Diana Tappert: When developing The Art of Character, what were the first few elements that you were sure you needed to touch on? How did you narrow down these essential elements? David Corbett: I actually first formulated the content that would evolve into The Art of Character while teaching an online class through UCLA Extension’s…

April: Last summer — also the summer I read Fire Season: Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors — was the first summer of my life where I didn’t go to West Virginia; where my grandfather worked as a county doctor, where I was born, and where I still feel at home when I…

Matthew Vollmer is a cheater. Not the kind of cheater who breaks rules, mind you, but that’s almost worse. He’s the kind of cheater that twists every rule to his own devious advantage and smiles an artful smile as his dumbstruck peers watch on in seething jealousy. He’s not the easily dismissed kind of cheater,…

For my thirtieth birthday, I had a storytelling party. When no one knew what to talk about, I asked for a story about a scar. Even though I cringe through them, even though I cover my mouth, even as I gasp and violently shake my head and fall just short of shrieking, I love them.…

Consider the Lobster is the first book I’ve read by David Foster Wallace. I’ve been interested in him since reading the commencement speech to Kenyon College’s Class of ’05, in which he suggests that the value of a liberal arts education is not that it teaches you how to think, but that it teaches you what…

A long time since I — Player 1 — last played games (depending on who you ask) and I sigh to steady my hands. I’m the boy who gave up games for the broken belle who babbled something about “growing up;” I am the old gunman who incorrectly believes it is a time of rest,…

Consider broadly the painted portrait: A torso and face in oils on canvas. A grayish greeny black mixture of nothing-space for background. This is the classical portrait, the Rembrandt or Van Eyck, the Gilbert Stuart. The face floats without context in order to capture the portrayed person without bias. Now consider broadly the photographic portrait:…

Weeks after weaving through the overwhelming crowds of AWP, I finally got around to tackling the large pile of books I had acquired. Black Warrior Review (BWR), issue 38.2, was at the top, and I found it to be chock full of amazing work. So, instead of concentrating on one voice to represent the whole…

Thank you to all who entered and gave us this opportunity to read and consider your work. We hope to host many more contests over the course of many more years, so it is exciting for us to have received such a large and impressive, wide-ranging pool of submissions right out of the starting gate.…

We are pleased to announce our First Annual Prose Contest, which is now open for entries. Submit your best prose manuscript. We’re looking for novels, novellas, memoirs, lyric essays, lyric novels, short story collections, flash fiction or prose poetry collections, and hybrid manuscripts that include prose writing. The deadline to enter is 11:59 PM EST,…

Here’s a moment that hit me early, from the end of an essay called “On Snooping”: “I can accept that all I’ve ever wanted is not very special — all I’ve ever wanted, like most people, is proof of love.” Chloe Caldwell’s debut, Legs Get Led Astray, is exactly that — a proof of love.…