About The Margins

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.

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 recently celebrated 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.

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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

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.