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 within and beyond New York City, stories that rarely find their way into the mainstream media.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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:
- Send us pitches and finished essays to our monthly column on language, culture, and translation from Asia
- Send us pitches and submissions of critical essays on Asian American literature, film, visual art, and culture.
- Send us pitches and submissions of reported pieces and essays for Open City, our journalism section devoted to chronicling the pulse of Asian America.
Masthead
PUBLISHER
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Dana Isokawa
MANAGING EDITOR
Allisen Hae Ji Lichtenstein
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
ADVISORY EDITORS, BLACK AND ASIAN FEMINIST SOLIDARITIES
Salonee Bhaman
Julie Ae Kim
Rachel Kuo
Senti Sojwal
Jaimee A. Swift
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.