Fourteen years ago, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop launched The Margins as a space for Asian intellectual culture. Inspired by the margins—the margins of a book, the margins of a map, and minority culture—the magazine was to call on a countercultural vision for Asian American literature and politics.

The Margins has undergone many transformations from our first post in 2012—a short blog-like entry on Japanese magazines about stationery—to our more recent slate of original and translated poetry, flash fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and more. As the magazine evolved, its work shaped by the thousands of writers we have published and a team of dedicated editors both past and present, some editorial and political commitments surfaced: We would report the stories of immigrant and Muslim communities, particularly in New York City where AAWW was founded and is based. We would curate Asian diasporic literature in translation. We would imagine the possibilities of abolition and solidarity. And we would both publish and critically engage with literary work of many styles and sensibilities. Fourteen years since our inception, The Margins is still guided by these ideas and chronicling what a transnational, multiracial Asian America looks like in 2026.

This summer, we are proud to present the latest reincarnation of The Margins with its inaugural issue and a refreshed website. In shifting our publication model from weekly posts to biannual online issues, we hope to gather writers’ work together in the spirit of AAWW’s origins—when our founders met with other Asian American writers at a diner in New York City’s East Village to workshop each other’s writing. We hope that feeling of sitting around a table, that tone of conviviality and lively artistic conversation, permeates this issue.

As part of bringing the AAWW community to the page, the issue features work by our class of 2025 fellows: a folio of poetry and fiction by our Margins fellows Jun Chou, Swati Sudarsan, and Jess X. Snow, as well as reportage by our Open City fellow Saliha Bayrak. The Summer 2026 pieces also include new nonfiction and criticism, as well as a selection of poems—in language both plainspoken and elliptical, ferocious and quiet—from writers all over the world, including Canada, China, India, Palestine, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

A sense of possibility, despite hardship and darkness, threads through much of the issue—whether it be the possibility that you might grow the food of your childhood in your own garden, or finally return home after a brutal civil war, or connect to a stranger through your loneliness, or unshackle yourself from tired narratives, or make genre-defying and daring art. We hope the issue offers you a cool summer respite and that you enjoy sitting with its many shades of language and feeling. We hope it helps you find your own sense of possibility.