fall, we will be distributing postcards at various bookstores, performance venues, and cultural institutions around Brooklyn asking people to document a public space in the borough on a 4" x 6" canvas. Here is what we've received so far.

June 15, 2015

Translation may be the invisible art, but the translator's mission is precisely to bring visibility to a work of literature, and at times to rescue an author from obscurity. This is especially true when translating Italian women writers of the past who struggled for visibility even within their own culture.

April 23, 2015 by Olivia E. Sears

Belinda McKeon on Colin Barrett's "Stand Your Skin."

March 31, 2015 by Belinda McKeon

We are thrilled to announce our 2015 Emerging Writer Fellows: Jai Chakrabarti, Cornelius FitzPatrick, and Arinze Ifeakandu. We would also like to thank all of the writers who submitted manuscripts, the readers who spent the past eight weeks evaluating, debating, and championing applications, and the National Endowment for the Arts for its generous support of the program.

Supporting new writers has been an essential part of A Public Space since our debut issue—Leslie Jamison, Nam Le, and Jesmyn Ward published their first stories in the magazine—and with the Emerging Writer Fellowships, which are now in their second year, we look to continue this tradition by seeking out writers who have not yet published a book-length work but whose writing shows exceptional talent.

February 10, 2015

Leslie Jamison on Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Dead Fish Museum."

November 12, 2014 by Leslie Jamison

Hello Readers,

I’m sitting in Slottsparken, in Oslo—on the stone steps in front of the Royal Palace, in the shadow of a looming bronze king on his looming bronze horse—and I’m thinking about public spaces, how they summon an inadvertent gathering stripped of intention or annotation: a young artist in Converse high-tops holds a baguette in one hand and a splattered canvas in the other; an elderly couple strides by in matching sunglasses, still holding hands after however-many years; a group of children convulses collectively around the fact of a tiny toffee-colored dog; a woman bends over to reach her arm down into a garbage can.

October 23, 2014 by Leslie Jamison