Founded in 2012, The Margins is an award-winning digital magazine of literature, arts, and ideas published by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW). The Margins draws upon a commitment to social justice to imagine a vibrant, nuanced, multiracial, and transnational Asian America.
We feature original poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, critical essays, reportage, translations, interviews, and experimental and hybrid-genre work.
The Margins is home to several special initiatives and regular features, many of which speak to our commitments as a magazine:
- Open City tells stories of Asian immigrant and Muslim communities across New York City, stories that rarely find their way into the mainstream media. In 2023, the project will expand to cover the tri-state area. A majority of Open City stories are written by AAWW’s Open City Fellows.
- The Transpacific Literary Project holds a space for writing and translation from across Asia and its diasporas, with an aim to reorient reader relationships to languages and literatures.
- Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities is a collaboration between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective that explores feminist histories, practices, and frameworks on care, community, and survival.
- A World Without Cages imagines the end of mass incarceration and migrant detention by bringing together the work of writers on the inside and on the outside. The project extended from 2018-2021.
- Poetry Tuesday highlights poems by emerging and established Asian and Asian diasporic poets with a mission to celebrate the personal and the political. Poems are published weekly.
- Flash Fiction features flash stories by emerging and established Asian and Asian diasporic writers, creating a dedicated space for fiction that was never meant to be any longer than one thousand words. Flash stories are published fortnightly.
Starting in 2017, The Margins began publishing collections of writing curated around a theme, first as part of our special projects, and gradually across the magazine. In 2020, we began calling these collections “notebooks.” Notebooks have been shaped by guest editors, including former AAWW fellows, as well as editors on our staff.
Alongside AAWW’s thirtieth anniversary, The Margins is launching a new print annual, collecting some of our editors’ favorite pieces published in the magazine the previous year. Pre-order your copy of The Margins: Best of 2021.
The Margins believes that writers and artists deserve to be compensated for their work. Find our current rates for writers here.
The Margins regularly seeks pitches and submissions for our running series and projects. Current open submissions:
We’re celebrating ten years of publishing Asian and Asian American writers in The Margins! Our team dove into the archive to share excellent poems, essays, short fiction, interviews, and more, across ten themes. Explore The Margins here.
The Margins is shaped by a brilliant and mighty team of editors. Find our masthead below.
Masthead
PUBLISHER
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Dana Isokawa
SENIOR EDITOR, OPEN CITY
Noel Pangilinan
SENIOR EDITOR, TRANSLATION
Soleil Davíd
POETRY EDITOR
Emily Jungmin Yoon
ASSISTANT POETRY EDITOR
Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس
FLASH FICTION EDITOR
Swati Khurana
ASSISTANT FLASH FICTION EDITOR
Yi Wei
CRITICISM EDITOR
Spencer Quong
EDITORS, BLACK AND ASIAN FEMINIST SOLIDARITIES
Salonee Bhaman
Julie Ae Kim
Rachel Kuo
Senti Sojwal
Jaimee A. Swift
Tiffany Diane Tso
ART DIRECTOR
Devyn Mañibo
Members of the AAWW staff are represented by the AAWW Union, founded in 2018, and affiliated with the Technical, Office, and Professional (TOP) Union, Local 2110 UAW, AFL-CIO.
