Simpsonistas: Vol. 6 highlights work from Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Ben Fountain, Joyce Carol Oates herself, and a host of distinguished authors connected to NewLit. Represented by their fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, they appear alongside high school-age aspiring writers from NewLit creative writing workshops. Series Editor, Joseph Di Prisco, from the Introduction: “…you may be isolated as a writer, but you are not alone, or then again, maybe it’s the other way around. Whatever the case, it’s a shared isolation. It’s a downright communal isolation embraced and affirmed by all the readers and writers and all the peopled voices ringing in your memories and in your conscious and unconscious.” Writers are “united by a conviction that art matters, and that the awe we feel in the presence of a great piece of writing makes all the difference in the world, not in some abstract sense, and not in some quantitatively measurable sort of way, but in the day to day life of people who desire to create something beautiful and important—because, just because.”