There’s a New Literary Journal for Queer Poets of Color

By Jamilah King Sep 15, 2014

There’s a new literary journal that’s looking for aspiring Gloria Anzaldúas, Cherríe Moragas, Essex Hemphills and Audre Lordes:

Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color is an intentional community space. Our mission is to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community. Through this journal, we are attempting to center the lives and experiences of QPOC in contemporary America. Thus, we view the journal (and our reading series) as part of a whole artistic project and not individual fragments of work. We believe that (here) the high lyric must encounter colloquial narrative. Here, we must provide space to celebrate both our similarities and our differences. We are one community with an array of experiences; we write in different formats, in different tones, of different circumstances. Nepantla is not the sort of journal that can project a singular voice (not if we want to reflect the various realities of our community). Nepantla is a journal of multiplicity, of continual reinvention. 

The new journal is supported by the Lambda Literary Foundation. You can read the inaugural issue here