American Chordata

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American Chordata, a Brooklyn-based magazine, pairs emerging voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with visual artwork carefully chosen to create a sense of dialogue between forms. Since it began publishing in 2015, American Chordata has built a reputation as a launching pad, often finding writers and artists their first audience, and as a home for work that is innovative and stylistically daring. As captivating to look at as it is to read, this singular publication appeals to habitual lovers and first-time readers of literary magazines alike.

Citation

American Chordata is a standout in style and interdisciplinary exploration. The magazine brings stunning images into conversation with breathtaking poetry, bracing memoir, and fiction that is compact yet expansive, creating a multidimensional reading experience that brims with surprising connections between forms. The editors seem wholly immersed in a vibrant world of multicultural writers and artists, and their delight in drawing readers into it is an act of creative generosity. 

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3

Arkansas International

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The Arkansas International seeks to put emerging and established authors from across the world in conversation with one another. Launched by the University of Arkansas’ Creative Writing & Translation program in 2016, the AI has published fiction, poetry, essays, comics, and works in translation from over 60 countries, including Egypt, Brazil, Venezuela, South Korea, Iran, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Russia, Italy, Galica, and Hungary. The AI also awards the annual C.D. Wright Emerging Poet’s Prize and an Emerging Writer’s Prize, both given to authors who have not yet published full-length works.

Citation

Distinguished by exceptional fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics that are as attentive to place as they are to language, the Arkansas International lives up to its name, publishing fiercely observant and open-hearted work by writers from around the globe. When this literature converges and collides with emerging work from within the United States, the result is breathtaking. The ambition of this bright new star in the literary firmament is nothing less than to build a world community of writers and readers.
 

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2

Foglifter

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Rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, Foglifter is a platform for LGBTQ+ writers that supports and uplifts powerful, intersectional, and transgressive queer and trans writing through publication and public readings to build and enrich our communities as well as the greater literary arts. Since 2016, this biannual journal has provided a path to representation for a broad selection of LGBTQ+ voices, centering queer and trans literary artists of color, youth, elders, and those beyond traditional LGBTQ+ cultural centers so that readers and audiences can see their own experiences authentically represented through queer and trans literary arts.

Citation

A passionate commitment to building community, a collaborative editorial project, and an unflagging sense of imagination are Foglifter’s abiding trademarks. A journal made by queer and trans writers imagining the journal their past selves would want to read, Foglifter is a bright spot on the literary map for thinkers, artists, and readers of many generations. The work it publishes is fresh, alive, and ripe with creative energy.

 

 

 

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3

Black Warrior Review

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Named for the river that runs along The University of Alabama, Black Warrior Review is the oldest continuously-run literary journal produced by graduate students in the United States. Since its founding in 1974, it has become known for nurturing writing that moves outside boundaries of form and genre, and has a rich history of taking risks and championing the unexpected. BWR continues to create space for experimentation by showcasing uncommon literature by intergenerational and international writers that push against expectations and subvert structures of oppression.

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Full of elegance and grit, fluidity and resolve, Black Warrior Review is a singular beacon for adventurous writing that shines forth from Alabama. This journal brings together what is gorgeous and necessary in literature today, treating each piece it publishes as an act of optimistic revolution. Black Warrior Review dissolves convention and leaves possibility in its place.

 

 

 

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