​
​Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. 

The prompt this time is Lovers on the Beach, by Müfide Kadri. Deadline is April 14, 2023.

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF.

3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does  not affect the selection process in any way.​​​

​4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include KADRI CHALLENGE in the subject line.

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your piece. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is midnight EST, April 14, 2023.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 

12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 

13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send Spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the  challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 
​
​14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
​
15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!

16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.

We are thrilled to feature the important artwork of Manuel Espinoza for the current ekphrastic challenge.

Meleb, or Manuel Espinoza, born in Mexico City, lives and works in Merida, Yucatan.  He lived in America for several decades, returning to Mexico where he began selling his artworks on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta. He has experimented with traditional colourful folk style paintings, abstract art, expressionist portraits and figurative works, and more. He has turned to photography in the past few years, working digitally with his own imagery. Manuel’s artwork, exhibition history, and local advocacy has always been directed to improving the lives of at-risk children and women. These images are from his new series, Oprecion (Opression) speaking against the endemic political and personal violence. The exhibition is currently open at Palomas de la Paz, an art gallery in the former Juarez Penitentiary. Manuel’s home gallery is called Sega. He teaches art at local community centres, schools, and galleries.  Manuel is a survivor of multiple traumas and also of cancer. He was heavily involved in acting in community theatre, guitar, and singing, before throat cancer took his voice. Today, photography is his voice.

​Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. 

The prompt this time is Opresion, by Manuel Espinoza. Deadline is March 31, 2023.

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF.

3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does  not affect the selection process in any way.​​​

4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include ESPINOSA CHALLENGE in the subject line.

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your piece. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is midnight EST, March 31, 2023.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 

12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 

13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send Spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the  challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 
​
​14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
​
15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!

16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.

Dear Ekphrastic Family,

I quietly chose this painting to honour Black History Month, placing it in front of you in hopes that it would work its magic and become part of your stories and poems. With its subdued scene, I wasn't sure how many responses we would get. It's a quiet painting that transports us into open space and a different time, but behind the scenes, the story of the artist is terrible and  remarkable and inspiring. I love how art speaks when we give it a few moments of contemplation, a phenomenon that happens every time, in every challenge. This time, we had a surprise flood of outstanding entries on so many themes. We chose a veritable cornucopia of stories and poems, to sustain you through to spring. Thank you to every single one of you who entered, even if your piece was not selected this time. This is such an important space of creativity and discovery, and everyone who participates in it is part of something truly amazing. Thank you all.

​love, Lorette

The Long View 

It is a panorama of snow-crusted field and trees and orange-streaked sky and perhaps the person on his or her way back to the old farmhouse is checking for someone hiding in the long line of spiky pines, or lurking in the underbrush.  The wife’s brother, perhaps.  An angry  father?  As if the person who’s peering out over the field has been gone a long while and isn’t sure of his welcome.  Let’s say that person is a derelict husband who a month ago, stole money hidden in his wife’s round hat box, oddly painted with a similar bucolic scene.  That husband went off over the hills to a distant village where he assured the post master that he could read, even read cursive, and so for almost a month he sorted the scarce mail the train periodically dropped off and picked up to carry downstate. And one day the husband up and accompanied the mail downstate where it was said women wore black stockings and strappy garter belts and not much else.  It got old fast.  He missed his daughters, their dresses sewn from flowered grain sacks, his wife whose apron is stained from canning beets and beans.  Soon he will cross the wide field, whistle for his old dog, spy his two daughters at the window, call out their names, lift them high.  He leaves his wife’s name for last, and when she appears in the doorway, he reads her narrowed eyes, her crossed arms above the apron he dreamed about.  She steps forward, and the door is open, her answer to him standing there, asking to come home.  

Pamela Painter

Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of five story collections. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals such as Fictive Dream, Flash Boulevard, Harper’s, JMWW, Sequestrum, Smokelong Quarterly, and Three Penny Review, among others, and in numerous anthologies such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, MicroFiction and most recently in Flash Fiction America.  Painter’s stories have received three Pushcart Prizes and have been presented on National Public Radio, on the YouTube channel, CRONOGEO, and by WordTheatre.

​**

Just

Just 
a man
born
into slavery

raised 
with compassion 

Just 
an artist 
musician 
scientist 
environmentalist 
honorary doctorate 

knitter 

Just 
a genius 
found 

not 
lost
not 
lynched 

Just 
because 
of the skin 
covering 
his bones 

Donna-Lee Smith

leads a peripatetic life, dividing her time between an off-grid cabin in Quebec, Canada, and a cozy stuga on Gotland Island, in the Baltic Sea. She is currently in Sweden with her daughter’s wee sprogs (4 and 7). Said sprogs keep their MorMor (an ancient 73) running madly off in all directions and massacring the Swedish polysyllabic vocabulary with alacrity. 

**

​Untitled 
 
Untitled undefined unrefined  
this landscape is tossed 
for anyone any time any cost 
at the auction of abandoned hopes 
 
because gold was not enclosed 
as a lining to its now lined skin 
though in the beginning when ravished  
by that excited young hand  
it gave birth to petals and potatoes  
grapes and cherries that cheered  
the new settlers who cherished  
the land for being just a host  
not for that entitled dowry ghost 
 
while now there isn’t anyone to give a damn  
on its own it can’t soul-shift from soil to land   
to planet earth amid the tides of aloof fate  
it can only weather and bathe 
under the cold heavenly tears  
as in the first post-petal day   
when it became an abandoned maiden  
though perfectly adorned as all its peers  
as Attica Campania Provence  
with the same chemical defiance  
which in alliance with sun rain 
and dexterous hand gives birth  
to petals potatoes grain and cherries  
that the soul cherish yet here it is alone   
untitled unmanned unpetaled 
soil land planet spellbound  
by the ghosted home sound. 
 
