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Craig Bernardini's "Lost Dogs" appears in the Fall 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Oh, the semicolon. I love that the semicolon asserts a relationship between two independent clauses and (barring an adverbial conjunction) doesn’t tell you what that relationship is. Grammatically speaking, in such cases the semicolon could be replaced by a period, and thus it has been called gratuitous. But grammar can’t ev

2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Fiction When the gods showed up—when the two of them puckered the sky like a cancerous breast, then split it apart, descending halfway between my house and Connecticut—I felt a familiar confusion. It was how I’d felt on 9/11, when I was fifteen-almost-sixteen, my junior year of high school. Was this actually a big deal? Would this actually change the world? Or was this more like when everyone said that Blu-Ray disks were the media of t

2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Poetry My grief counselor pounded the arms of his desk chair so hard he replaced them twice in two months. He tells me, You can’t save anyone, son, & God, how I want to believe. Dear Heavenly Father, didst thou sculpt us in the dark? What does one call one half of a duet? Of what use is a lone ski, barreling down black diamonds? I can rip this paddle so hard I tear the river & still, I’ll drift in circles. It’s autumn in Los Angeles &

2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Creative Nonfiction I am standing on the Provincetown pier, waiting to board a whale-watching boat, when I get a text from my aunt saying my dad’s left lung has collapsed. My legs turn liquid and I kneel, one knee against the rough hot boards. Nobody looks at me, nobody asks if I’m okay. Maybe they think I’m retying my shoes. My aunt says she will keep me posted. I tell myself there is nothing I can do right now, force my feet up the m

In my home office hangs one of the seven photo-collages my niece made for my parents’ memorial ceremony. I picked it for the pictures of old cars and old pets: a Corvair and a Firebird; a cat, a kitten, and a dog. The dog is medium-sized and stands across my mother’s lap. It probably has its back paws on her thigh and its front paws on the arm of the chair or sofa, though neither—thigh, chair —is visible. My mother has one arm under the dog’s belly and the other over its ru

Tú, mijo. Your English is better than mine. They will listen to you. Tell them not to take me. Tell them that in the pueblo I was accustomed to living with hunger as my most intimate companion, my closest friend, my only inheritance. That my neighbors, too, were poor but happy, content to live a simple life where we tended to one another with generosity, nourished only by a few cold, hard tortillas. Tell them that we lived without vanity or pretense, faithful to God and hu

Gordon Brown's "King of Infinite Space" can be found in the Summer 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is a literary hot take you have? We are long overdue for more stories told from the perspectives of animals. Whatever happened to those? Seems like there was a solid stretch of time where we could reliably jump from Call of the Wild to Animal Farm to Watership Down to Heart of a Dog or The Master and Margarita. Granted, that last example isn't told from an animal's persp

MJ McGinn's "The Hard Part is Keeping Them Alive" can be found in the Summer 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? My favorite punctuation is definitely the comma. I love their versatility. I’m not sure if this counts as a literary hot take, but I have a lot of strong feelings about lending books to people. If you share a book with someone, then they can keep it until they finish it. That should be the only dead

Daniela Buccilli's "Italian Shoes" appears in the Summer 2026 Issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? My hot take: Open up a fresh Poetry issue. Find your favorite poem in that issue, reread it several times aloud, annotate it as an admirer of craft would; then use the poem as a model for a draft of your own. And here is the best part: find the poet's website and thank them. I just did so with Teresa Cabor. She wrote

ECW Press | 9781770417793 | 344 pages | August 12, 2025 Joelle Kidd’s Jesusland: Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture offers an insider look at Christian pop culture of the 2000s paired with precise, insightful analysis that isolates and examines its inherent contradictions. I grew up within that world, and Jesusland reflected my teenage self back to me and allowed me to see the political and social messaging embedded within those products. Joelle and I

