Do you fall in love like you’re being sucked into a vacuum cleaner, with a woosh? Or silently, by pretending not to? TGLR wants to know…
February 26, 2026
When we said we wouldn’t pinky swear to post monthly, there was a reason. January was so ugh! Right??! And impossibly, it’s almost the end of February. We missed Valentine’s Day and all those feels. But being fashionably late is cool. All the hopeless romantics know that hearing “I love you” when it’s *almost* too late is so satisfying. (As evidenced by the frequent use in rom-coms in Hollywood.)
In all fairness, in our December newsletter, we also said we were gearing up to hibernate for the winter. Still, where do all the weeks go? But enough about romance and the calendar, we’ve got a LOT of exciting updates to share, starting with some BIG NEWS!…
Last week, PEN AMERICA announced the winners of the 2026 PEN/Robert J.Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and among them was Sara Maria Hasbun for “Tbilisi.”
The editors of the Pen/DAU Prize select 12 outstanding debut short stories published in a literary magazine, journal, or cultural website each year. The winners receive a $2,000 cash prize, and their work is published in Catapult’s annual anthology, Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize. Read their full announcement here.
Congratulations, Sara Maria! Amazing work!!
Sara’s piece was originally published in Issue 19 ~ Spring 2025 and re-released as a part of our “Best Of” anthology in Issue 22 ~ Winter 2026.
The anthology is a collection of the best pieces from the past two years, plus bonus new work from Matt Mason, Jake Bienvenue, Frank Gaughan, and the Nebraska Writers Collective 2025 Kate Sommer Memorial Poetry Prize winner, Rebecca Oliver.
The issue also includes “Razia, Razia” by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar, selected for “Best Small Fictions” in 2025 by Robert Shapard and Alternating Current Press, and the poem “How to Hear God While Making Thanksgiving Dinner” by Charlene Pierce which was a “Best of the Net” finalist. All of the pieces in this stellar collection are worth spending time with. Not to mention the art! So good!
The online version was released on January 8th, and the print version should be ready in early March. Just in time for AWP!
If you’re planning a trip to Baltimore for the conference this year, we’d be thrilled if you stopped by our table at the bookfair to say hello: T716. If you’ve ever walked the bookfair, you know it’s a sea of tables with lanyard-wearing writers surging and ebbing in the aisles. For those of us shackled to a table, it can get a little boring, so a friendly face or three would be amazing!
If you stop by and say “Doug sent me,” we’ll bestow a tiny token of gratitude that you’ll have no trouble slipping into your carry-on. Teaser… It’s not a book.
Other Hot News…
🐝 The illustrious MARYA HORNBACHER has agreed to be the judge of our 6th annual HoneyBee Poetry Prize!! 🐝
This year, the combined prize payout is $1000. The winner will receive $500, publication, and a jar of honey from a Midwest apiary. 🍯 Other select finalists will also be published, with an honorarium of $60 per piece. The submission fee is $18 (for 5 poems), and the deadline is April 20th. Info about Marya and more details about the prize are available on our contest page here.
💫 We’re on the hunt for our next favorite prose piece! 💫
TGLR is currently accepting fiction and creative nonfiction—short (up to 5000 words) and flash (up to 1000 words—for our Summer Issue. We’re also open for micro prose for our bi-weekly Micro Monday feature.
100% of the work we publish is unsolicited. Every single piece is selected from what we receive in Submittable. In addition, each story and poem that lands in our queue is given serious consideration and evaluated by at least three people from genre-specific editorial teams, including at least one editor.
Details, guidelines, and the submission forms for all opportunities are available on Submittable.
💫 Our commitment to be better in 2026.💫
As we ramp up for the next reading period, we will be implementing a few changes to our reading schedule to better serve the writing community we are working to support. This includes increasing the frequency of internal deadlines for quicker turnaround times on submissions and streamlining our editorial processes. More info on all that will be in the next newsletter and most certainly in our interview with Becky Tuch, coming later this year.
In closing, we’re going to drop a fab new micro fiction piece, “House Party” by Dory Rousos Moore, originally featured on The Buzz (while we were in hibernation)…
“I start on my second coat of Red Hot, the boldest color of nail polish I could find, carefully painting each nail. Aviva and I sit on our apartment balcony, our shiny legs long on the railing, hot air balloons in primary colors floating above us as everyone starts to arrive. When her new boyfriend’s black Grand Am swerves into our complex, she jumps up, her drink spilling over the edge. The way she falls in love is with a whoosh, like she’s being sucked into a vacuum, and the way I fall in love is by pretending not to.
Moments later, Raj crosses the parking lot from his apartment to ours with long strides, grinning up at the balloons and clouds drifting toward the horizon. With graduation next weekend…” Read the Rest
Thanks for Reading, We Love You!
As always, if you have a question, quandary, conundrum, or a burning desire to share what sound you associate with falling in love, hit the “comments” button below.
Otherwise, stay safe out there and enjoy whatever weird weather situation you’re currently experiencing.
Cheers,
~The Editors