Ekaterina Dukas 

Ekaterina Dukas, MA, has studied and taught linguistics and culture at Universities of Sofia, Delhi and London and authored a book on mediaeval art for the British library.  She writes poetry as a pilgrimage to the meaning and her poems have appeared widely on The Ekphrastic Review, its Challenges, Poetrywivanhoe and anthologies, among others. Her poetry collection Ekphrasticon is published by Europe Edizioni, 2021. 

**

We walked out of the forest
 
And Tooley, who doesn’t like the forest, says loud and clear into the frostbell air, can’t we go to a movie for a change?
 
I’ve been trying all kinds of whatever with Tooley. Dress-me-up sex and now hiking, that I had to buy a pair of boots for. 
 
I say, Tooley, just look at that house over there in the clearing. Tooley tells me I sound like a fairy tale. The clearing, Tooley says with his Tooley-sneer, who talks like that in real life?
 
Excuse me, mister, I say trying to be light and all, but I talk like that. And it’s a beautiful clearing, a beautiful house. Look at that sloping roof, all white and Christmas. I bet a wonderful family lives there. 
 
We are a wonderful family, Tooley says, and I figure he’s being sarcastic, so I tell him right there that he is the one sounding like a fairy tale. He rears back at that, like a unicorn heaving up on its hind legs. I give you everything, Tooley says. And by everything, I say, I am sure you mean heartache. I remind him right there about Loretta. Which is a thing he would rather I forget. 
 
The trees all around us are scabby and bare, the grass nearly dead and glistened with snowfrost. Without the forest to hush up our thoughts, Tooley and I can hear everything we are thinking at each other. 
 
I’m going to knock on that door, I tell Tooley. I bet there’s a warm fire there, and cocoa. 
 
Well, I’m going home. Tooley says and walks away from me like he’s done so many times. I watch him fade back into the forest. I watch and watch until he is a twig himself. 
 
I walk across the open field. Skrinkle of ice cracking under my boots. I am hoping that if there isn’t a family inside of that house, then maybe a kindly old woman, someone who will make me feel wanted and make me feel loved, the way I must have felt the first time I looked into Tooley’s eyes. 
 
At worst, it will be a poisoned apple that I will at least know enough not to bite.

Francine Witte

​Francine Witte’s flash fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. Most recently, her stories have been in Best Small Fictions and Flash Fiction America. Her latest flash fiction book is Just Outside the Tunnel of Love (Blue Light Press.) Her upcoming collection of poetry, Some Distant Pin of Light is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in NYC. Visit her website francinewitte.com.

**

Detroit Institute of Arts Museum
 
In contemplation I study
the landscape painting
while the museum guard
in a pressed gray uniform
with polished black shoes
stands erect and motionless 
five feet to my left. 
In the untitled painting
snow-tinged Norway pines
are a backdrop for winter’s
naked hardwoods. 
Wisps of smoke rising
from a weathered cabin 
elicit memories of exploring
northern Maine woods
when I snowshoed near 
Moosehead Lake. I pause,
refreshed by this recollection,
continue across parquet 
to the next framed piece.

Jim Brosnan

Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Nameless Roads (2019). His poems have appeared in the Aurorean (US), Crossways Literary Magazine (Ireland), Eunoia Review (Singapore), Nine Muses (Wales,) Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), Strand (India), and The Madrigal (Ireland). He holds the rank of full professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI.

**

To George Washington Carver Regarding Undated Home Landscape

Sober is simplicity
as truth you find to praise
nestled in the nature you
have painted with its clays
stating so implicitly
we're what our life becomes  --

what inventiveness exhilarates
or mindlessness benumbs.

I sense a soul alive within
the place it knows it must begin
to live the love that sets it free
from devil's shackle hate would be

that stays content with meager yield
and blames its own mismanaged field
that must be fed what it must feed
by crop rotation to succeed

the way that art had led your mind
to fascination it would find
to summon its creative force
that helmed the path of patient course

to answers you would find were where
you wisely took each reasoned dare.

Portly Bard

Portly Bard: Old man.  Ekphrastic fan.

Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.

Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart.

**

Homestead 

Out in a field
is revealed a cabin
 
some might not think
livable, but stars
at night show a different
 
view, tree lines, new grass,
deer may graze, calm –
undisturbed by man,
no fear of small cabin
 
in pre-dawn sky, etched
painted morning light, open
landscape forewarning
them of predators that might 
lurk by woods;  quiet
 
is the norm, from window
watch nature unfold its day,
branches sway, sky changes
hue from gold to red to blue,
 
homestead sits in solitude,
no others in sight, land
unblemished earth but for
 
small plants that serve
to nourish inhabitants.
 
Julie A. Dickson
 
Julie A. Dickson is hooked on Ekphrastic poetry and loves a good prompt. She has served on two poetry boards, coordinated 100 Thousand Poets for Change for five years, and her work appears in over 50 journals, including Misfit, Tiger Moth Review, Uppagus and The Ekphrastic Review. Dickson holds a BPS in Behavioral Science and her full length works are available on Amazon, including her book, Bullied into Silence (Piscataqua Press 2014).

**

The House

The woman with the camera came again yesterday. I told my mother. I was frightened. My mother has said before that when you are trapped in a picture taken by a camera, the spirits come for your soul. The woman did not take my picture but she did take a picture of the house. Our house is supposed to be safe and she has made it not safe, because probably now the spirits can get into the house through the picture. There is hardly any furniture and it is often cold and we don’t have a tap inside but we are together.
 
