A fond farewell to Nana K. Twumasi

Nana K. Twumasi, a longtime editor of Monday Night, is moving on to new projects. We’re grateful for her creativity, insight, and friendship as well as hours and hours of reading over the past decade. During Nana’s tenure, we put the journal online, launched a small press, and hosted cool events at Cafe Van Kleef, E.M. Wolfman Books, and other venues. 

Nana is a tremendous literary author and content creator in her own right. Nana’s prose and nonfiction work has been published in various literary journals. By day, Nana works as a book editor in Emeryville, CA, and she also writes for the East Bay Monthly and for Oakland and Alameda Magazines. You can follow her endeavors at https://nanakt.com/, on Instagram @fiftyfootroman, or on Twitter @editrix_n.  

MN takes Portland

We’re still reeling from the awesomeness of AWP 2019. Monday Night shared a table with the Bay Area Correspondence School at the Book Fair, and we had lots of chapbooks and swag to share. Dozens of new fans signed up for our mailing list, grabbed free buttons, and purchased fresh-off-the-press editions of our new chapbooks. Our special-edition bookmarks featuring art from our covers were so popular we ran out!

If you missed out on the conference, you can still buy chapbooks on our MN Press page.

Color-your-own bookmarks in progress
Free buttons!

Introducing Monday Night Press!

Monday Night the literary journal began as an annual print publication that ran from 2001-2014. Since that time, the journal has gone exclusively online. While we love the ease and accessibility of online publishing, we miss having something to put on our shelves. This is why we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our very own press featuring select poetry and fiction by past and present Monday Night authors.

Our first chapbook, THE CITY IS BURNING by Patrick Duggan will release in spring 2018. Please visit our MN Press page to see all our titles and to place an order.

Spokes of an Uneven Wheel by Colin Dodds

Congratulations to Colin Dodds on his new book Spokes of an Uneven Wheel, to be released in July 2018 by The Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Sharon Mesmer, author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place had this to say about his poems: “His work consistently delights with humor, inventiveness, a blessed dose of sarcasm and, yes, wisdom (despite his best intentions). We are all “born for that other thing,” and this is that other thing.” Colin is also the author of many screenplays and novels, most recently Watershed. Colin’s poems were featured in issue 16 of Monday Night.

The Paper Tree by Caroline Goodwin

Monday Night contributor Caroline Goodwin has a new book of poetry out from Big Yes Press! Caroline is also the author of Peregrine (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Trapline (Jack Leg Press, 2013), and several chapbooks. Caroline lives in the Bay Area and teaches at California College of the Arts and the Stanford Writer’s Studio. From 2014-2016 she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA. We were pleased to publish two of Caroline’s poems in issue 13.

Souvenirs and Other Stories by Matt Tompkins

Congratulations to Matt Tompkins on his new book Souvenirs and Other Stories, published in 2016 by Conium Review. Matt Tompkins is one of our favorite contributors in recent issues. His work is both strange and familiar, light-heartened and darkly funny. Lena Bertone (author of Letters to the Devil) calls his stories “loops of life and metaphor, making the surreal become real.” Read Matt’s story “Please Please Please Please Please Keep Smiling” in issue 14 of Monday Night. He is also the author of Studies in Hybrid Morphology.

Raegen Pietrucha wins Two of Cups Press Poetry Chapbook Contest 

Raegen Pietrucha’s An Animal I Can’t Name is a beautiful collection of articulate, courageous verse that shares some dark and devastating moments of the human experience, in particular of the family.


“There is no / other story. Best to never / be, but here you are, / and the swells are hissing. / This water was never hesitating, just building / and building – then, unzipping, snickering / at you, the prey it ached to drown in its dark.”  


These poems enact the striving and struggling to name and communicate life’s trials: “I couldn’t speak what I feared most / believed speaking made real / summoned things into being again.” Lucky for her readers, Raegen’s poems persevere to revisit and respond to family and home. In the end, this work reflects not a full healing but a grappling through: “reinforcing a fortress with these pitchy songs.” It is a rare achievement to create poetry that is merciless without being gratuitous, that is honest about the damage done but without sentimentality. We’re pleased to congratulate Raegen on her chapbook and her award and look forward to seeing more from her. Order a copy of An Animal I Can’t Name through the Two of Cups Press website. (Other poems of Raegen’s were published in issue 14 of Monday Night.) 

strays by jennifer caloyeras

Congratulations to Jennifer Caloyeras, whose latest novel Strays was published in May 2015 by Ashland Creek Press. Jennifer’s story “The Sound of An Infinite Gesture” was published in Monday Night Issue 11.

Midwest Book Review had this to say: “Strays tells what happens when two wandering creatures find one another, overcoming their fears to make friends and rise above their dark reputations…Young adults who want a story of more than an animal rescue or a sixteen-year-old’s angst will find Strays a compelling saga.” Download an excerpt here—or find out how to buy your very own copy.

valerie witte’s a game of correspondence

Black Radish Books released Valerie Witte’s (Issue 11) poetry collection, a game of correspondence in April 2015. This is Witte’s first full-length collection of poems and the seventeenth release from the book publishing collective, Black Radish Books (BRB). Novelist Laura Moriarty says of the book: “With the intimacy and obsessive passion of Djuna Barnes and the precision of Jane Austen, Valerie Witte involves the reader in a deep game. The complexity of the first section, ‘her week of wonders: a translation,’ composed using text from a novel from the ’30s, will be fascinating to the mad indexer in every reader. The eponymous section that forms the book’s second half has the persuasive charm of a lyric novel. The presence of just plain good lines throughout makes the whole project a delight.” Read an excerpt here—or just buy a copy. Congrats, Valerie!