Editor Interview: ANMLY

Secrets & manifestos

Right now, my favorites are Apogee Journal, Rigorous, Nat. Brut, Winter Tangerine, Blueshift Journal, Dorothy, Waxwing, Yellow Medicine Review, Obsidian, Cloudthroat, Grist, Underblong, LIT, The Margins, Queer Southeast Asia, Black Napkin, and The Wanderer.

Layli Song Solider and Don Mee Choi are always on my mind. I'd love to read someone who can write the way Nobuyoshi Araki approaches photography. Craig Santos Perez, Michael Wasson, Sherrie Flick, jayy dodd, KOKUMO, and Natalie Eilbert have been my major recommendations this past year.

We challenge the canon, and have a grassroots commitment to justice, without being a journal with a "social justice" theme, per se. We also work with translation and visual arts more than similar publications tend to. I never want someone to read one of our issues, and know what's coming. Because we have special folios in each issue, we have the opportunity to touch on topics like writing by neurodivergent queer and trans people of color, or writing from the Caribbean, or speculative fiction in translation.
We publish more hybrid and experimental work, but are interested in meaningful experimentation. Form for form's sake is less interesting to us than form that innovates, or makes something inside of the author burn brighter. We also refuse to accept that experimental work can't also be lyric, confessional, or multimodal. I'm generally interested in interrogation and deconstruction, personally.

Reading some of our previous issues will always be the best advice. Send us work you believe in. Take risks. Be you.

I read your writing, I burst into flames. These flames engulf the earth. Or, these flames fix the ozone layer, or something.

Some people think we're just being nice when we turn down their work, but invite them to send new work in the future. We always mean it when we say this! Also, we don't accept submissions via email. And please, never address us as "Dear Sirs."

We don't care about your past. We just want to be your future. If you're doing persona work, or writing something more conceptual, an artist's statement or note of intent can be helpful.

Of course we read the whole piece!

Sometimes I go up to the roof and shout the piece at the moon, just to be sure.

You don't want to know.

We don't tend to edit poetry very much. More poets work with editors or do peer swaps before sending in work, I think. Prose tends to at least receive copy editing. If we think a piece could be made stronger, we'll let you know. We only ever want to publish the best version of your work.

We do! We currently nominate for Bettering American Poetry, the Pushcart, Best of the Net, the Saboteur Awards, Firecracker Awards, Best Small Fictions, and several more specific awards and anthologies.