My mother tells me to watch carefully and to let her know if the woman comes again. I must not shout – I must run to her quickly and quietly so that the camera cannot capture us, and the woman does not suspect that we are near.
 
I have spent the day waiting and watching. I did not sleep well and I was tired as I did my tasks this morning. I was glad when my brother left the house and my father went to the fields because their souls will not be in danger if the woman comes again. I have kept the animals away all day. The cat was surprised as I flapped my arms at her but the dogs were happy to run free and go after rabbits. My father did not want the cat and dogs but my mother insisted, she said we had to look like a normal family, in case anybody came.  But the only person who has come is the woman with the camera. I don’t know if she wants to talk to us, or take us away again, or capture our souls for the spirits. 
 
The lovely pink colours are in the sky now, as the sun is going down. I do not think the woman will come again today but I am going to wait until it is dark completely. Then my brother and my father will come home. If we are lucky my father will bring some food and we will eat before sleeping.

Frances Owen

Frances Owen lives in Salisbury, England. Now retired from a career in public health, she writes poems about the places she has lived in Africa as well as about health issues, social justice and inequality. Having had a number of academic papers published, she is now working on her first poetry pamphlet and a memoir. She workshops her poetry with a number of writing groups.  A member of Lapidus, she facilitates Writing for Wellbeing Groups with the WEA, at her local doctors' surgery and for Wiltshire and Salisbury Museums.

**

Diamond Carving

The town called Diamond was smothered in white. 
A ghost haunted the treetops, the fields, 
Is it cold, it it dead? 
Tenacious, the way growth separates walls. 
Roots pushed arms from the earth. 
 
But in the cabin, time looked with the long eye. 
While Diamond miners scooped handfuls of dirt 
And wondered, how can this be bought and sold? 
How deep do we go? 
 
From the unremarkable but warm cabin,  
Another took a handful and asked, 
What life can be coaxed from here, 
how can it be nourished? 
Plumes of breath decorated the wind. 
 
Milkweed and seed pods, frost in the fall, 
Golden gauze peeked through  
A lidded sky.

Sara Dallmayr
​
Sara Dallmayr is originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She received her a BA in English from Western Michigan University. Dallmayr's work has appeared in Laurel Review, Sugar House Review, Midway Journal, Penn Review, and others. She lives in South Bend, Indiana.

**

Winter in Alabama

for George Washington Carver

Peanuts and sweet potatoes 
fill the hillside, 
they fill the living earth 
to the living door. 
Next year, they will 
burst forth again, 
but for now, under the frost, 
under the gloom, 
those legumes and tubers 
await the passing 
of another season. 
Snow sits suspiciously 
on those towering conifers. 
Evening’s winds will shake 
those branches free of the dusting, 
but for now, under the frost, 
under the gloom, the boughs await 
the coming thaw. 

You can feel it on the breeze, 
smell tomorrow’s vernal equinox 
in the damp midwinter skies. 
Tomorrow, the peanuts 
and sweet potatoes will 
once again rule the valley. 
Tonight, under frigid 
Alabama stars, 
they sleep and snore. 
Tonight, under the cold gusts 
of February, 
as the clock on White Hall chimes, 
we doze and dream 
of peanuts 
and sweet 
potatoes.

​Andre F. Peltier

​Andre F. Peltier (he/him) is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet and a Lecturer III at Eastern Michigan University where he teaches literature and writing. He lives in Ypsilanti, MI, with his wife and children. His poetry has recently appeared in various publications both online and in print. His debut poetry collection, Poplandia, is available from Alien Buddha. He has three collections forthcoming in 2023, Trouble on the Escarpment from Back Room Books, Petoskey Stones from Finishing Line Press, and Ambassador Bridge: Poems from Alien Buddha Press. In his free time, he obsesses over soccer and comic books.

**

Carver's Colours

Just because you were born under 
a mulberry tinted Missouri sky 
behind bars of winter trees 
didn't mean that winter would
set limits to your dreams.
 
Just because you spent thirteen 
years in Moses Carver’s tiny
cabin on contested prairie ground, 
yellow ochre, walnut brown, 
didn’t mean you weren’t free.
 
Just because winter was hard & 
woods thick didn't mean the wood 
was yours to cut or fire yours to 
kindle: the only road unmarked, 
you found your way out alone.
 
Just because you were the shade
of earth, every human's home,
barred from schools reserved for  
whites, didn't mean you couldn't
learn from nature's misegnations.
 
Just because you painted a scene
from earliest childhood's seeing -
everything about the place, empty;
no people, no animals, father 
dead, mother lost - didn't mean 
 
you learned nothing: scholar, 
heart & soul, studied nature’s  
bounty, creation's partner,
learned to see what’s hidden 
under winter's landscapes; seeds 

that can be coaxed to green
abundance, Alabama’s mean 
clay mixed into five-hundred 
shades of paint to beautify 
the south, liberate its colours.

Margaret Flaherty

Margaret Flaherty: "I’m a retired attorney. I wrote poetry in high school, but stopped for a busy fifty years or so.  I started again in 2016 after I met poet and essayist Lia Purpura at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts where she was leading a poetry writing workshop. With her encouragement, I went on to earn an early-pandemic Masters in Poetry in August 2020 from the Ranier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. I’ve published poems in Passager (2022 Poetry Contest), Yellow Arrow (2022 on-line Vignette series) and was recently awarded first prize for poetry in a contest sponsored by the Bethesda Urban Partnership.​"

**

The Land

Holdouts, they call us. 

