Our latest storytelling platform
We are thrilled to launch our new Community Anthologies program, which gives the editorial keys to four editors-in-chief. This cohort of curators will work together over the course of five months as they curate their own anthology — for example, “On Work” — showcasing seven voices in each anthology. This new platform enables us to publish an additional 28 voices, nearly doubling the number of people we can publish each year. At a time when we’re seeing literary magazines closing their doors, TSW is dedicated to building more platforms for our communities’ voices.
This new cohort-based storytelling platform takes everything we have learned and become over seven years of publishing our annual literary magazine — our collaborative issue curation process, our publishing calendar, TSW’s editorial practices, as well as graphic design and social platforms — and bundles that into a single resource for aspiring editors-in-chief to wield. Each community anthology, entitled “On ____,” comes with a budget: each EIC receives a $1,000 stipend and each contributor they publish receives $100 for publication.
Who are our 2023 editors-in-chief and what anthologies are they curating?
In order to grow, we need to tend to our decay. How much old growth are you carrying that hasn’t been tended to, preventing you from sprouting?
A river is a contested site. Rivers have something to tell us about our bodies and the land. I bring the river questions. I want to know yours.
I want you to reflect on your relationship to work, critique corporate “culture,” talk about unions, bemoan the churn of “passion fields” and “mission-driven” careers, discuss “employability” in terms of gender presentation, class, race, neurodivergence, etc.
Maybe permanence echoes within the rigid constraints of a now ill-fitting label, or in something a birth certificate or diagnosis proclaimed your body, a living vessel, could or could not be (or do) as long as you lived.
We are thrilled to welcome our first cohort of editors-in-chief: Bianca Ng, Patrycja Humienik, Sarah Madges, and Briana Gwin. We have had the privilege of working in various capacities with each, and so it brings us great joy to provide these four deeply-talented creators with the keys to curate their own community anthology. The topics they have selected — On Work, On Tending, On Rivers, and On Permanence — are guaranteed to inspire a powerful mix of work. We cannot wait to see their issues unfold this November. Get to know a little about each of our EICs below, and make sure to visit our Community Anthologies page to read more about their anthologies:
- Bianca Ng (she/her) is a Cantonese American visual storyteller and facilitator, creating brave spaces for BIPOC folks to affirm their intersectional identities and creative voices. She began her career in NYC as a designer working at an award-winning branding studio and a fortune 500 company before becoming the Creative Director for The Cosmos, an intentional online & offline community for Asian women. Bianca is also a TSW 2018 Rhinebeck resident, whom we published in Issue 8: Power And, and she was also the 2020-2022 artist-in-residence for TSW, during which time she produced our first-ever anthology, We Keep Beginning; a zine, harmer/harmed; and rest begets rest, an artist postcard series.
- Patryjca Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, teaching artist & performer based in Seattle, WA. She serves as Assistant Poetry Editor with Newfound. Patrycja most recently worked for the University of Washington’s Office of Equity & Justice in Grad Programs, in service of underrepresented graduate students, faculty, and staff. She has received fellowships from the Jack Straw Writing Program and Brooklyn Poets, and was a semi-finalist for the 2021 92Y Discovery Prize and a runner-up for the Lighthouse LitFest and Key West Emerging Writer Awards. She is currently working on her first book of poems, Anchor Baby. She works between borders: of disciplines, language/body, art/activism/scholarship, conflict/transformation. Patrycja was TSW’s Events Director from 2020-2023, and is currently a guest faculty and facilitator for TSW’s digital residency programs.
- Sarah Madges is a Brooklyn-based freelance editor, writer, and copywriter, as well as a nonfiction reader and copy editor at Guernica. They hold an MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School (2016) and have written essays and reviews for Guernica, The Rumpus, the Village Voice, and more, and are anthologized in A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM Press, 2017). They co-curate and -edit Handwritten, an online project dedicated to the art and act of handwriting, and formerly hosted the monthly poetry reading series, Mental Marginalia from 2015–2017, as well as the monthly writer’s variety show, Same Page Reading Series, at KGB Bar’s Red Room from 2018–2020. Sarah was also published in Issue 8: Power And.
- Briana Gwin is a bilingual and multicultural poet, essayist, and hybrid creator. She is currently the editor and storyteller at Milkweed Editions, and holds a BFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and a dual MFA in fiction and nonfiction from The New School. As a life-long lover and dedicated learner of all things language, literature, and the natural world, Bree is a perpetual student, passionate about unearthing and amplifying urgent and untold perspectives. She believes that our voices hold weight, and our stories are more than water. They are connective and restorative; they are life-giving. Briana is the senior prose editor at The Seventh Wave, and was published in Issue 10: Willful Innocence.
