LUMEN No. 7 Is Coming This Friday!

Get ready—the summer 2019 installment of our email newsletter, Lumen, drops on Friday, and it’s one for the books! For Lumen no. 7, we’ve asked some of our Issue 7.2 contributors to share the can’t-miss, APA-authored books that are top of their reading lists this summer. From Ocean Vuong to Seema Reza, this edition of Lumen is packed with fantastic reading recommendations. We can’t wait to dive into the titles they recommend ourselves—and hope you’ll discover a new favorite read or two, as well!

Photograph of a black mug containing milky tea and a copy of Lee Herrick's SCAR AND FLOWER lying open on its front (with the cover up—showing large, red-and-white, sans-serif display type on a dark background). The words "What to Read in Summer 2019" and the Lumen logo (a black circle with a white, hanging line-drawing of a pendant lamp and the word "Lumen" in white script font) take up the right side.
LUMEN 7: What to Read in Summer 2019. Click here to subscribe. 

If you’re already subscribed to Lumen, you can look forward to receiving this season’s letter in your inbox on Friday morning. And if you aren’t yet a subscriber, not to worry; there’s still time to make sure you won’t miss out! Follow the link below or click on the image at the top of this post to sign up:

Subscribe to Lumen

We hope this issue of Lumen provides you with some great inspiration—and would love to hear what’s on your reading list this summer!

Light and peace always,
Iris, Mia, and Irene

LUMEN No. 6 is Coming on Friday.

Happy Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month! So much is already in motion this May—from Kundiman’s release of a special poetry folio in honor of the occasion to Penguin Books’s addition of four seminal Asian American literary works to their classics series—and over here at LR, we’re excited to be celebrating in our own way, too.

Writing Into Silence: Four Prompts for APA Heritage Month; Lumen by LANTERN REVIEW (Photo of purple flowers against a yellow wall by Mona Eendra on Unsplash)
LUMEN 6: Writing into Silence—Four Prompts for APA Heritage Month. Click here to subscribe. (Photo by Mona Eendra on Unsplash)

Later this month, we’ve got a brand-new issue focusing on APA history and literary lineage forthcoming, but first, a special APAHM edition of our newsletter, Lumen, featuring four prompts about writing into silence, drops this Friday, May 10th. During APAHM, when we often stop to consider the legacies of injustice and trauma that are written into our histories, it seemed appropriate to address what it means to grapple with silence in our craft, and we hope that the four exercises we’re sharing (each of which is inspired by a different Issue 7.1 contributor’s piece) will inspire and challenge you in your creative practice this May.

If you’re a Lumen subscriber already, you can look forward to seeing the new newsletter in your email inbox first thing on Friday morning. And if you’re not yet subscribed, there’s still time to get on the list to receive this quarter’s letter! Just follow the link below or click on the image at the top of this post to sign up.

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A very happy May to you. We look forward to hearing how you might use the prompts we’re sharing in Lumen 6 to inspire your writing this APAHM month—and can’t wait to share Issue 7.2 with you in just a couple of weeks’ time!

Light and peace,

Iris & Mia

LUMEN No. 5 Drops on Friday!

LUMEN 5: How to Give a Gift to a Poet. Click here to subscribe. (Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.)

It’s late in the season, but if you still have a poet friend for whom you want to find a last-minute present this year, you might be wondering what to give them. 

Well, this Friday, in our last Lumen newsletter of the year, we have you covered. In this quarter’s letter, we will be sharing five ideas for giving a thoughtful, unique gift to a poet. Here’s a sneak peek:

“If you’re anything like me [Iris] when it comes to giving gifts, you like to give objects or experiences that will be truly meaningful—that will support and encourage the recipients in pursuing their passions. So how does one choose a thoughtful gift for a poet that will do more than collect dust after the thank-you note is sent? In keeping with the principle that gift-giving is not about the money spent, here are some ideas of how to give gifts to poets (or any writers, really) that will inspire and support them in their vocation—whether during the holidays or at any time of year.”

Whether you’re shopping for a poet or you are a poet whose loved ones occasionally ask you for gift ideas, we hope this issue of Lumen will help provide some inspiration. And if you’re still not subscribed yet—you still have four more days to do so before the newsletter drops! Just click here to sign up.

We hope you have a happy and healthy end of 2018. Cheers to the end of yet another year of fantastic Asian American poetry, and here’s to a new year full of still more brilliance—ever more light—in 2019! 

Light and peace always,

Iris & Mia

LUMEN No. 4 Is Coming on Friday, and We’re Giving Away a Copy of ISAKO ISAKO to Celebrate!