Stuck in the past. 

Ninety-five runs so close to here you can smell the fumes, they say. There’s a Starbucks across the street, for Chrissakes. 

The Koenigs have sold. Their pasture, cattails, and shallow creek have been tamed, paved and soldered into a hotel, ten stories tall. Along our northern boundary, the Childers’ farm is now a Big Lots, a Supercuts, a Giant, the stores surging out of the ground, shiny and sprawling as poison ivy. At night, we hear workers stomping down boxes, tossing glass bottles that shout and echo inside dumpsters. Cigarette butts and aluminum cans in wrinkled paper bags creep onto our land like trespassers. 

The men come when Granddad is chopping wood. The silver of his axe speaks for him, so the men prance along our porch, offended roosters, the tired planks bending with their weight, muttering about wasted acreage, dreaming up the ways our cottage violates their codes. Lindy and I, peeking through yellowed lace curtains, stumble backwards when one of them slaps a bright orange sticker on the window pane. 

Later, Lindy and I will peel off the sticker with our fingernails and Granddad will burn it in the red brick fireplace. The sun will fall behind the hills and the land will rust to gold, and Granddad will deliver his lecture on sovereignty again. As Lindy writes down his words on the back of an unopened letter from the bank, I will fix my eyes on the downy barbs of his beard and imagine him young and green, black mud cupping his heels, crouching to spy on sparrows that bathe in the dust beneath loblollies, the land spiraling around him like a cartwheel.

Joanna Theiss

Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her short stories and flash fiction have appeared in journals such as Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Fictive Dream. Before devoting herself to writing full time, Joanna worked as a lawyer, practicing criminal defense and international trade law. Links to her writing are available at www.joannatheiss.com.

**

You are here
 
Loud and clear
Never there 
Never where
 
Mapping the mind not
Tracing the tracks
 
Prisms and squares what
Is this gift of abstraction
 
Root vectors
Rainbow circles 
Honeycomb hexagons
 
I am here
Staying
Morphing the math from
The dancing sparrow
You and
Not you
I am here
Not blending in but
Carving out
 
Logarithmic spirals
Geometric snowflakes
 
I see you
Clairvoyantly
I am stardust boxed
A rooftopped dreamer
 
Stien Pijp
 
Stien Pijp lives east of the Ijssel, in Gelderland, The Netherlands. Some years ago she and her family moved there to a house in the woods. As a dreamy urban person, comfortable with the rhythm of the city, she experienced nature to be quite unnatural to her and seeks to connect with it ever since. In 2017 she wrote her dissertation Why this now? about the search for meaning in conversations with people with aphasia. She works as a language therapist. She reads stories and poems of friends and sometimes writes herself.


**

The Peanut King

I know this place. I’ve been here. Diamond Missouri.
It’s just a few miles from Joplin, where I was born.
Straight east, then south on Highway 59, though
The road probably wasn’t there in your day.
It looks like you painted this picture in winter,
Just at twilight, or maybe dawn. The walnut trees look almost bare,
And that might be a little frost on the ground,
Though I don’t see any smoke coming out of your cabin, which is gone now.
That big space in the back must be your garden.
And those trees, just in front of the distant horizon could be pines
Or white oaks. This is the Ozarks, an ancient magical land of rocks
And cliffs older than humans, rivers and underground springs,
And deep cold caves meandering under the earth, darker inside
Than a starless night. Those of us who were born here
Carry the Ozarks in our hearts forever.
But there was always an elephant in the room,
Although we didn’t use that expression in those days.
Everybody used the S words, forming an invisible, curving line,
Like a Serpent: Slavery, Segregation, Separate, but equal.
All the children knew that was a lie. We could hear the sorrowful
Gospel music coming out of the old unpainted church right across the street
From Grandma’s church. We could see the shabby schools and
Broken down cabins like yours. But the grownups all believed the lie,
Except for just a few, like my mommy. She’s the one who told me about you,
A former slave who transformed American farming and made Missouri famous.
You were Missouri’s diamond, the Peanut King. You grew peanuts 
In your garden, performed experiments on them, and invented all kinds of
Wonderful new things to make life better for the sharecroppers and everybody else.
She had a list in her head of all your accomplishments, like crop rotation,
Whatever that was. I was a little girl who loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
So you became my hero. I think you were Mommy’s hero too, because
She wanted to make something of herself even though her family didn’t’ have much.
And she did. She and my daddy got out of the Ozarks before us kids started 
Believing the lie. And she earned herself a doctor’s degree.
There were Ozark men besides you who came along later and did well for themselves, 
Harry Truman, Langston Hughes and Johnny Cash, but you were smarter than they were. 
You went off to Tuskegee and became a professor, a scientist, always helping.
Now your garden and the place where your rickety old cabin used to be
Are a National Monument with an African American woman park ranger. 
Now kids learn about you in nice clean schools. 
I can’t honestly tell you that old serpentine line has disappeared, 
But you were the sunrise that drove some of those snakes back in the cave.

Rose Anna Higashi

Rose Anna Higashi is a retired professor of English Literature, Japanese Literature, Poetry and Creative Writing. Recently, her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, America Media, Poets Online, The Avocet, The Agape Review and The Catholic Poetry Room. Many of her lyric poems and haiku can be found in her blog, “Tea and Travels,” which appears monthly on her website, www.myteaplanner.com, co-authored with her niece, Kathleen Pedulla. Rose Anna lives in rural Hawaii with her husband Wayne.

**

Homestead
 
Before ever the war ceased and I could return, I dreamed the shack, the barn—both crouched beside the lake. 
 
