Editor Interview: Blackbird

Excellence.

Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Drunken Boat, 42opus, Glimmer Train, Southern Review, Asheville Poetry Review, AGNI, Greensboro Review, Hollins Critic, DIAGRAM, diode, etc.

Our favorite fiction writers include George Garrett, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Randall Keanan, Christine Schutt, Steve Yarborough, Charles Johnson, Zachary Mason, Guy Davenport, George Singleton, Lorrie Moore, Josh Wheedon, John Gardner. Our favorite poets include Charles Wright, James Wright, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, David Wojahn, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Gerald Stern, Louise Gluck, Eleanor Ross Taylor, John Ashberry, Norman Dubie, Joshua Poteat, William Matthews, David St. John, Ann Lauterbach, Claudia Emerson, Terence Hayes, Anna Journey, Nicky Beer, Rita Dove.

Blackbird publishes outstanding poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama, as well as multi-modal works such as process presentations in the visual arts and video essays. The journal takes advantage of its electronic production to include audio, video, digital photography, and other modes of presentation not possible in print, while continuing to exercise the judgement and careful selection inherited from the traditions of the best print journals.

Although our sole principle in the work we look for is excellence, hopeful contributors should remember that, in the end, our selection process is based on taste. This is why we often encourage hopeful contributors to send us new work even after a submission has been rejected. Read the journal, and read our submission guidelines.

The ideal submission, regardless of the quality of the work, would arrive to us in a font that doesn't distract; without clip art or backgrounds; in a proper document form (.doc or .rtf) so that all of our intern and volunteer readers can participate in that submission's discussion; and with a simple and brief cover letter. Likewise, our copyediting team especially appreciates clean writing with few errors.

We often receive submissions in .docx or .odt formats. (The correct formats are .doc and .rtf files.) While some of our readers can open these files on their personal computers, others cannot. The reading process is much faster when we have documents that we know all of our readers can open. If a submissions is in an inappropriate file format, we don't like to reject it on that basis, for fear that we're missing some really great work. Therefore, we hold on to them until the reader who can access these files is available; but this often means that the submission lingers in a waiting room, so to speak.

We like to see cover letters, especially when the cover letters are pasted into the "comments" section of our submissions software. This not only helps us screen the work for previous contributors, friends of the journal, or solicited material, it also allows us to keep up with trends in the publishing world. Likewise, we like to get to know our contributors and a cover letter on their submission is the first step in this process.

We encourage the first reader of each submission to read the entire piece. Each submission, however, receives at least one additional reader before a decision is made.

Generally, most submissions are read first by an intern or a volunteer reader; if he or she enjoys the piece, it will go before a Monday Group discussion of the entire intern staff that's moderated by our senior literary editor. If the group finds the piece of interest, the submission goes before our associate editor and the literary and senior editors who decide, generally by consensus, that a piece fits the journal's tastes and needs.