Electric Literature's 2023 Spring Salon Series is presented by Mount Saint Mary's University.

All events are pay-what-you-want, and proceeds support Electric Literature, a 501c3 nonprofit with the mission to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive.

Book media loves to write a piece about a dead literary magazine. Living magazines, however, rarely attract the same prurient attention. Meanwhile, readers feel betrayed when beloved magazines with the same funding model (a single wealthy benefactor) continue to fail. But there are many literary magazines with alternative structures, young and old, online and in print, doing the work to stay alive in a culture that seems to like having them around, but celebrates them most fervently when they’re gone.

Electric Literature has assembled five independent magazines of significant literary influence that are forging their own paths. One Story is a 20-year-old print magazine with a devoted following that has never published the same writer twice. Taco Bell Quarterly was founded as a “reaction against everything” and is devoted to writing about Taco Bell. The Offing is volunteer run, and publishes work “that challenges, experiments, and provokes.” ZYZZYVA  began in 1985 to reflect the cultural values that make San Francisco a cultural beacon, and offers themed, print issues on a wide range of topics. And for the last fourteen years, Electric Literature has been using our platform to launch new writers in a way that is exciting and inclusive.

Leadership from each of these publications will have a candid conversation about how they stay afloat, the role of literary magazines in the cultural landscape, and their predictions for the future. Moderated by Halimah Marcus, executive director of Electric Literature. Their discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A.

Maribeth Batcha is the executive director and co-founder of One Story, a print literary magazine that sends one great short story each month to subscribers. Maribeth has worked in magazine publishing for over 30 years for titles including Lingua Franca, the New York Review of Books, Working Mother, The Progressive and Diabetes Self-Management. She has a BA from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.

M.M. Carrigan (they/them) is the editor-in-chief, of Taco Bell Quarterly, a literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters that was started as a joke in 2019, and evolved to be a reaction against everything, that seeks to demystify what it means to be literary, artistic, important, and elite.  M.M. Carrigan is a writer in the Baltimore area. Their essays examining pop culture have appeared in VICE, Bon Appetit, Eater, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and more. Their interviews have appeared in Vox, Eater, Salon, The Take-Out and more. You can follow them on Twitter @mmcarrigan.

Oscar Villalon is the editor of ZYZZYVA, an independent literary
magazine publishing from San Francisco since 1985. In 2019 ZYZZYVA
received the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Firecracker
Award for Best Magazine: General Excellence, and in 2022, ZYZZYVA was honored with the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, as well as the
Recognition Award from the Northern California Book Awards. Oscar
Villalon's work has been published in Freeman's, The Believer, VQR,
Stranger's Guide, and elsewhere. He lives with his family in San
Francisco.

Mimi Wong is editor-in-chief of The Offing, an online literary magazine publishing creative writing in all genres and art in all media. The Offing actively seeks out and supports work by and about those often marginalized in literary spaces. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland Magazine, The Margins, The Believer, Catapult, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and was anthologized in Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts (Paper Monument/n+1, 2021). For her writing on contemporary art by artists in the Asian diaspora, she was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She teaches writing at The New School and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Halimah Marcus is the executive director and fiction editor of Electric Literature, a nonprofit digital publisher making literature more exciting, relevant and inclusive. Electric Literature publishes over 500 writers per year, five days a week, to an audience of 3.5 million readers. Marcus is also the editor of Horse Girls (Harper Perennial, 2021), an anthology that reclaims and recasts the horse girl stereotype, which was a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” pick. Her short stories have appeared  in Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, One Story, BOMB, The Literary Reviewand elsewhere. Andrew Sean Greer selected her short story, “The Party Goers,” from the The Southampton Review as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2022. Halimah has an MFA from Brooklyn College, and lives in Kingston, New York.

Literary Magazines Are Dead, Long Live Literary Magazines