News – Seventh Wave

Join an info session about applying to be an Editor-in-Chief for our 2024 Community Anthologies

The Seventh Wave — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 18:08:45 +0000

We are hosting 3 info sessions in March.

In case you missed it, we just opened applications for our next cohort of editors-in-chief for our 2024 Community Anthologies. You can apply via Submittable by March 31 here, read all about the program here, or take a look back at our 2023 Community Anthologies here.

If you are interested in being an EIC, we’re hosting three Zoom Info Sessions this month, which will walk you through the program, roles and responsibilities of an EIC, and information about our selection and application processes. To register for one of our info sessions, see below:

There will also be time for questions and answers at the end, so take a look through the links above and bring your questions, curiosities, and excitements. We will also be recording those sessions, so please reach out to us at submit@seventhwavemag.com if you’d like to get a recording (or have any questions in general).

What did some of our past EICs and contributors have to say about their experience in our 2023 Community Anthologies program?

“Being an EIC with TSW’s Community Anthologies program was hands-down one of the most rewarding experiences of the last decade for me. In addition to the program itself being suffused with so much care, thoughtfulness, and support, EICs are given the tools and opportunity to pay it all forward in a series of nurturing collaborations with their contributors.” — Briana Gwin, 2023 EIC, On Permanence
“There are a lot of literary magazines in the world; what sets TSW apart is the way they run. From submission to editing to publication to promotion, everyone I worked with at TSW kept things clear and well-organized, and made me feel truly valued and appreciated as a contributor.” — Jade Wallace, 2023 Contributor, On Work
“The EIC program, like everything TSW does, was a collaborative effort of deep care and thoughtfulness. I felt supported throughout, while also being given the freedom to see my vision through. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with passionate and meticulous people who are committed to an expansive vision of what’s possible in publishing.” — Patrycja Humienik, 2023 EIC, On Rivers
“There is a different feeling to being published as part of a cohort, all writing toward the same theme. Whatever that feeling is — community, care, solidarity, grace — The Seventh Wave, in its gestures, is holding this space, a space where our words can not only sit side by side but as part of a shared vision.” — David Naimon, 2023 Contributor, On Rivers

Applications to be an Editor-in-Chief for our 2024 Community Anthologies are now open

The Seventh Wave — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 03:25:46 +0000

Apply by March 31, 2024 to be one of our four 2024 EICs.

In 2023, we launched our Community Anthologies program, which gave four curators the opportunity to publish their own digital issues on our site. The result? Four stunning anthologies — On Work, On Rivers, On Permanence, and On Tending — that showcased the work of 31 writers, artists, and activists. And today, we are thrilled to open up applications for our 2024 cohort of editors-in-chief, who will curate our next four anthologies in 2024.

You can read about the program and position below, but do note that we have three info sessions happening this month — March 11 @ 5pm PST, March 21 @ 2pm PST, and March 26 @ 12pm PST — where our Director of Programs Bretty Rawson will walk you through the program details, EIC roles and responsibilities, and the application and selection processes. There will also be time for questions and answers at the end. We will also be recording those sessions, so please reach out to Bretty at bretty@seventhwavemag .com if you’d like to get a recording.

Apply: to apply, please visit our Submittable page here.
About: Each year, we give our editorial keys to four curators — writers, artists, or editors — to create their own digital issue, showcasing the work of 6-8 artists/writers in each, publishing a total of 28-32 additional voices per year. These Editors-in-Chief work in a cohort together, supporting each other as they curate their own call/topic, work with their 6-8 contributors, and publish their anthology. We call them “community anthologies,” because that’s what they are: an anthology of community, conversation, and voice. In an era where we’re seeing literary magazines closing their doors, TSW is dedicated to building more platforms for our communities’ voices. We modeled this program off our nine years of experience publishing our annual literary magazine, turning our editorial and publishing models into a resource and blueprint for community curators.
Applications: are now open on Submittable until 3/31. There is a $5 application fee, which you can waive by sending your application to submit@seventhwavemag.com. Please ensure you submit complete applications via email.
Eligibility: the only requirement to apply for the EIC position is that you must have some kind of publishing/editorial/curatorial experience. For example, a) you/your work has been published before (in a magazine, publication, anthology, etc.); b) you have edited/published someone else’s work before (in a magazine, publication, anthology, etc.); or c) you have curated an exhibit, show, anthology, etc. This requirement is intentionally loosely defined. The main requirement here is that you have some previous experience doing the type of work you would be doing as an EIC.
4 EICs: TSW will select 4 EICs, who will each curate their own digital anthology of 6-8 voices on a topic of their own choosing (for ex., “On Work”). We recommend taking a look at our 2023 Community Anthologies to learn about our first cohort of EICs, as well as the anthologies they curated.
Timeline & Duties: EICs are selected and notified in April. The work begins in May and ends in November. TSW guides EICs through each step of the process: call curation, submissions, selection, editing, and publishing. EICs are required to attend a monthly meeting from May to November. Main duties include curating your 1-paragraph prompt, selecting your 6-8 writers/artists, editing your contributors’ work, and providing key anthology items, like an Editor’s Note. We will go over each phase in our info sessions in March.
Stipend: Each EIC will receive a $1,000 stipend, and each contributor they publish receives a $100 stipend. There is also an additional $250 stipend that an EIC could use to work with a featured artist (to produce featured images for each post). As such, the total budget for each anthology is around $1,850-2,050 ($1000 + $600-800 + $250).
Our recommendations: to submit the strongest application, we recommend a) going through our 2023 Community Anthologies, if you haven’t already; b) reading the Community Anthology section of our FAQ page; c) attend one of our three info sessions in March (see links at the top of the post); and d) spend time thinking about the issue that you want to curate (this is one primary ways for you to stand out as an applicant). Note: if/when selected, you will be able to change your topic, but we require that you let us know what you are currently interested in curating as a way to ensure we have a variety of curators and topics. Looking at our 2023 anthology calls should help you think about the type of issue you might want to curate. You can see a little glimpse into each one below:

