An interesting, utterly unpredicted side effect of our September transition to electronic submissions is that we’ve noticed far more international submissions than we used to get on paper. Sucker that I am for number-crunching, I just ran a quick query on our submission database to see if this is really the case. It turns out, yes, there’s really been a marked increase.

During our September 2006 - May 2007 reading period, during which we only accepted print submissions, 2,673 authors submitted work to us. Ninety seven percent of these authors live in the United States. One percent live in Canada. A total of thirty two countries are represented.

From September 2007 through today (or just 41% of the prior period), the span during which we’ve accepted only electronic submissions, 1,591 new authors submitted work to us. (The 278 authors who submitted work during the prior year are not counted here.) Just 91% of those authors are the U.S. Two percent are from Canada. Just under one percent are British, and about the same number are Indian. A total of fifty countries are represented, a 56% increase from the prior year. That comes to, proportionally, a 265% increase in international submissions.

The newly-represented countries are Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Portugal, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, the Slovak Republic, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, The Gambia, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.

Because we only publish four times annually, it’s too early to say what the effect of this will be. If we don’t accept any work from these countries, I’d feel like we’re wasting their time. But if we increase the rate at which we publish work by extra-U.S. authors at the same or greater rate that their submissions have increased, I’d have to conclude that this has been an entirely worthwhile side effect.

We’re excited to announce the winners of our annual writing prizes, honoring the best writing to appear in our pages in the past year.

Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction:

• Philip Caputo for “Life on the Line: The Arizona-Mexico Border” (Spring issue)

Philip Caputo’s essay about life along the Arizona-Mexico border is a perfect example of how journalism and literature can be combined to bring us not only the news but the human impact of political decisions. Phil doesn’t see things in simple terms; he doesn’t caricature anyone, but also doesn’t let anyone off the hook. As a result, this piece is the deepest, most probing, and unsettling essay I’ve read on this complicated subject. There are no easy answers, but there is a lot revealed and many possibilities to pursue. To my mind, that’s what the best nonfiction can do: open doors.

Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry:

• Peter Balakian for three poems in the Fall issue: “World Trade Center / Mail Runner / ’71,” “World Trade Center / Mail Runner / ’73,” and “World Trade Center / Black Holes / ’74”

Peter Balakian’s poems are a unique and haunting take on the tragedy of 9/11. Rather than focusing on the horrors of that day, these poems narrate Peter’s naive admiration for the towers when he worked there as a mail runner in the early ’70s. His language is lush and exuberant—I’m reminded of Hart Crane’s odes to the Brooklyn Bridge or Walt Whitman’s lines of praise for Broadway—but in Peter’s work, this energy is freighted with the coming loss that we see from our historical perspective. The effect is poignant without ever straying into the maudlin.

Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Story (co-winners):

• Helon Habila for “The Hotel Malogo” (Spring issue)
• Brendan Mathews for “Dunn & Sons” (Summer issue)

Helon Habila’s story does what so much great fiction does: it opens our eyes to worlds we never knew existed, even as it pulls us along with a thrilling narrative. We see the backstreets and dive motels of Lagos, Nigeria, the effects of poor infrastructure in the form of rolling blackouts and train worker strikes, but these details serve to support a story that is, at its heart, a tale of danger and intrigue—a thriller revolving around murder for money and a young man who is willing to venture into these dangerous waters for the promise of quick fortune. The story couldn’t be more timeless, but it also couldn’t be rooted more firmly in its setting.

Brendan Mathews’s story is a kind of meditation on the nature of storytelling itself. It is a domestic drama built on slow revelations and focused on the intrigue of learning facts that change the way we view those unknowable people we call our family. We are especially excited by this story, because Brendan is one of our own. He served as a reader on VQR’s fiction board while he was a student in the UVA MFA program. Now he is teaching and writing full time and producing top-flight work.

The Emily Clark Balch Prizes for short story and poetry were established in 1955. Past recipients include Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Hayden Carruth, Carolyn Forché, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, and May Sarton. The Staige D. Blackford Prize for nonfiction, established in 2003, is named for the seventh editor of VQR who retired in 2003 after guiding the magazine for twenty-eight years. The complete list of past winners can be seen here. Each prize includes a monetary award of $1,000.

Over at the New Republic’s site, James Wolcott reviews Gail Pool’s book Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America.

Today’s issue of Brazilian daily A Gazeta features the following political cartoon, by Dejamil. The man pictured is Blairo Maggi, Mato Grasso’s governor and the world’s largest soybean producer.

Pat Joseph’s “Soy in the Amazon,” found in our current issue, is surely the source of Maggi’s consternation. Joseph takes a hard look at Maggi, and finds little to like about the man:

As villains go, he is made-to-order. A picture in the report shows him striding imperiously, flanked by sycophants, beady eyes darting from a round, fleshy face, the head bursting from the collar of his oxford without benefit of a neck. More than his swinish aspect, however, it is Governor Maggi’s statements to the foreign press that have made him the personification of ecological depravity. In the New York Times story by Larry Rohter, Maggi is quoted as saying: “To me, a 40 percent increase in deforestation doesn’t mean anything at all, and I don’t feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here . . . . We’re talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about.”

The feeling, I trust, is mutual.

(Via Blog do Antero)