Cosumnes River Journal IV Launched Today

CRJ

As Trina Drotar of the Sacramento Poetry Center already pointed out, this is the literary journal season for Sacramento. The local colleges launch their Spring issues in May, and today Cosumnes River college is launching its annual issue, volume 4.

CRJ, freshly delivered, and here I am showing off my copy. Photo by Heather Hutcheson.

This year's installment is the best ever, high-quality color cover and great poetry, fiction, images, and essays, featuring contributions by students and writers from the surrounding communities, as well as some out of area works, such as poetry by Zimbabwe'a Tinashe Muchuri. The print copy is beautiful, and for a taste of the content, here is the electronic version.



The readings from the journal were fantastic. The attending writers did a great job of bringing their poetry and short stories to life. Below are some images from the event itself.

Cosumnes River Journal editorial stuff for 2010. We read over 400 pages of submissions and ended with 32 high quality selections of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and short essays. I remember the busy Friday afternoons.

Below are some of the writers featured in the journal.



Of course, we had a great audience.



It was a good event. I read Tinashe Muchuri's poem "Gestures". This is the second Sacramento area journal in which Zimbabwean poet Tinashe Muchuri has been featured.The other, Rattlesnake Review, once featured him as a guest poet. I also noticed this year, while reading submissions to CRJ, that there was a higher number of submissions from southern Africa, particularly Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Abuja Writers' Forum Call for Submissions

Wordsbody has announced the following call for submissions: CAVALCADE literary journal, devoted to publishing original stories, poems,one-act plays, reviews, critical essays and art from an African perspective,will debut in October 2008 with a special edition. The tri-annual journal, a project of the Abuja Writers' Forum (AWF), is now seeking submissions for the second and third editions. Deadline: October 30, 2008 See more details here: Contribute to Cavalcade.
Read more

Roland Mhasvi's Flowers

Image
This is the cover of my copy of Roland Masvi's Flowers of Yesterday, a collection I reviewed in 1996 for The Herald. I was going through my old stuff when I saw this book in my old collection.  As I was flipping through the pages, I saw the cut-out for the original review, which in part reads: "This is a collection of highly esoteric poetry..., which can be charged of what Afrocentric scholars have described as 'piles of esoterica and ostentatious erudition'... The language is to the ordinary reader opaque, the imagery is inaccessible and the symbolism is surprisingly unusual but invitingly novel...real food for scholars."   The review just reminds me of the Chinweizu days, when we, as university students, had rediscovered African literature and its theory. Talking about Afrocentricity had a certain appeal, and we were looking at a lot of writing through the lenses of this newly-discovered Afrocentricity. Looking back, perhaps there was more in Mhasvi's poe
Read more

FREEDOM, a poem on South Africa by Afzal Moolla

Freedom The shackles have been cast off. Chains broken. People once squashed, under the jackboot of Apartheid, are free. Free at last! Freedom came on the 27th day in that April, 1994. Freedom from prejudice. From institutionalised racism. From being relegated to second-class citizenship. Freedom came and we danced. We cried. We ululated as we elected our revered Mandela. President Nelson Mandela. Our very own beloved 'Madiba'. Black and white and brown and those in-between, All hues of this rainbow nation, rejoiced as we breathed in the air of freedom and democracy. Today we pause. We remember. We salute. The brave ones whose sacrifices made this day possible, on that 27th day of April, 18 years ago. Today we dance. We sing. We ululate. We cry. Tears of joy and tears of loss. Of remembrance and of forgiveness. Of reconciliation and of memories. Today we pause. We acknowledge the tasks ahead. The hungry. The naked. The destitut
Read more