After more than a decade of editing jubilat (www.jubilat.org), the biannual journal of poetry and art published at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Robert Casper is stepping down as publisher in order to devote more time to his new position at the Library of Congress. Beginning with Issue 20, the current assistant editor, Emily Pettit, will assume the role of publisher and Kevin Anthony González and Caryl Pagel will succeed editors Cathy Park Hong and Evie Shockley. Casper, who started the journal in 2000 along with Christian Hawkey, Kelly Le Fave, and Michael Teig, says Pettit will draw on the history of the journal while bringing to it a sense of “youthfulness, the kind of energy that we started the magazine with.”
The Yale Review (www.yale.edu/yalereview), edited by J. D. McClatchy in New Haven, Connecticut, is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary as a literary magazine. Founded in 1819 as the Christian Spectator, the Yale Review has had several incarnations—from a journal of theology to one of politics, economics, and history—before becoming the acclaimed literary review that has published work by legendary authors such as Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. To commemorate the centennial of “the nation’s oldest literary quarterly,” this year’s issues will feature work exclusively by members of Yale faculty in order to, as McClatchy puts it in his editor’s note, “compose a portrait of the mind of Yale over the past century.” The editors will resume reading unsolicited manuscripts later this summer; visit the website for updates.
River Styx (www.riverstyx.org) is entering its thirty-sixth year as one of Saint Louis’s oldest literary journals. Published three times per year by Big River Association and edited for the past fifteen years by Richard Newman, the journal has been home to the work of poets laureate Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Ted Kooser, Howard Nemerov, and Mona Van Duyn; Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa; and Nobel laureates Czeslaw Milosz and Derek Walcott. The editors are accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, and essays—from emerging and established writers alike—through November.
David Holub, editor and cofounder of Kugelmass (firewheel-editions.org/kugelmass), the new biannual journal of literary humor based in Danbury, Connecticut, says he and his staff are accepting submissions of fiction and essays (one thousand to four thousand words) that “jerk us from a daze and dangle something extraordinary in our faces, something that was there all along, but we couldn’t see it” via Submishmash.
Also new to the scene is the Drum (slab500.com/drumlitmag), a “literary magazine for your ears” that publishes short shorts (under two thousand words), stories and essays (under ten thousand words), novel excerpts, and interviews in audio format. Past issues have included work by Bret Anthony Johnston, Andrew Kaufman, and Lynne Tillman. As is apparent from the variety of formats accepted—not to mention the generous word counts—the editors promise to “accommodate” their writers. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
The editors of Knee-Jerk (kneejerkmag.com), a Chicago-based literary magazine that for the last two years has published fiction and creative nonfiction exclusively online, successfully raised (via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter) more than the one thousand dollars they needed to cover a portion of the printing fees for Knee-Jerk Offline, Volume 1. It includes work by Joe Meno and David Shields, among others. The editors plan to publish an annual print edition and are accepting submissions of fewer than three thousand words—or up to five thousand if, as they write on the website, “you are confident that the story will blow our minds.”
