Editor Interview: Sinking City

Experimental renderings.

We love ANMLY, Versification, Hobart, Moonchild Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, The Acentos Review, The Adroit Journal, AGNI Magazine, Broadsided Press (these are just a few)--any lit magazine that taps into the experimental, provides different avenues of possibility, both for the work itself and for the writers, especially writers of color. We are especially excited by multilingual pieces / those that also engage with the environmental (we encourage writers to interpret this in many different ways, and which are not limited to environmental issues / concerns).
We also admire magazines that provide continued dialogues between a writer's work and provide a sense of collective community that goes beyond just the lit mag format (I'm thinking specifically of Broadsided Press, for their mission of bringing broadside collaborations out in the world, and Kissing Dynamite Press, for their openness with publishing experimental works that may not always fit the traditional "page" / alignment format (even if technology already inherently creates that difference ).

We love writers such as Eavan Boland, Eva Saulitis, Jamaal May, Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Bradfield, Camille T. Dungy, Sean Hill, Claudia Rankine, Fatima Asghar, Craig Santos Perez, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jemsyn Ward, Ursula Le Guin, Zaina Arafat, Anne Carson, Elvira Sastre...really there are too many too name, but what we love about these writers are their engagement with language play (and this sometimes includes multilingualism), surrealism, environmental writing, and the sense of urgency that is embedded within their works!

Sinking City is a relatively new literary mag, but what sets apart Sinking City from other magazines is our engagement with place (Sinking City is, after all, a nickname for Miami) and its intersection with the diverse array of writing that we have published, from poems about extinction to hybrid works that include different mediums such as switching of language and inclusion of the author's own drawing as well.

The best advice we can give someone who is considering submitting work is to first make sure one follows our submissions guidelines here: http://sinkingcitylitmag.com/submit/. We also strongly suggest that those who submit read our previous issues before sending in their work to get a better sense of what we publish!

Our ideal submission would be a work of fiction, poetry, or translation that jumps off the page (both literally and metaphorically!) We want something that reverberates, subverts, and challenges traditional senses of language and form. We want to see insistence, the reality of global extinction, environmental concern, or any other topics that engage with the same level of significance, and which gets our editors and readers alike leaving us with a newfound and dreamlike sense of knowledge and attention.

We thankfully have not had too many submitters get much wrong about our submissions process, but one thing that we do see while looking through submissions are pieces that don't fit our literary magazine's mission. Therefore, to reiterate, we encourage future submitters to please familiarize themselves with Sinking City's philosophy and aesthetics by reading our previous issues.

Previous publication credits are not something we prioritize. We have published a range of authors, both emerging and established writers, but are not biased by the author's publications because we read the writer's work before reading their bios.

We read every single piece to the end before making the decision to reject it. Our editorial team spends their time reading each piece and going back and forth with meticulous commentary before we make our final decisions.

Before a piece is accepted, our editorial team has our final editorial meeting to go over the pieces that we have marked as "maybe" and/ or "yes". Each member discusses his or her own editorial evaluation particularly if a piece has received a range of opinions by different editorial members.

The reading process involves organizing and compiling submissions, gathering our editorial team for meetings, and making sure we discuss every piece with as much attention, care, detail, and perspective.

We don't usually provide an extensive amount of editing once we accept the piece. We will make small minor line / grammatical edits if we catch some, but our goal is not to change someone's piece through our own edits.

Yes, we nominate work for the Pushcart Prize!