By: Alanda Jackson   Former Cream City Review contributor Christine Ma-Kellams’ latest novel, The Band, is a satirical page-turner that explores K-Pop, cancel culture, and fandoms. In this novel, we meet Duri, one of five members of The Band, everyone’s latest K-pop obsession and rising boy band. After Duri releases his latest solo single, he finds himself at the head of a controversy that leaves him being canceled by the overzealous fans. On the run with nowhere to go, he meets a psychologist, a married Chinese American woman with two children at a Los Angeles H-Mart. Against her better ..read more

Red Shuttleworth By Jacob Collins Boxer and poet Red Shuttleworth’s poetry collection, Straight Ahead, transports its readers to the dusty, forgotten landscape of the western wilderness. Shuttleworth captures this landscape on page in vivid detail and colorful words. This is a rocky land full of coyotes, loss, and “sunflower-tinged dying clouds,” where “the rosy curtain of dusk falls on sagebrush, / silent as something buried-by-hand decades ago” and “the sun gouges an irrigated cropland horizon.” When you read Straight Ahead, it is as though you are out west, wilderness all around you and ..read more

Springtime is here, so check out these vintage seasonal offerings from the original Cheshire. Good and true with age. Happy weekend! Villanelle — Clarence Owen When I hear you softly sing,         Little one, with eyes of blue, All my thoughts are of the Spring. Violets are blossoming,         Everything seems fresh and new, When I hear you softly sing. In the skies the bird’s on wing,         In your eyes the light is true, And my thoughts are of the Spring. Little brooks ar ..read more

In the lead-up to our 50th Anniversary next year, Cream City Review is revisiting work in our Archives. Below is one from Ted Kooser, Pulitizer Prize winner, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and one of the great living writers of contemporary poetry. This poem would go on to appear in his excellent collection Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). Ted’s website can be found here.   Fireflies   The cricket’s pocket knife is bent from prying up the lid of a can of new moons. It skips on the grindstone, chattering, showering sparks that float away over the darkened yard. This ..read more

Cream City Review intern, Hazel Reese Ramos, recently connected with Bo Hee Moon to discuss her new poetry collection and themes of identity, hunger, and the connections that nourish us. Her poems “Generosity” and “Korean Little Girl” appear in our Fall 2022 issue, published under her previous name. Bo Hee Moon is a South Korean adoptee. Her poems have appeared in Cha, Gulf Coast, The Margins, Salt Hill, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs, published by Tinderbox Editions, is her debut collection of poems. Note to the reader from the poet: In the in ..read more

Winter/Spring 2023 Issue 46.2 can be found on Project Muse. Print copies will be available soon and mailed out to our subscribers ..read more

We’d like to thank everyone who submitted to our 2020 Summer Prize in Fiction and Poetry. Without you, this would not have been possible, and we are grateful for your participation and trust in our journal. Please join us in congratulating the winners, runner-ups, and finalists of the 2020 Summer Prize! Winner of the 2020 Fiction Prize selected by Lucy Tan: “The Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel” by Leah Fretwell Lucy Tan says, “’The Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel,’ a story about the frailty of all we hold near in the face of death–whether it be religion, blood connection, or the stories we grow up te ..read more

This year’s Cream City Review Summer Prize in Poetry will be judged by the poet and memoirist E.J. Koh. In this micro-interview conducted by Editor-in-Chief, Su Cho, E.J. discusses moments of surprise during her writing process, what makes a poem memorable, and what she’s working on now. Read on for the full interview.  E.J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), winner of the Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry and the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020). You can learn more at www.thisisejkoh ..read more

This year’s Cream City Review Summer Prize in Fiction will be judged by award-winning novelist and short-story writer Lucy Tan.  In this micro-interview conducted by Fiction Editor Jessie Roy, Lucy weighs in on class and power in fiction, how “things” shape our relationship to place, and what she loves to see in a short story—and makes some excellent reading recommendations.  Read on for the full interview.   Lucy Tan is author of the novel What We Were Promised, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a Best Book of 2018 by&nb ..read more

2020 Cream City Live! Reading by Marlin M. Jenkins  Even though we had to cancel our annual Cream City Live! Reading, we wish to continue this tradition by bringing the event to you in the form of online blog posts and videos featuring our brilliant cast of writers. Our first reader is the talented Marlin M. Jenkins! Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and is the author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020). A graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA in poetry, his work has found homes through Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and Kenyon Rev ..read more