About Copper Nickel

Spring 2024, Issue 38

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Copper Nickel—the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver—was founded by poet Jake Adam York in 2002. When York died in 2012, the journal went on hiatus until its re-launch in 2014.

Work published in Copper Nickel has been reprinted in the Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays anthology.

Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the National Book Award; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Nobel Prize; the Georg Büchner Prize; the TS Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes; the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Whiting Writers Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffe, Bush, and Jerome Foundations; the Bunting Institute; Cave Canem; and the American Academy in Rome. Other contributors have had their first published work appear in our pages.

We publish a broad range of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and writing in translation, with a particular—but by no means exclusive—interest in work that considers sociohistorical context. Please consider submitting your original, unpublished work between September 1–December 15, January 15–March 1.

Copper Nickel currently pays $30 per page + contributors copies + a one-year subscription. (International writers, please note: payments sent overseas are subject to a 30% tax, which is withheld on the front end. This is beyond our control.)

Copper Nickel also facilitates the Jake Adam York Book Prize for a first or second poetry collection. The winning book each year is published by Milkweed Editions.

And Copper Nickel is—with Pleiades and Gulf Coast magazines—a co-facilitator of the Unsung Masters Series.

For questions, please contact Editor/Managing Editor Wayne Miller.

If you have a past Copper Nickel contributor with news to share, email us at coppernickelnews@gmail.com.

Masthead

Editor/Managing Editor

WAYNE MILLER is the author of four poetry collections—most recently Post- (Milkweed, 2016) and The City, Our City (2011)—co-translator of two collections—Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015) and I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007)—by the Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, and co-editor of three books, including Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed, 2016) and New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). His awards include the Rilke Prize, a Colorado Book Award, six Poetry Society of America awards, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize, and a Fulbright to Queen’s University Belfast. With Kevin Prufer, he co-curates the Unsung Masters Series. Visit him online here.

Co-Editor

JOANNA LULOFF—who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sri Lanka—is the author of the novel Remind Me Again What Happened (Algonquin, 2018) and the story collection The Beach at Galle Road (2012), which was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers title. Her work has appeared in Confrontation, Memorious, The Missouri Review, New South, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals. Visit her online here.

Poetry Editors

BRIAN BARKER is the author of three poetry collections—Vanishing Acts (SIU Press, 2019), The Black Ocean (2011) and The Animal Gospels (Tupelo, 2006). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Triquarterly. His awards include the Crab Orchard Open Competition, the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. Visit him online here.

NICKY BEER’s poetry collections are The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2015) and The Diminishing House (2010). Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Mary Wood Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Award, a fellowship and a scholarship from the Breadloaf Writers Conference, and two Colorado Book Awards, and her poems have appeared widely, including in AGNI, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. Visit her online here.

Fiction Editors

TEAGUE BOHLEN’s novel, The Pull of the Earth (Ghost Road, 2006), won the Colorado Book Award in Fiction. His short stories have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review, Hobart, South Dakota Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Visit him online here.

ALEXANDER LUMANS has received an NEA Creative Writing Grant in Fiction, a fellowship to the 2015 Arctic Circle Residency, and a Philip Roth residency at Bucknell University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Walrus, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. Visit him online here.

CHRISTOPHER MERKNER is the author of the story collection The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic (Coffee House, 2014), which won the Colorado Book Award, and his work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg ReviewSubtropics, Best American Mystery Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and the New Micro anthology. Visit him online here.

Consulting Editor: Nonfiction

NICOLE PIASECKI has published nonfiction in Brevity, Hippocampus, Literary Mama, Longreads, Shadowbox Magazine, and elsewhere. Visit her online here.

Art Consultants

KEALEY BOYD’s critical writing has appeared in ArtBeat Magazine, Artillery Magazine, College Art Association Reviews, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She is a board member of Minerva Projects and RedLine Contemporary Art Center. Visit her online here.

MARIA ELENA BUSZEK is the author of Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, and Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2006) and the editor of A Companion to Feminist Art (Blackwell Art History, 2019; w/Hilary Robinson) and Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke UP, 2011). Her current book project is Art of Noise: Feminist Art and Popular Music since 1977. Visit her online here.