I dreamed the land we fought for—hard edges of the homestead softened in first snowfall; a beacon sun sinking west over those low hills; birches almost bare of leaves; spruce bent in the blast; and snowdrifts on the lake whisked all wild by a northerly wind.
 
I dreamed all this when I lay shivering from frost and shock on the front line.
 
To wake, then, in that bitter darkness, was to grieve the loss of my own land each night I was alive—or half alive—in a filthy foreign war.
 
After those long, mud-ridden nights on the Somme, I would waken to reds—not the red of a painted barn, nor of iron-rich earth—but to the poppy-stain of blood spilled on furrowed French soil. Or I would be hunched on a fire-step watching for the other red—not that of the farm’s gentle sunsets swooped by cardinals and robins, but for death-dealing fire-bursts in churned fields: fire in fierce skies, fire on the ground—flames blossoming like great peonies…but in no way sweet in our nostrils.
 
Although the red clapboard barn has weathered to brown since last I saw it, this—our land which I love so dear—did not in fact change over the time I went away. I am glad to be able to make this simple assertion. I am surprised, too.
 
In quiet homecoming daylight, I know now that the farm—the land—is just the same. 
 
My eyes, I realise, are what must have changed—my view of all I see, all that lies right here.
 
Today, I cannot look at red. Standing here with a brush in my right hand and bucket of undercoat in my left, I shall never again cover the barn’s siding in red paint.
 
Instead in green—the colour of hope, and home.
 
Lizzie Ballagher

In 2022, Lizzie Ballagher was chosen as winner in Poetry on the Lake's 2022 formal category with a pantoum entitled ‘Across the Barle’. Her work has appeared in print and online on both sides of the Atlantic. She lives in the UK, writing a blog at https://lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/.

**

George Washington Carver's Daybreak in Missouri

after Langston Hughes, "Daybreak in Alabama"

When I get to be a famous scientist
I'm gonna write some bulletins
Share my knowledge about the plants
I'm gonna write down the best advice
How to learn the secrets from nature
The garden of Eden that grows right here
I'll be out before the the sun's risen yet
When I can study the stems and leaves
When I can sketch their delicate traceries
And I can use all my learning for good
Be a better plant doctor than right now
And I'll teach classes that'll be for everyone
"Of black and white black white black people"
And tell them how to dig deep into the soil
How to grow peanuts and sweet potatoes
Teach them how to heal our barren land
"And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it"
All these hands will reach out together
To help and heal and provide for one another
In the time near dawn when the woods are loveliest
When I get to be a famous scientist
And paint the beauty of daybreak
In Missouri.

Emily Tee

Note: the quoted lines in italics are from Langston Hughes' poem.  This poem is also inspired by the following quotation from George Washington Carver: "Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.” 

Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction.  She's had pieces published in The Ekphrastic Review and for some of its ekphrastic challenges, and elsewhere online, and in print in some publications by Dreich, in Poetry Scotland and in several poetry anthologies. She lives in England.

**

The Spectacular
 
In the dream 
my father’s middle-aged body 
 
became a glorious farm pastoral 
where on his thighs grazed the cattle 
 
and between his toes the grasses grew
where maidens carried milk in buckets 
 
up his arms and down 
his back a pasture where wild horses ran 
 
while the sheep lay down at his feet 
and in his hair the flowers grew
 
his chest a meadow of melancholy 
rising and falling 
 
with the kind of breathing 
only the dead know how to do. 
 
I looked at him and said
Mom would like that.
 
He replied 
Yeah, I think Mama would.  

Ann Iverson

Ann Iverson is a writer and artist.  She is the author of  five poetry collections:  Come Now to the Window  by the Laurel Poetry Collective, Definite Space and Art Lessons by Holy Cow! Press; Mouth of Summer and No Feeling is Final by Kelsay Books. She is a graduate of both the MALS and the MFA programs at Hamline University.   Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals and venues including six features on Writer’s Almanac.  Her poem "Plenitude" was set to a choral arrangement by composer Kurt Knecht. She is also the author and illustrator of two children's books.  As a visual artist, she enjoys the integrated relationship between the visual image and the written image.  Her art work has been featured in several art exhibits as well as in a permanent installation at the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital.  She is currently working on her sixth collection of poetry, a book of children's verse, and a collection of personal essays.

**

Untitled   

Mickey had hidden her father’s painting underneath the bed. He wouldn’t be looking for it anytime soon. She had three days to put it back before he came home from his latest trip to England and did his usual inventory to determine what if anything had been sold. Her father considered himself a great artist and would puff up with pride when people told him he painted just like George Carver. After one trip, he’d hit Mum when he discovered the Blue Barn was gone. Mum had shushed her just before his fist shot out. Mum was always protecting her. The last time was worse. Mickey thought she’d seen her father’s anger in all of its shades of fury but when she’d sold Morning Rush, he’d lost all control. Mum was in hospital after another ‘silly fall’ for a week. 

When Mickey visited her with a bunch of peonies from the garden, Mum had told her it was time. “You’re old enough now, Mickey. Take the passbook, and the suitcase from the back of the shed. Your father won’t remember that one. By the time he figures out I’ve been lying about you visiting your friend, you’ll be safe. I’m sorry Mickey. I should’ve left a long time ago and taken you with me but I was scared. Forgive me.”

She’d tightly held her Mother’s hand, tracing the bruises on the pale face with her finger. “He would have found us Mum. No one was going to protect us. I’ll come back Mum, I will. I’ll come and get you once I’m settled and he will never, ever guess where we are.”

