The final issue of Isotope (isotope.usu.edu), the biannual journal of literary nature and science writing, was published earlier this year. In his last editor’s note, Christopher Cokinos, who founded the magazine at Utah State University in 2003, wrote that budget cuts at the university led to “the loss of the managing editor position and the funding used to design, print, and distribute the magazine. Grant support has not been readily forthcoming, thus crippling our ability to promote the magazine and to pay our contributors.”
Gigantic (giganticmag.wordpress.com), the biannual journal of prose and art edited by Ann DeWitt, Rozalia Jovanovic, Lincoln Michel, and James Yeh in New York City, publishes mostly fiction, but is open to nonfiction. “If you have an idea for restaurant reviews written in haiku, profiles of celebrities in baseball-card format, or interviews with interesting people about things not related to their field of work, feel free to submit or query,” the editors write in a note on the Web site. Submissions are accepted via the online submission manager; contributors are paid in copies of the magazine.
The current issue of Bombay Gin, the biannual journal of poetry, translations, book reviews, and critical essays published by the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, includes transcriptions of two brief talks, by poets Anselm Hollo and Gary Snyder, delivered for the dedication of Naropa’s Allen Ginsberg Library on July 3, 1997. The recordings are part of the university’s audio archive—containing approximately six thousand hours of material dating back to 1973, a year before the first issue of Bombay Gin was published—from which the journal regularly draws excerpts. Submissions for Volume 37, Issue 1, of the journal will be accepted beginning in September. Would-be contributors are advised to query the editor in advance if they would like to submit a book review or critical essay.
Ploughshares (pshares.org), the literary magazine published three times a year at Emerson College in Boston, recently changed its reading period to better accommodate creative writers who don’t take the summer off. Bucking the trend of university journals that stop reading submissions during the summer months, Ploughshares is accepting work from June 1 to January 15. Editor in chief Ladette Randolph reports that the journal receives well over a thousand submissions each month, so a typical response time is at least five months.
In April the eighteen-year-old biannual Harvard Review (www.harvardreview.org) launched Harvard Review Online, a monthly complement to the print journal published by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By moving the majority of its book reviews online, Christina Thompson, editor of both versions of the magazine, hopes to have more room for poetry and prose in print. The submission period is closed from May 31 to September 1, but in the fall writers can submit up to five poems or seven thousand words of prose by postal mail or, for a small fee, use the new online submission manager at www.tellitslant.com.
Speaking of new Web-site initiatives, Prairie Schooner (prairieschooner.unl.edu) announced a new editorial position at the quarterly’s offices at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. The journal’s new digital development and online editor is Timothy Schaffert, a regular contributor to Poets & Writers Magazine. Although Schaffert’s mission is to beef up Prairie Schooner’s online presence—blog, Twitter, Facebook—the journal accepts submissions exclusively via postal mail and, like many university-based magazines, does so from September 1 to May 31 only.
