THIS YEAR’S NEW POP LIT PUSHCART NOMINATIONS

AS we’ve stated in past years, New Pop Lit‘s nomination process for the Pushcart Prize is to a certain extent arbitrary. We had a lot of excellent work to choose from, would’ve loved to select all of it. Unfortunately that wasn’t possible.

The rationale for the choices we made is this:

Our knowledge that nominations have to be made by snail mail, and the Pushcart editors are flooded with submissions. Hundreds of envelopes. Thousands of nominations. The first objective, in trying to have one of our nominations selected to be an actual prize winner, is getting the editors to read what we enclose. The bias then isn’t toward stuffing the envelope we mail with reams of paper, but toward shorter work.

Our other objectives were these:

1.) To enclose a variety of writing styles. We’ve done that.

2.) To make sure the nominations are well-written, and different enough from the norm to (possibly) gain attention.

3.) Lastly, to make sure the nominations are attractively presented.

ALSO, we decided to split our six choices equally between on-line work, and writing which appeared in our first two print zeens.

The chief criterion of course is excellence, well-displayed in these selections.

OUR NOMINATIONS

Poetry: 

–An excerpt from “The Spectre of the Rose”: by Frank D. Walsh.
(Published in New Pop Lit’s Extreme Zeen in May, 2020.)

Prose: 

–”The Sacred Whore.” Fiction by Rachel Haywire.
(Published in New Pop Lit’s Extreme Zeen in May, 2020.)

-”Vyvanse.” A novel excerpt by Brian Eckert.
(Published in New Pop Lit’s ZEENITH in July, 2020.)

–”Ben Lerner’s Topeka School Failure.” A book review by G. D. Dess.

–”The Look.” Fiction by Aaron H. Aceves.

–”On the Origin of an Event.” Fiction by Oliver Bennett.

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Thanks much to these exceptional writers and to all the writers we’ve published and will publish this crazy year!

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