LUMEN 4 is coming: Books We Wish We Had as Kids (Picture Book Edition)

It’s now a good solid month or two into the new academic year, and just in time to get ahead of that mid-semester slump, the fourth issue of Lumen is dropping on Friday!  Following up on Lumen No. 3, in which Iris shared some of her favorite middle-grade and YA books for young APA readers, in Lumen No. 4, Mia writes about books for younger children that she has enjoyed reading and sharing with her family. Here’s a sneak preview of some of her thoughts on the matter:

It’s a privilege to raise children in a literary landscape that includes such a wealth of talented APA children’s authors. . . . As a parent, I want nothing more than for my children to read books that enrich the imagination, that broaden their capacities for empathy, and that expand their worlds to include unfamiliar places and ways of living, while also affirming their lived experiences and the experiences of those around them.

If you’re not already subscribed to Lumen, you’re in luck! Not only are there four more days to subscribe before the newsletter hits inboxes this Friday, October 5th, but we are also celebrating by randomly giving away a copy of Mia’s new book, Isako Isako, to one of our subscribers. All you have to do to enter is the following:

  1. Be subscribed to Lumen by 11:59 pm PDT on Thursday, October 4th. (If you’re not yet a subscriber, you’ll need to sign up first, but existing subscribers are also eligible to enter!)
  2. Leave us a comment on this blog post with your name and the title of a contemporary kids’ or teen book by an APA author that you wish you’d had as a kid. (It can be a picture book, an early reader book, a middle-grade book, or YA book of any genre.) [UPDATE on 10/4/18: We’re now expanding the giveaway to our social accounts, too! See today’s posts on our Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts for instructions specific to each. Lumen subscribers can enter more than once, on more than one platform (as well as on the blog)—so fire away! We look forward to hearing from you.]
  3. Lumen subscribers may enter as many times as they like—each new comment that is left with a book title will count as one entry (though the same person may not repeat the same book’s title for more than one entry). After the giveaway closes, we’ll randomly choose one winner amongst the entries and will get in touch via the email address with which the winner is subscribed to Lumen.

[UPDATE on 10/5/18: Congratulations to Rachelle Cruz, our randomly chosen giveaway winner! Rachelle shared with us on Instagram that she wishes she’d had Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters when she was a kid. Thanks for the recommendation, Rachelle—we can’t wait to check out this spooky, October-appropriate tale. We’ll be in touch soon to coordinate sending you your prize copy of Isako Isako.]

We hope you’ll discover a new title or two to share with your favorite little ones in Lumen No. 4. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing about the books you wish you’d had when you were a kid!

Light and peace,

Iris & Mia

LUMEN No. 3 Drops Tomorrow, and We’re Talking about Diverse Books for Kids!

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month may be nearing its close, but as we all know, the challenge of representing APA voices on the page is one that continues year round. Lumen No. 3 (the third installment of our email newsletter) is about to drop into inboxes tomorrow, and we’re excited to announce that it will be the first of two newsletters focused on the topic of Asian American literature—not for adults, but for kids! These days, there is so much exciting, diverse work that is being published in the world of children’s books, and the titles that we’ll be talking about are stories that we have loved sharing with the youngsters in our lives and that we wish we had had as kids.

Why, you might ask, do we feel so strongly about this topic—though children are not LR ‘s primary audience? Here’s how Iris explains it in Lumen 3:

“Kids need books that will challenge them to see worlds outside of their own—but they also need books that offer them mirrors in which they can see themselves. And in the nineties [when I was the same age as my sixth graders], there just weren’t many kids’ or teen books that had characters like me or families like mine. . . . In short, I wasn’t only bored with the books in the teen section of the library; I just couldn’t relate to them.”

In this quarter’s newsletter, Iris will be putting on her “teacher hat” to discuss middle-grade and YA titles, focusing on three books that she enjoyed getting to share with her sixth-grade ELA students this past school year, and in Lumen No. 4 (to come in a few months’ time), Mia will be meditating on her thoughts as a parent on finding diverse books to share with younger APA readers.

If you’re already a Lumen subscriber, we hope you’ll enjoy sharing the books we talk about in these next two newsletters with the young people in your life. And if you’re not yet subscribed, there’s still time! Click here to sign up so that you won’t miss out when Lumen No. 3 drops tomorrow.

A very happy and healthy Memorial Day to all of you, and cheers to another wonderful APA Month!

