Rain Taxi publishes work by writers in all stages of their careers. Our quarterly magazine provides a place for the spirited exchange of ideas about books, particularly those overlooked by mainstream review media. While Rain Taxi focuses on current releases, it also devotes space to the discussion of older works that continue to resonate. Interviews, essays, and "Widely Unavailable" (reviews of out-of-print books) are also regular features of the magazine.

Our print issues usually appear in March, June, September, and December. An accompanying Online Edition with additional, original material is published shortly after each print issue. Submissions are accepted year-round, except for the months of June and December. Please note also that we do not accept submissions of original poetry or fiction.

Before submitting a review to Rain Taxi, we ask that you please carefully review our guidelines.

ETHICAL AND EDITORIAL GUIDELINES

Rain Taxi is dedicated to publishing unbiased, objective reviews. If you have a connection with the author or press, please disclose it upon submission. Not all relationships constitute conflicts of interest, but we respectfully request your candor regarding any relationships. If you are friends with an author and would like to highlight their work, please feel free to email us and suggest a review, or consider pitching an interview instead.

We discourage reviewers from having any direct contact with the author or publisher prior to submitting a review. If it is necessary to clarify facts, our editorial staff can handle that for you. If you must contact the author or publisher, please be careful to ask specific questions rather than sending them the entire review for approval, and please disclose the extent of your communications upon submission.
Rain Taxi publishes original work that has not appeared previously in any other venue, including magazines, newspapers, personal web sites or blogs, and mass emails.

We reserve the right to edit, though major content or style edits are always discussed with the writer before publication. We also reserve the right not to publish work that we feel does not meet our editorial standards or is in conflict with our mission and aesthetic.
Material may be published, at our discretion, in either our print issue, Rain Taxi Review of Books, or in our Online Edition at www.raintaxi.com. Please disclose upon submission if you have a strong preference for either format.

If you become a regular reviewer for Rain Taxi, note that we assign books according to the reviewer's interest. If a book assigned for review turns out to be uninspiring, we will usually be happy to assign something else. While we generally prefer to use our limited space for discussion of books that are worthwhile, negative reviews that engage larger issues are certainly welcome. Article lengths and deadlines are determined upon assignment.

Rain Taxi holds the copyright to all articles published. Copyright reverts to the author one year after publication, though Rain Taxi should always be credited as the original source. Please discuss with us any reprint plans.

Our contributing writers are truly “contributing”—as a nonprofit organization, Rain Taxi does not have the means to pay (except in copies) the more than five dozen writers who write for each issue. We invest our resources instead in maintaining our high circulation and good reputation, making Rain Taxi a place where our contributing writers will be widely read and proud to be published.

HOW TO SUBMIT

1. We encourage you to submit by email. Send your review submissions to info@raintaxi.com. Please submit your review as a Microsoft Word or RTF attachment, or pasted into the body of your email. If sending via snail mail, please use our postal address, and include a SASE or email address for response:

Rain Taxi
PO Box 3840
Minneapolis, MN 55403

2. Please include a cover letter or email that indicates you: a) are submitting an original piece that has neither been published nor is under consideration elsewhere; b) are familiar with Rain Taxi through its print magazine or Online Edition; c) have read and agree with our ethical and editorial guidelines. Please disclose any relationships or communications with the author or publisher.

3. We encourage you to include in your cover letter a note about your background, reading interests, favorite authors, and other publications (if any).

4. If submitting a review, send something approximately 500 words in length, and please indicate how you obtained the book you have selected. Please include book title, author, publisher, and price as well as page numbers for all quotations. (If submitting an interview or essay, please provide any background information that may help us evaluate it.) Writers who have previously published reviews in newspapers or magazines and would like to be considered for an assignment may send three samples instead of newly written work.

5. We do not accept simultaneous submissions. We normally respond within one month. Please do not send submissions during the months of December and June.

BOOK FAIR FUN

People stream into the doors as the Twin Cities Book Festival begins!

 

People moved between the readings in the Fine Arts Building and The Book Fair in the Progress Center Building

 

The Book Fair was busy all day!

 

Reading up on HOW TO TALK MINNESOTAN!

 

Bob Matson wants to know WHAT'S IN YOUR BOATHOUSE?!

 

Browsing the Literary Magazine Fair.

 

This year the Used Book Sale also featured used records!

 

Metro Public Library gave away free bags!

PICTURES FROM AUTHOR EVENTS

David Wojan reads with ASL interpreter.

 

Caledcott Winner David Wiesner poses with a fan.

 

Rare appearance by Romanian Novelist Mircea Cartarescu.

 

Howard Mohr signs books

 

Nicholson Baker makes a point

 

Ytasha L. Womack answers questions after her presentation

CHILDREN'S PAVILION

A lucky girl displays the Wonderous Pop-Up Book by Robert Sabuda

 

Captain Readmore stopped by to encourage kids to read

Duke otherwise got the kids moving around

Mary Logue signed books after her reading

FRIDAY NIGHT SOIREE

Rain Taxi Board Member Pamela Klinger-Horn and Delia Ephron

Rain Taxi Board Member Mark Gustafson and Nicholson Baker

Fall 2008 Issue

California painter Ginny Stanford is known for her skillful and sensitive portraits. Her subjects include people of high accomplishment in government and public service, the arts, education, religion, and business.