Mickey slid the painting out from underneath the bed and brushed the dust off the canvas. This one didn’t have a title because her father said it wasn’t finished. She took out his pochade and ran her fingers over the ridges of dry paint on its edges. Looking at the cheerful rainbow of colours, she wondered how a man with such a black heart could create such beauty. On his trips away, he’d leave them just enough money to eke out a bare existence. He’d never wanted her mother to work and then complained about how much money she cost him, and inevitably, how much both of them cost him. Selling a painting was the only way to make ends meet. Mickey would pass the streetwalkers at dusk on her way home from school, and pray to god she and her mother never ended up beside them. Their sad eyes, hard as granite, would soften when they saw her. Were they remembering when they were too young to have any inkling of what lay ahead?

She took a slim charcoal pencil from the box and started to sketch. By the time night had fallen, she’d filled the image in with muted colour. Opening the closet door, she took out her packed suitcase with the passbook safely tucked inside, and with the painting under her arm, Mickey climbed the stairs to the attic. She rehung the painting carefully, making sure it was in the same position as her father left it. Any degree left or right, and he would know it had been moved, and her mother would pay. Mickey closed her eyes and stepped through the door of the tiny wooden house she had added to her father’s unfinished scene. Tomorrow, her mother would come to the attic, and, as Mickey had taught her, remove the little house from the painting with a cloth moistened with acetone, gently, so as not to disturb her daughter’s future.

Linda McQuarrie-Bowerman

Linda lives in Lake Tabourie, NSW, by the sea. In this beautiful environment, she writes poetry and has recently dabbled in flash fiction. Linda is completing her Degree in Creative Writing at Curtin University and enjoys seeing her work published in various literary spaces. She is a recent Pushcart nominee thanks to the The Ekphrastic Review.


**

Winter 1946. Germany.
 
My brother’s boots stuffed with newspapers.
I didn’t inherit his trousers. 
Dress requirements for girls: ski pants covered
by a dress. (Don’t they now have leggings covered
by a dress?) Anyway, where was I… 
We ski to school, straight from the low window,
couldn’t open the front door, too much snow.
 
Now the hares are coming to the fence.
Not that we have anything to spare, but there is
always a carrot or some grass we take from the spot
by the barn where the roof covers it and the snow
can’t settle. The hares are grateful.
 
We heat a Pfennig on the wood stove and press it
against the iced-up glass, iced up with many magic patterns
of extra-planetary flowers and fairy grass. We watch
the hares zig-zagging across the endless field, leaving their
footprints in the snow.
 
It’s closed season. The animals seem to know it. 
Two Russian soldiers pass on a motorbike, stop, get off.
Several shots later they each carry a hare by their ears,
clearly congratulating each other on an efficient kill.
As though I hadn’t known by then that the world
is not a fair place.

Rose Mary Boehm

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as seven poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her latest: DO OCEANS HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS? (Kelsay Books July 2022), WHISTLING IN THE DARK (Cyberwit July 2022), and SAUDADE (December 2022) are available on Amazon. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

**

History

There will be no survivors. The trees are almost an afterthought, the squat little building planted amid the clearing, arrogant and oblique, a desperate attempt to bluff one’s way out of trouble; the lone sentinel resolute against the pressing onslaught of the wilderness. It’s no longer a laudable thing, to be the champion of the frontier, there are other things out there, things that stir in the evening, once the shutters come down, and the lights go out. What happened to the ones you turned out, you chased away with fire and noise, unintelligible words from your square mouth, echoing up and down the valley, barked with righteous indignation? The old binaries no longer exist, they are as lost as the owner of this slab hut, scrabbling for purchase against the increasingly slippery cliff face of moral progress. Today is a reckoning for the man who travelled up the river in a futile attempt to stamp his mark on history, to capture the land in paint and patronage. Now our past demands that we knock down the walls, liberate the artefacts from their glass cases, and look again at the landscape we put in the frame, as woke as the dawn sky. 

Jessica McCarthy

Jessica McCarthy is a high school English teacher from Adelaide, South Australia. She has a Master’s Degree in Writing and Literature, specializing in Children’s Literature, and enjoys finding new ways to inspire her students to read widely and write creatively.

**

Stepping out to the porch I watch
              
a hover of crows assembles
in the bare sycamore 
like a darkroom image.
 
Another sign that after years of turning
my back to this patch of bottom land,
to the fields gone to pasture,
 
to the white framed house leaning
like a moored skiff in a sea of switch grass,
return runs in my blood. 
 
Return after all those years of spinning 
the dial on the volume of the world, 
humming along to its noise.
 
Tapping my foot to its static 
out there on highways, in my bubble 
of glass and chrome. 
 
Here, a high wind soughs through 
the evergreens that circle the house, 
tuning the orchestra of morning. 
 
When I was a child, I dared the blackwater river 
to ferry me all the way to the Gulf 
in its swift spring run. 
 
On the threshold of spring once more, I rest
against the rail, giving in to the gravity 
under these well-worn porch boards.

Barbara Sabol

Barbara Sabol is a retired speech pathologist attuned to the music and timbre of voices in conversation  and within the lines of a poem. She writes both long-form poetry and haiku. Her fifth collection, core & all: haiku and senryu, was published by Bird Dog Press in 2022. She is the associate editor of Sheila-Na-Gig online, and edited the 2022 anthology, Sharing this Delicate Bread: Selections from Sheila-Na-Gig online. Barbara finds both editing and teaching essential to a sustainable writing life. She lives in Ohio with her husband and two wise old dogs, who listen to every line she writes.

