Overview

Little Patuxent Review (LPR) is a biannual print journal with an associated blog that features writers and artists from the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. A reading by contributors marks the launch of each print issue.

LPR was named for Little Patuxent River, one of the three major tributaries of the Patuxent River. Like LPR, the river flows over stones–the Algonquin word “patuxent” means “water flowing over smooth stones”–through Howard County, Maryland, gathering strength as it carries content to the Chesapeake Bay and out toward the larger world.

It was founded in 2006 by a group of local writers—Mike Clark, Anne Bracken, Ann Barney, Brendan Donegan—to fill the void left when a periodical of the same title, founded by poets Ralph and Margot Treital, closed a quarter century ago.

They envisioned LPR as a forum for area writers and artists. In doing so, they not only provided readers with a diverse array of local offerings but also attracted contributors of national repute.

There has been poetry from Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States and Michael Glaser, Poet Laureate of Maryland. Also from Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award winner Stanley Plumly, the late Lucille Clifton, winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry and recipient of the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America and Joy Harjo, recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.

There has been fiction from Edith Pearlman, whose collection Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award,  Michael Chabon, whose Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Rafael Alvarez, whose screenwriting contributed to the critically acclaimed television series Homicide: Life in the Streets and The Wire, and Manil Suri, whose The Death of Vishnu became an international bestseller.

And there have been myriad early efforts from writers and artists who will look back on Little Patuxent Review as the publication that gave them their start.