Light and peace,

Iris & Mia

 

What Are Your 2018 Writing Intentions? Join Us for LUMEN No. 2 as We Discuss Ours!

Happy Wednesday! We hope you’re staying warm and cozy this frosty January day, especially those of you who are bracing for winter storms out East this week. It’s been a season full of transition for us here at LR, but we’ve really been enjoying leaning into the seasonal rhythm of writing for our new, quarterly email newsletter, Lumen. And today, we’re super excited to announce that the second installment of Lumen will be hitting our subscribers’ inboxes next Monday!

Lumen No. 1 focused on prompts and exercises for renewing one’s writing practice with the turn of the seasons, but Lumen No. 2 will be dedicated to considering the turn of the year—and specifically, the practice of setting intentions for our writing lives this year.

Just what is an intention? Here is a little sneak peek from the newsletter to explain:

Different from a goal or a resolution, an intention is more about calling a season into being or simply naming it for what it already is. An intention may be about realigning one’s perspective; refocusing one’s attention with renewed intensity; or even aspiring to sustain a rhythm of growth or rest in one’s day-to-day life. Intentions are not meant to have quantifiable end results—rather, they’re are meant to guide and center us throughout a course of time in one’s life.”

LR editors Mia and Iris will be sharing some of their own intentions as they consider where 2017 took their writing lives and where they hope to go in 2018. We hope that those of you who are already subscribed will join us in thinking about how we can each approach our writing practices with greater purpose and grace this year—and if you’re not already a Lumen subscriber, there’s still time to make sure you don’t miss out! Simply click here or on the image at the top of this post to sign up

A very happy, healthy New Year (and Year of the Dog) to you and yours—and may your writing in 2018 be filled with light, joy, and inspiration.

Light and peace,
Mia & Iris

 

 

Introducing LUMEN

Lumen Post Header

Hello, LR community! It’s great to be back from DC. The Smithsonian APAC’s Asian American Literature Festival two weekends ago was a truly amazing experience, beautifully tying together multiple literary generations, styles, and sub-communities (from spoken word to critical scholarship) in the best way possible.  We loved getting to catch up with old friends and had lots of fun meeting new faces in the literary lounge, where we were overwhelmed by your outpouring of support and enthusiasm. Thank you for making us feel so welcome!

As promised, we have some exciting news to share today. As announced at the festival, Lantern Review is getting a newsletter! There have been a lot of changes for us at LR these last few years, and we’ve been searching for a way to bring both more sustainability and more intimacy to what we do. The blog and the magazine are wonderful, but they require a lot of lead time due to the editorial process, and we’re not always able to deliver content to you with the sort of immediacy we’d like. Hence, we’ve created Lumen, a smaller-scale extension of LR that is sent right to your email inbox.

Lumen is not just your standard newsletter. As a subscriber, you’ll get more than just updates; you’ll have access to exclusive content, including writing prompts, meditations on craft and writing practice, teaching ideas, tips on publishing, reading recommendations, and more. We’d like to envision Lumen as a living-room chat between friends, a catch-up over an afternoon cup of tea or coffee. You can think of it as the blog’s little sister, with the type of content that we have always provided, but with a more intimate format and feel.

So what does this mean for LR? Certainly, neither the blog nor the magazine is going away anytime soon. But the distribution of our editorial energy will be shifting a little. You’ll continue to see news and occasional full-length posts on the blog, but whereas we were very focused on the blog in the past, we now want to pour more of our energies into the magazine itself, so we’ll be concentrating on putting out more of our supplementary content via Lumen in the hopes of building toward a next issue sometime in the near future. Because we’re still experimenting with this new format, Lumen will come out quarterly for now, but if we feel that there is enough momentum to produce more installments, we may decide to increase the frequency of publication.

If you came by our table at the AALF, you should already be subscribed (if you haven’t received a welcome email yet, please check your spam or updates folders, or email us at editors [at] lanternreview [dot] com). And if not, getting linked up with Lumen couldn’t be easier. Simply fill out the form below, and you’ll receive a confirmation email in your inbox. Once you’ve confirmed your subscription, you’re all set! As a little thank-you gift for signing up, you’ll get access to a digital Little Poetry Flight created exclusively for Lumen subscribers, featuring work from Sally Wen Mao, Neil Aitken, and R. A. Villanueva. (Please note that even if you were receiving emails from us before as a contributor, you’ll need to sign up for Lumen directly, as it is an entirely different list).

We’re so very grateful for all of your continued support and are excited to build LR out in new directions through Lumen and more. We hope you’ll come along with us for the ride!

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