Dear Readers,
Today, with great excitement, Switchback Journal launches its new website. As Editor-in-Chief, I welcome you all to the new home for our magazine. Our previous site will hold all of our archives. Past publications can be found at www.swback.com.
We’re ecstatic to launch this new site with two visceral poems by Dane Hamann. In addition, we’re proud to announce that the winner of our 2018 Your Monster Contest is Eric Machan Howd’s poem, “Mycology.”
Here at the University of San Francisco, we’re starting our Fall semester with a bang. We have a fantastic line up of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that we cannot wait to share with you all. We will be publishing weekly every Friday starting on August 24th with “Mycology.” Our reading period will be open from September 15th through December 1st. We want your best work, your strangest work, your most honest work. Take a look at our submission guidelines and submit to us via Submittable.
Now, I’d like to take some time to introduce our new editors and thank the people that make Switchback possible. I will be on leave this academic year to research my next book, but Sayantika Mandal will serve as our interim Editor-in-Chief. I’m also excited to introduce Rachael Moore who will be our Fiction Editor while Sayantika takes the helm of the magazine.
Switchback would not be possible without the guidance of our wonderful advisor Bich (Beth) Minh Nguyen. We also owe a big thank you to our administrative director, Micah Ballard, and our program assistant, Kimberly Garrett.
This last school year has been an exciting time as, for the first time, all of our editors of the magazine are women, with a majority being women of color. This year, we look forward to publishing work that expands the representation of underrepresented voices.
As a whole, what we publish can be summarized with something
Nietzsche once wrote: “Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood.” Sylvia Plath also referred to this ineffable quality of brilliant writing as “the blood jet.” The Switchback editorial team looks forward to reading everything you’ve written with blood.
— Kat Lewis
Editor-in-Chief
August 2018
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