Copper Nickel Issue 39

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of five collections, including We the Jury and Post-, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of Remind Me Again What Happened and The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game, and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic), and Emily Wortman-Wunder (author of Not a Thing to Comfort You).

Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s 2024 literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 15 for poetry and number 35 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals.

Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Griffin Poetry Prize; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward

Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations.

Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360.

Issue 39 Includes:

• A Translation Feature of poems from the Ravensbrück Striped Uniform Book—a collection of anonymous poems written in Polish by women prisoners at the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp between 1939 and 1945.

• Translation Folios with work by Egyptian poet Mona Kareem, translated by Sara Elkamel, and Spanish poet Karmelo C. Iribarren, translated by John R. Sesgo.

• New Poetry by National Book Critics Circle Award–winners Mary Jo Bang and Cynthia Cruz, Fulbright Creative Writing Award–winner Mary Crow, Audre Lorde Prize–winner Elizabeth Bradfield, Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award–winner Iain Haley Pollock, Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize–winner Bob Hicok, and many others, including Alex Chertok, Dorsey Craft, Rodney Gomez, Clemonce Heard, Rage Hezekiah, Oksana Maksymchuk, Rachel Mennies, Daniel Moysaenko, Eleanor Stanford, Zack Strait, and Matthew Tuckner.

• New Fiction by two-time NEA Fellow Tara Ison, O. Henry Prize– and Pushcart Prize–winner L. Annette Binder, as well as Tierney Oberhammer, Chaitali Sen, and Isabelle Stillman.

• New Essays by Kate Tufts Discovery Award–winner torrin a. greathouse and Pushcart Prize– winner Robert Long Foreman.

• Cover Art by Brooklyn-based artist Madeline