Xu Li, Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal, dezireé a. brown, and Para Vadhahong

We’re excited to introduce 16 new voices to the TSW community. The beginning of a new season marks the arrival of many things long-awaited. Graduations, arrivals, departures, and quietude. Get-togethers, travel plans, verdicts, and new commitments made. It’s a moment ripe for change and movement, which is why we’re so thrilled to — at long last — share the work of our 16 contributors for Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting. And, as the saying goes, this was well worth the wait. Within this issue, you’ll read about one contributor’s experience waiting in the liminal space of government bureaucracy; simmer on poems about climate change and grief and the loud…

Our editorial team has been working closely with our Issue 17 contributors to bring their pieces to life. At the Seventh Wave, our annual magazine is at the heart of everything we do, which means our editorial team is the heartbeat that keeps it thrumming. Beginning in 2020, we expanded our team from a core group of three to a larger team of 12; since then, we’ve brought on numerous past contributors to serve as editors for the magazine, a tradition that we see as a way for writers and artists to keep paying it forward. For Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting, we enlisted the help of our brilliant…

These writers and poets are bringing the heat with their powerful work. New season, new cohort of incredible TSW contributors. We are over the moon to share with you a glimpse into these 16 writers’ perspectives, processes, and obsessions. Our original call for submissions for Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting opened last November, a tumultuous time rife with grief and uncertainty. As an organization, we view our role within the public discourse to be one of resource gathering and reflection — our call was born of a deep belief in the power of community and in amplifying some incredibly necessary and urgent voices. Nine years since our founding, we…

Amplifying community voices with Magic Cabinet Next week, on Jan. 16, TSW is launching our first cohort of the Community Anthology program: 32 new voices across four anthologies, each curated by an editor-in-chief. This is a new program for us, and we have a Seattle-based philanthropy organization, Magic Cabinet, to thank for quite literally making the magic happen. In April 2023, we found ourselves asking the same question we had been grappling with for years: How do we publish more people? While it might seem easy — just include more people in your annual literary magazine — it’s never actually easy: we’re a volunteer-run staff and our 12-person editorial team is…

We’re excited to introduce 18 new voices to the TSW community. At long last, Issue 16: Proximities is complete. As you’ll recall, we published the first half of the issue in June, a talented cohort of 15 contributors who shared poetry and stories of (among many things) diaspora, queer motherhood, generational strain, and the limits of intimacy. Today, we’re so thrilled to publish the second half of the issue, which is a powerhouse of talent, adding 18 more contributors’ voices to the mix. Read the issue in full Inside this winter edition, you’ll find contemplative essays about finding stillness amid the loss of an estranged parent; poems about the paradox…

These writers and poets are ones to watch. We are so thrilled to share our nominations for the 2023 Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. Every year, we work closely with anywhere between 32 to 62 new voices, and so it is incredibly difficult to narrow our pool of nominees down to just a handful. In our minds, everyone we publish deserves all the flowers for their willingness to share their poetry, their story, and their art with us and the world. Each of our nominations are exceptional works of art that expanded our ways of viewing genre, pushed us to think more deeply about the possibilities of craft…

The call will close Dec. 31, 2023. Late capitalist time — and its war machine — surges forward relentlessly, not allowing us to remember what we already know, not giving us space to practice care over consumption. But “the act of remaking the world is intimate, daily.”* And it’s one that can only be done communally. So in this moment of civil collapse, as we vacillate between rest and resistance, we return to the questions that build and thunder inside us.  Since 2015, we’ve asked 114 questions across our 16 calls. In 2015, we asked: Might the plasticity of our language be responsible for the gaps between us? In 2016,…