Joe Baumann's "Leave in Death with Ease and Plenty" appears in the Summer 2026 Issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Oh, I love a well-used semi-colon. I used to be a big em-dash fan, but as my style changed over time (as I think many writers' styles do), I left it behind. And of course, now there's all the humbug with AI-generated garbage overusing them, so semi-colon it is. My literary hot take, which may not actu

Bloomsbury | 781639738564 | 256 pages | June 23, 2026 It’s 6:30 am in New York City, and Agnes is filled with lip injector and toxic optimism for her day. She’s a SoulCycle devotee, an ideal girlfriend for her novelist partner Nathan, and a writer for an “anti-fashion” magazine called Whorl, a superior version of W. Over the course of twenty-four hours, her internal monologue never stops, and her goal is simple enough: Agnes wants someone to kill her. Like a feminist After H

Carl knows Tim is gone when his skin takes on the texture and color of a terracotta planter. He knows the shade well, having spent the last several days wandering through the living room, stopping at the display case with pieces of Tim’s parents and grandparents, shards of their skin mounted like butterflies pinned into a specimen box. When Carl sets his hand on his husband’s chest, it feels hollow, not just still, as though he is one of those hundreds—maybe it was thousand

I was four months pregnant, and we were already broken up when he started planning our future again. The muscle memory came easily—pretending the wound wasn’t still bleeding beneath the floorboards. We spoke in futures, borrowed intimacy like proof we hadn’t imagined it all. He would FaceTime me late at night, tilting the screen as if he were offering himself carefully, hoping I would take him whole. “I didn’t want to spoil the surprise,” he said, his voice light with antici

You might’ve seen my domain from an airplane window. Miles and miles of rocky, empty, firework-colored desert, and somewhere at the center of it all, the little white glint of a lone building. That’s where we live. My older brother, my grandad, and me – King of Infinite Space. You probably wouldn’t think anything about it. I’ve been on a plane once too, for my parents’ funeral. My brother let me have the window seat on the way back, so I know there are all sorts of strange sh

I wore only new shoes that summer. He asked to walk with me. My heels sank into mud. We took the woodsy path to the cliffside bar where the older teenagers kissed. The gossips told my mother this. I didn't catch his name. I hardly looked at his face. He was traveling up and down the boot to festivals of the saints. A pellegrino. In my mother's childhood, they walked barefoot for their penance, prayed at the church. He wore grown men's shoes and zippered pants. He walked

My boyfriend left for a week, but he hasn’t been back in a month. He keeps texting me, “Just a few more days, babe.” His name is Gary, but his SoundCloud rapper name is G-Dirty money. We met in college, senior year, and he owned a rusty red truck. This was upstate New York, where everyone owned a rusty red truck. Gary fit in. It snowed all the time that year. We used to smoke cigarettes in the rusty red truck bed, snow everywhere, letting ourselves get buried together.

Eleanor Polak's "The Dinner Party" appears in the Spring 2026 Issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? My favorite punctuation mark is the m dash (—). I think it’s one of the most emotionally expressive punctuation marks. A literary hot take I have is that, regardless of the recent movie version, Wuthering Heights’ Catherine and Heathcliff have very little romantic chemistry. What inspired you to write “The Dinner Party

"Flu Season" by Ella Torres appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What’s your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? As a huge fan of Emily Dickinson (and a poet), I love using em dashes! I feel like, when they’re properly used, they can really help emphasize sentences. My hot take is that "good writing" doesn't require inaccessibility. Too often, literary prestige gets confused with difficulty, but I think the true mission of writing is to

Erin Williamson's short story "Litany" appears in the Spring 2026 Issue of Broad Ripple Review. What’s your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Oh! The exclamation point, for sure! It can be overused and should not (!) be co-mingled with CAPITALIZATION to dictate public policy!!!!! But! Exclamation points still make me giddy. It’s the best punctuation for a sports bar, or when you need to yell "I love you," across a crowded train platform. I don’t know if