Issue 98.4 Now Available
The Winter 2024 issue of Prairie Schooner has arrived! And with it, a bittersweet farewell to our long-time and well-loved editor in chief of more than twelve years, Kwame Dawes. Our upcoming Spring 2025 issue will be the first under our new editor in chief, Timothy Schaffert; keep an eye on our website and social channels for more.
The Winter 2024 issue opens with Marilyn Hacker and Deema K. Shehabi’s poem “Water to Water: A Renga for Gaza,” which is the winner of a 2024 Edward Stanley Award. In this collaborative renga, Hacker and Shehabi write of the photographs and news coming out of Gaza: “Real as hunger pangs; the milk drying in her breasts as the baby hangs // so limp in her thin, bronzes arms.” This poem is excerpted from Hacker and Shehabi’s upcoming book, Water to Water: A Gaza Renga (Interlink Books, Fall 2025).
Nadeem Zaman’s story “Special Registration,” the winner of a 2024 Glenna Luschei Award, follows a young Bangladeshi American journalist reporting for a small paper while working on coverage of the widespread lockup of Muslim men in the US after 9/11. As the narrator struggles with his own alcoholism and sense of pointlessness, the story touches on themes and questions of assimilation, identity, cultural allegiance, and violence while challenging the Islamophobia disguised as patriotism after 9/11.
In another corner of the world, Catherine DeNardo takes the reader to Italy in her essay “Three Views of Naples.” Punctuated by epigraphs from Elena Ferrante, this piece follows DeNardo’s memories of growing up visiting Naples and the changes that occurred with each visit. “I was never afraid in Naples even though there was plenty to be afraid of,” writes DeNardo. “As a child, the blue mole on my grandfather Poppop’s lower lip that joggled when he ate and put me off my food bothered me more than the brick that came smashing through the window of the orange municipal bus and landed at my feet.”
Other topics are covered and uncovered, like in the story “Boyish” by Emily Black, a powerful queer coming of age story which was named the winner of the 2024 Lawrence Award. Black utilizes a second-person point of view to explore identity, shame, sexual discovery, and longing. Black writes: “Where you want to be touched doesn’t exist, but somehow you feel it—the opposite of phantom limb, an imaginary hollow that feels to you like truth.”
You can order the new issue now through our online store. Our store also offers subscriptions for a full year (4 issues) of the journal. New subscriptions will start with our upcoming Spring 2025 issue, coming this fall.