TSW’s job is to give you — our 4 EICs — the tools, resources, and structure you need to curate the anthology you want to see in the world. In our monthly meetings, our Director of Programs Bretty Rawson will walk you through TSW’s blueprint for each phase of the work. Even though each EIC will be working on their own anthology, you will never be “working alone.” TSW is here to guide you through each step of the process, and your fellow EICs will also be there to support and buoy you. In particular, TSW is here to make sure that your anthologies look exactly as you had hoped: once your pieces are done being edited, we will work with you to stage your posts on our site, and TSW then designs suites of graphics for each anthology.

What did some of our past EICs and contributors have to say about their experience in our 2023 Community Anthologies program?

“Being an EIC with TSW’s Community Anthologies program was hands-down one of the most rewarding experiences of the last decade for me. In addition to the program itself being suffused with so much care, thoughtfulness, and support, EICs are given the tools and opportunity to pay it all forward in a series of nurturing collaborations with their contributors.” — Briana Gwin, 2023 EIC, On Permanence
“There are a lot of literary magazines in the world; what sets TSW apart is the way they run. From submission to editing to publication to promotion, everyone I worked with at TSW kept things clear and well-organized, and made me feel truly valued and appreciated as a contributor.” — Jade Wallace, 2023 Contributor, On Work
“The EIC program, like everything TSW does, was a collaborative effort of deep care and thoughtfulness. I felt supported throughout, while also being given the freedom to see my vision through. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with passionate and meticulous people who are committed to an expansive vision of what’s possible in publishing.” — Patrycja Humienik, 2023 EIC, On Rivers
“There is a different feeling to being published as part of a cohort, all writing toward the same theme. Whatever that feeling is — community, care, solidarity, grace — The Seventh Wave, in its gestures, is holding this space, a space where our words can not only sit side by side but as part of a shared vision.” — David Naimon, 2023 Contributor, On Rivers

We hope you find this information helpful, and that you’re interested in applying to be one of our next EICs. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at submit@seventhwavemag.com. We know it takes energy, time, and vulnerability to put your words and art out into the world, so we appreciate everyone who takes the time to submit an application for this program.

TSW launches Community Anthologies

The Seventh Wave Admin — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 15:00:02 +0000

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?

Bianca Ng

On Tending

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?

7 Days Ago

Patrycja Humienik

On Rivers

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.

10.04.2018

Sarah Madges

On Work

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.

5 Month Ago

Briana Gwin

On Permanence

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.

6 Month Ago

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.

Three of the four anthologies are open to the public for submissions. See our TSW Submittable Page to submit to On Work, On Permanence, and On Tending.

Welcome!

New to Seventh Wave? Learn about our new website, check out our org’s timeline and team, read our latest issue or past issues, visit our community bulletin, see what our staff are reading these days, and learn about our residencies, anthologies, and how to support us.

Upcoming

JUNE | Launch of Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting
JUNE | Community Anthologies open for submissions through July 17
JULY | Digital Residency applications open for Fall 2024

From the Vault

Related to Rhythm: Three Poems

Tomorrow Will be Even Brighter

Mapping Relationships with the Physical World

Introducing The Seventh Wave’s new website

The Seventh Wave Admin — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 15:00:30 +0000

The Seventh Wave's brand new home was seven years in the making.

We are thrilled to launch our new website, which is very much a homecoming for The Seventh Wave. As a digital community of now 250+ artists, writers, and activists from around the world, this website was a long time coming, and was built to function as a digital hub and platform for our community of writers, readers, and deep-thinkers; a place of exchange, art, and rest. Regardless of how long you’ve been with us, we want to walk you through our new site, and talk about some of the exciting things we’ve built for our past, current, and future community.

