By Andrew H. Miller, Online Managing Editor
Dear Readers,
When Columbia Journal was founded by its graduate writing program students in 1977, two central tenets were installed: first, that the journal staff must fill the pages with outstanding & promising poetry and prose, and second, that the journal only belongs to one group for a single mad, exhilarating, hasty year. You may wonder who that group is, this year: I’m Andrew, the online managing editor for the journal’s website. I am fortunate to work with an excellent staff of genre editors in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art/film/music. We’re pleased to have you as our audience. As you can see already, there are some excellent pieces of work forthcoming! After our tenure as the Issue 55 staff, we will hand the journal off to the next cohort.
I am excited to suggest the first in a series of ambitious goals for our web and print publications. You will see more features, even more outstanding and promising poetry & prose, and new perspectives – in writing, for you, our readers.
None of this would be possible without Issue 54’s staff, our predecessors, who ran the baton like Olympic athletes before handing it off to us. We are wildly hopeful to bring you new content and features, and wildly grateful to those who paved the way before us. You can read about those teams & see their hard work here.
The Winter Contest
On to our announcements. Our Winter Contest begins October 3rd (more information coming soon), and there are cash prizes you can win.
Please also keep in mind that regular, free submissions to be published in our annual print publication (Issue 55) are closing on September 30th. The literary contest has a submission fee, and winners will also be published in Issue 55.
The Election & Politics Feature
The U.S. presidential election, and politics in general, are the focus of our first themed online feature: a 2-month phase in which your submissions are requested, to which our guest editor will observe, comment, and respond. Submit here.
Our Guest Editor
That guest editor will be Joobin Bekhrad, the founder and Editor of REORIENT, a Canadian publication celebrating contemporary Middle Eastern arts and culture. I think we stand to learn a great deal from Joobin’s perspective on your submissions concerning the election and politics.
More about Joobin:
An award-winning writer, Joobin Bekhrad (BBA, MSc.) is the founder and Editor of REORIENT (www.reorientmag.com), a publication celebrating contemporary Middle Eastern arts and culture. He has contributed to such publications as the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, The Guardian, Aesthetica, Artsy, Christie’s, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Canvas, and Songlines, been interviewed by news outlets such as Newsweek and the CBC, and seen his articles translated into Persian, Arabic, Italian, Russian, and Chinese, among other languages. Primarily writing about visual art, literature, music, and film, many of his articles focus on subjects such as identity, Persian culture, and the experience of living in the Iranian diaspora. In 2015, Joobin was granted an International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC) by London’s Royal College of Art. He is also the author of a new translation of Omar Khayyam’s poems from Persian into English, a foreword to Mahdi Ehsaei’s Afro-Iran, and Coming Down Again, a forthcoming novella.
Thank you for reading,
Andrew Miller