**

Carver's Garden

Close behind the house, under brush,
disclosed to no one, blooms a garden
so lush it dims the ground it grows out of
and browns the surrounding leaves and trees,
each flower reflecting the other’s beauty,
each resplendent in its knowing.
Above, a rainbow streaks 
the sky into dusk and 
snow caresses the canvas.
Or is that cotton 
lollygagging across the land,
choking the soil into servitude?
It is the moneymaker, after all--
flowers, to some, pure folly.
A golden door of freedom awaits.
The answers aren’t inside
those four walls.
They are everywhere else.
To touch a flower is
to touch infinity.
Did you feel it?
Did you love it enough?

Lisa Reidy Harter

Lisa Reidy Harter writes to challenge the status quo. Interning for The Gettysburg Review while earning her BA in English literature, which included taking classes with the Review’s inimitable Editor Peter Stitt, sealed her passion for all things poetry. To satiate her lit addiction, she also got her MA. You can find her on Zoom with her beloved poetry writing group or taking courses with The Writer’s Center, Grackle & Grackle, and Hugo House. Lisa resides in Maryland with her Velcro Vizsla, Harley, attached to her side. 

**
When an Artist Becomes an Agricultural Scientist

Day after day, he spends alone, in the woods,
collecting his floral beauties to plant in his little garden
hidden in the bush not far from his house,
hidden away from the thorns of judgement and pricks of prejudice.
Day after day after day, he toils
to fan the fire of desire
to learn more
music, math and painting.

And then he begins observing how the ink traces of art can shape
and reshape the contours of science.
He notices the principles of science
diffused in the ways of nature,
like strands of colours in water.
And he documents the wonder that is missed
in the ordinary blink of an eye.
He makes the world understand that art and science
can co-exist on the beam
balance of interest.

And when the time is wild and ripe,
he gives back
285 new uses for the peanut and 118 new products
from the sweet potato,
a blend of sisal and henequen that can be used as twine.
He advocates cultivating native crops - wild plum and soybeans.

He gives, gives and gives
not just when the time is wild and ripe,
but he gives back all the time.
He gives back
to the villages, to the poor,
to soil, to nature.

He becomes a sheet anchor, a trend setter, a streamliner,
a go getter, a goal setter, a path finder, a path breaker.

He gives back
to life.

Preeth Ganapathy

Preeth Ganapathy is a software engineer turned civil servant from Bengaluru, India. Her works have been published in several magazines such as The Ekphrastic Review, Soul-Lit, The Sunlight Press, Atlas+Alice, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Mothers Always Write, Tiger Moth Review and elsewhere. Her microchaps A Single Moment and Purple- have been published by Origami Poems Project. She is also a two-time winner of Wilda Morris's Poetry Challenge.

**

Family Home

Look, the tarpaper roof is torn
in the shape of the mountains we left, 
or my girlhood spent birthing 
these children. I won't sing to them, 
the daughters who will only leave me 
for strangers. I save my voice for prayer. 

I tell my eldest to bundle her sister 
and rock her in front of the stove. Don't leave 
the candle in the window. It will inspire the men 
who already burned down our barn. 

The snow is higher than the roof now. 
How many sons will satisfy you, husband? 
This new one is as wrinkled as an old man. 
Say something please, say something. 
The only place for us is where we carve it. 

Cheryl Snell

Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. Her latest title is a collection of flash fiction called Intricate Things in their Fringed Peripheries. Most recently her writing has or will appear in journals including Gone Lawn, The Dribble Drabble Review, and New World Writing. She was trained as a classical pianist, and lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.

**

Doing the Dishes after Shoveling 
 
After two hours of heavy lifting 
the second round left my hands 
shivering 

The first round sang 
encircled the trees 
embraced the freeze 
surrounded the landscape 

as if an orbit of notes 

    a rondeau 

rondel 

    roundelay 

After the second round 
I dipped my shivers 
quivers of cold 
beneath running water 
into a river of warmth 

as if an orbit of notes 

    an echo 

antiphon 

    iteration 

The radiant repetition of living

Jeannie E. Roberts

Jeannie E. Roberts has authored eight books, six poetry collections and two illustrated children's books. Her most recent collection is titled The Ethereal Effect - A Collection of Villanelles (Kelsay Books, 2022). Her work appears in Barstow & Grand, The Ekphrastic Review, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs.

**

Small Black Horse, Large Moon


                                                                    "Whose woods these are I think I know,
                                                                      his house is in the village though...

                                                                     My little horse must think it queer
                                                                      to stop without a farmhouse near
                                                                      Between the woods and frozen lake
                                                                      the darkest evening of the year."
                                                                     Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening,
                                                                                                        Robert Frost

                                                                      "Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness
                                                                       of the woods before sunrise."
                                                                                              George Washington Carver


     The woods are lovely, dark and deep     with fairy tale flashes of color, Grimm's characters
      singing in a 20th century musical to dispel their fear of darkness;    my son as The Narrator

       in a high school production of Into The Woods...    How different are those woods now
       than they were in 1864    when, as an infant, George Washington Carver was kidnapped

       by slave raiders during the Civil War?    And how lovely the woods he painted as they looked
       before sunrise after he was grown     his  life saved when he was traded for a fine horse

       by Moses Carver, a horse trader in Diamond, Missouri?     The moon and stars have a history
       of their own --  as everyone knows --     diamond-like patterns that show the way home,

       following the light from Kentucky to Missouri;     and on a Spanish trail to Cordova
       in  A Rider's Song by Lorca     a poem with la luz de la luna -- a  large moon -- to print the sky

       above the horse and rider     as sounds of war and music fill the foreign landscape:
       even as death stalks beauty    Lorca's words are nourished by Spanish olives in his saddle bags...

