R262. Limited Resources, Big Dreams: How to Mine the Rush of Online Lit Journals

Room 511, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

Desktop publishing software has made producing an online literary journal easier than ever. But with limited staff and funding, how does one create a journal of the highest caliber? How does one establish an ethos, stay relevant, and grow their reader base in a sea of journals with similar offerings? And how can these journals compete with more established presses? Five journal editors—some connected to universities, others indie—explore these questions and discuss their publication processes.


Participants

Moderator:

Eric Blankenburg currently serves as the managing editor for Front Porch Journal, Texas State’s graduate-run literary magazine. Previously, he worked as the webmaster, helping rebuild and redesign the journal’s website and video archives. He has also edited monthly, weekly, and online publications.

Heather Lefebvre is an MFA candidate in fiction at Texas State University, where she works as a managing editor of Front Porch Journal. She is the founding editor of Broad!, an online journal publishing writers and artists who identify as female, trans*, and/or outside the gender binary.

Ralph Pennel teaches poetry at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. He is founding/fiction editor of Midway Journal, an online journal published out of St. Paul, MN. Ralph served as the judge for the 2013 WLP Dean’s Prize for Emerson and was a finalist for poet laureate of Somerville, MA, in 2014.

Cynthia Plascencia is a third-year MFA poetry student at the University of New Hampshire. She has served as a reader and poetry editor for the UNH online literary magazine, Barnstorm, in past years, and is currently serving as its editor in chief.

Christopher Allen's work appears in Indiana Review, Night Train, Literary Orphans, and over a hundred other journals. The recipient of the 2015 Ginosko Literary Journal's flash fiction award, Allen is the managing editor of SmokeLong Quarterly, a web journal devoted to flash fiction since 2003.

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