In 1992, The National Portrait Gallery acquired one of three portraits she completed of prose writer MFK Fisher. The Fisher portrait was among 75 paintings from the Gallery's permanent collection selected for a multi-year exhibition of remarkable Americans which toured museums in the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. Ms. Stanford, the only living woman artist to be represented in the exhibition, is the subject of a short film on portraiture produced by Arts & Entertainment Network for the Smithsonian Institution. In 2004, The National Portrait Gallery commissioned her to paint the official portrait of former First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, which was unveiled in April, 2006.

Fall 2009 Issue

Joe Brainard was born in Salem, Arkansas, in 1942, but shortly thereafter his family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he grew up. From an early age Joe showed artistic talent. In the early Sixties, Brainard found inspiration in New York City where he met a plethora of talented artists and writers including: Joseph LeSueur, Frank O'Hara, Kenward Elmslie, Kenneth Koch, Alex Katz, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Rudy Burckhardt, and Yvonne Jacquette, soon followed by Andy Warhol, John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thompson, and others, as well as younger poets later associated with the St. Mark's Poetry Project, such as Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Tony Towle, Tom Clark, Larry Fagin, and Michael Brownstein, to name a few. His early paintings and assemblages showed the influence of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, but Joe's work soon distinguished itself by its lyricism, wit, warmth, and generosity, combined with his penchant for making art that was unabashedly beautiful. His 1975 show at Fischbach consisted of 1,500 miniature works. It was praised by New York Times art critic John Russell as "the wittiest show of the winter."

Brainard’s drawings, collages, assemblages, and paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Museum, and the Joe Brainard Archive at the University of California, San Diego, as well as in many private and corporate collections. (More info at www.joebrainard.org)

Winter 2009/2010 Issue

Augusta Talbot was born in New York City, attended the Maryland Institute of Art from 1969-1971, and received a BFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1973. She has exhibited in museums and galleries across the country, and has twice had solo exhibitions at Vanderwoud Tannanbaum Gallery in New York City. Her work has been in numerous group shows, including The Sculpture Center in New York City, The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and The San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, The Village Voice, and American Ceramics, among other publications. Talbot is now involved in a collaboration with the painter Amy Trachtenberg on a large installation at The Children's Hospital in Oakland, California. She is also working on a project employing language and image with the poet Michael Palmer. Visit her website here.

Summer 2009 Issue

George Schneeman, a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, began painting in 1958 in Italy after graduate work at the University of Minnesota and service in the US Army. Nine years later, he moved to New York City with his wife Katie and engaged in the burgeoning scene around The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. There, Schneeman began collaborating with poets Ted Berrigan, Larry Fagin, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, and others. It is for these spectacular and energetic works that he is best known. While some collaborations were conventional (e.g., accompanying illustrations for friends’ books), others went beyond categorization. Ron Padgett described the process in a recent New York Times article: “We would simply get together at his studio, using whatever materials were at hand. We would work spontaneously, sometimes on as many as five pieces at once, going back and forth between them, adding and subtracting and changing.” In 2004, Padgett edited Painter Among Poets: The Collaborative Art of George Schneeman, published by Granary Books. Schneeman’s solo work has been exhibited at the Fischbach Gallery and Holly Solomon Gallery, both in New York, and at the Denver Art Museum, CUE Art Foundation, and other public and private institutions.

Spring 2009 Issue

Fran Herndon met Jim Herndon in Paris in the late 1950s. They returned together to San Francisco where Fran met and became friends with the central poets and artists of the San Francisco Renaissance, including Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jess, and today with writers such as George Albon, Norma Cole, and Kevin Killian. At Spicer's insistence, Fran began taking print-making and painting classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, thus beginning her ongoing life as an artist. Her prints appear alongside Spicer's poems in The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. Her sports collages, originally printed in Everything as Expected, were reprinted with some of Spicer's poems in The Golem, published by Granary books. In addition, Herndon's artwork was on a SUNY Buffalo Special Collections Library Holiday broadside, and on the covers of books by Elizabeth Robinson and George Stanley.

Recently Herndon has been making paintings, drawings, and pastels; she has shown her work at Canessa Park Gallery in San Francisco, where she will have a retrospective show in September of this year.

Summer 2010 Issue

When Ramona Szczerba (a.k.a. Winona Cookie) is not being a psychologist in private practice in San Diego, she’s busy making art, something she has done for as long as she can remember. She enjoys creating whimsical children’s illustrations in watercolor, but also loves working with collage and assemblage. She favors the darkest faeries, legendary women, arcane subject matter and inventors who never were. She is currently obsessed with the steampunk genre and is trying to keep up with the torrent of characters who insist on being depicted and having their stories told. She has illustrated several coloring books and published two calendars; three of her pieces with their accompanying stories will appear in the upcoming anthology of steampunk short fiction, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. “Tesla” will also be included in the upcoming Steampunk Bible.