        2.

        In America, George Washington Carver --     his early education from the earth --
        invents 300 ways to use  peanuts    a chance to rise with agricultural abundance

        in places where, even today, tourists look for diamond chips      and see -- in reality --
        a woods with an untitled home,  a terra firma stage    where Carver's hands were quick

        to learn domestic chores    his fingers with a facility for sewing as well as sowing --
        for growing peanuts.     Like Jimmy Carter, whose family were peanut farmers;

        and like African slaves from the Congo     who believed some plants could possess
        a soul (the word goober comes from nguba)     nature shows anyone can be a President,

        or named  for one -- George Washington --     his namesake Dr. George Washington Carver,
        the first Black African American to get college degrees in agriculture;     and maybe

        taste a spoon full of peanut butter...
                                                                     Near a cabin in the woods in Carver's untitled landscape

        (and in Frost's poem) a horse pauses      as, in Spain, Lorca's hand  closes around an olive,
        his gypsy heartbeat  paced by the ecstatic notes of the duende.     The call of a voice

        in the woods     asks a slave running to freedom if passion is a fairy tale, an escape
        in a setting dwarfed by a variety of trees     where Red Riding Hood plays hide-n-seek

        with an unidentified wolf.    Here, in this wonderland of leaves, magical and scientific,
        where trees fill with words and color     as the sun rises over a rural doorway

        that leads into a boy's mind     home becomes a memory with horses and riders
        and goober peas --  A Large Moon and A Small Black Horse  --  words

        of ways that love has searched
                                                             for destiny's design. 

Laurie Newendorp

Laurie Newendorp lives and writes in Houston.  Honored multiple times by The Ekphrastic Challenge,
her book of poetry, When Dreams Were Poems, explores the relationship of art to poetry and life. Historically speaking, George Washington's survival and success are exceptional.  Kidnapped as an infant in Missouri and taken to Kentucky, the man who would raise him, Moses Carver, sent a neighbour to find the child, his mother and sister.  Only George was found, and exchanged for one of Moses' finest horses.  A sickly child, he was taught domestic skills and learned to sew instead of working in the fields. Africa (the Congo) and America both farmed peanuts; and both had "safe houses" such as the ones on The Underground Railroad during the Civil War.  Lorca was executed during the Spanish Civil War, but the beauty of his language survived Fascism. 

​We are delighted to have the wonderful Kate Copeland as a guest editor for this challenge! Welcome, Kate.

**

Dear Ekphrastic Challengee!
 
Be welcome to a new challenge from The Ekphrastic Review. First of all, I would like to thank Lorette for the opportunity to be a challenge-editor for this most inspiring journal. I feel very honoured. 

As a poet with this ekphrastic family, I know (or…erm…I think I know) how exciting and inviting and, well, challenging it is to write to an artwork. Yet, aren’t these challenges none other than a fantastic opportunity to have the mind go on a museum-wander, while you rave about in your notebook? 

So, I would like to invite you to a sequential art-write, along Trauma 1, 2, 3 by Romina Ciaffi (2012). The prompt is not one, but a series of paintings that you can certainly use any way you like. The challenge shows you two pieces, the whole sequence can be found via https://www.ciaffi.ink/Trauma-1-2-3
 
I am a big fan of Romina’s versatile work; she is an original and intelligent artist who knows how to put art meticulously on canvas, as well as on skin. And she includes words! 

According to the artist, the colours used in Trauma 1, 2, 3 all come from the same bottle of black ink. Depending on the amount of water you mix the black tone with, all sorts of purple pop up and move around. Then, the title “Trauma” refers jestingly to the German word ’Traum’. The added “1, 2, 3” you will have to elucidate for yourself.

I hope you will enjoy playing with words, with sequences, with colours. 
 
Good luck, enjoy, Kate Copeland

**

Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrasis! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential writers working today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. 

The prompt this time is Trauma 1,2.3, by Romina Ciaffi. Deadline is March 17, 2023.

You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction, or any other form creative writing you like. 1000 words max please.

The Rules

1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination.

2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF.

3. There is no mandatory submission fee, but we ask you to consider a voluntary donation to show your support to the time, management, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review. It takes an incredible amount of time to curate the journal, read regular and contest submissions, etc. Paying all expenses out of pocket is also prohibitive. Thank you. A voluntary gift does  not affect the selection process in any way.​​​

4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY.

Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry.

5.Include CIAFFI CHALLENGE in the subject line.

6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your piece. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 

7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 

8. Deadline is midnight EST, March 17, 2023.

9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is.

10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline.

11. Due to the demands of the increasing volume of submissions, we do not send out sorry notices or yes letters. You will see what poetry and stories have been selected when the responses are posted one week after the deadline. Understand that we value your participation as part of our ekphrastic community, but we can only choose a handful of the many entries we receive. 

12. A word on the selection process: we strive for a balance between rewarding regular participants and sharing the voices of writers who are new to our family. We also look for a variety of perspectives and styles, and a range of interesting takes on the painting. It is difficult to reproduce experimental formatting, so unfortunately we won't choose many with unusual spacing or typography. 

13. By submitting to The Ekphrastic Review, you are also automatically joining our subscribers' list. Your submission is your permission. We don't send Spam and we don't send many emails- you will not receive forty-four emails a day! Our newsletter occasionally updates you on some of the  challenges, news, contests, prize nominations, ekphrastic happenings, prompt ebooks, workshops, and more. 
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​14. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
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15. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!

16. Check this space every Friday for new challenges and selected responses, alternating weekly.