“Start here” bookmark. When you first land on our website, you’ll notice a little orange “Start here” ribbon in the top left corner that resembles a bookmark. This “Start here” sidebar will offer a variety of actions for you to take: you can dive into our latest issue, see our upcoming opportunities and deadlines, or dive randomly into our archive of pieces, issues, and interviews. You’ll also see a few links to resources that will help you learn more about us, what we do, and how you can join our community.
A true landing page for our publication, issues, and voices. Everything we do revolves around our digital magazine, even our residencies (you have to be published in our magazine to be eligible to apply for our in-person residencies). It was essential to us that we build a home that showcases the depth of voice, variety of form and perspectives, and personality of the people and pieces we publish. Whereas on our old site, our issues were essentially category landing pages (for those who know CMS) with limited ability to enhance the user experience, with our new site, we’ve built out a true landing page for our publication, offering up words about our editorial process, allowing you to search by contributor name, displaying all of our issues on one page, and giving you insight into the heart of each call.
A reading experience that is as calm as it is connective. Each of our magazine issues is tied to a single social issue, like “Dangerous Bodies” or “You Are Politics,” but we also like to think of our issues as social in and of themselves. We want them to engage with writers, artists, and readers of today, while adding to the conversations of yesterday. While each issue revolves around a different topic — “Perception Gaps,” “Labels,” “Who Gets to Belong,” etc. — they’re all deeply interconnected. We wanted you to be able to experience multiple issues in the same way that you can experience multiple pieces within an issue. So whenever you click into an issue, like “Proximities,” you’ll be able to read the call for submissions and see all the pieces in that issue. And when you click on any single piece, you’ll also see an “In This Issue” button appear on the left-hand side, allowing you to easily navigate between pieces.
A structure when you need it. While we want you to get lost in our work, we don’t want you to get lost on our site, so we have little guideposts, signs, and status bars to help you know where you are, how to get home, and where you could go next. For example, when you’re reading a longer prose piece, there is an orange progress bar at the top that lets you know how much of the piece you’ve read; as you scroll on a page or post, a little circle will appear on the bottom right side of the page. If you click that, it’ll take you back to the top; there are also buttons within posts that take you back out to the main landing pages.
Giving poems the space they deserve. Publishing poems is tricky. It’s like trying to capture breath: how do we showcase the space between words, images, and ideas? So much of the poetry we publish is experimental in nature or form, and so we wanted to find a way to honor the experience of every poem. Our art director and web designer, Meg Sykes, found a solution we’re really thrilled with — when you land on a piece with multiple poems, each poem has its own “page” that you can flip to, allowing you to fully digest each poem before going to the next. We also utilize this function for prose pieces that are especially long, allowing a reader to experience that content as if it were in a book or on a tablet.
Two new platforms for voice. Our old website did what we needed it to do — elevate the voices in our magazine — and it did it well. But with limited space in our magazine and limited bandwidth as a primarily volunteer-run organization, we always wondered: is there a way to publish more voices outside of our magazine? As we built this new website, we did so with this question in mind, and so we are thrilled to launch, alongside the website, our Community Anthologies program and our Well-Crafted column. Our Community Anthologies program brings together four editors-in-chief who work in a cohort together while curating their own mini-issue, showcasing seven individuals on a single themed topic. This allows us to publish 28 more people per year, nearly doubling the number of folks we get to elevate. And you’ll find our Well-Crafted column on our new community bulletin, which is meant to take you behind-the-scenes at TSW, showcasing people, process, and culture. We’re distilling our seven years of publishing into tips and tricks, as well as prompts and inspirations, to help you keep beginning.
Innovating our interviews and one-time talks. We’ve taken the interviews we’ve done over the past seven years and turned them into more digestible experiences for readers. These interviews are riddled with words of wisdom and continue to inspire us today. This year, we’ll be opening our interview column up to past contributors, staff, and digital residents, allowing you to conduct interviews with writers, artists, and thinkers of your choosing — and we’ll pay you to do so. And, starting this fall, we’re making our One-Time Talks, which launched in winter 2021, more accessible to the community, with each seat available for $50 to the public.
The future is #TSWIRL. Our hashtag is #TSWIRL, which means The Seventh Wave (TSW) in real life (IRL), as we are all about offline and online conversations. In 2024, we will be building out a #TSWIRL Club digital hub for those who want to either a) be a part of our community or b) support our community. It will be a subscription-based membership — $7 a month or $70 per year, if you pay in advance — and this will give you full access to seven years’ worth of resources, prompts, and opportunities. Whenever we open up our One-Time Talks, you’ll be the first to know, and receive discounts to attend. You’ll also get access to exclusive interviews — if you can’t afford to join a one-time talk, we’ll be making them available to our #TSWIRL members to read for free. Our goal here is accessibility, transparency, and community. All at the price of two coffees per month (or one, depending on where you live). It’s our hope that this hub will keep you connected to our community and provide resources for your own creative process.
A shy tiger named Meg Sykes. All of this is possible because of our art director, Meg Sykes, who goes by @shytigers on Instagram. As a web designer, she naturally exists behind the screens, but her impact is felt and seen by anyone who comes through our magazine. We want to extend the deepest gratitude to her for building us such a possible home, and we cannot wait to see what we all continue to become together. We’ll be sharing more from, and about, Meg in our Well-Crafted column in the coming weeks and months.