Literary MagNet
The first essay Allen placed in a journal
was “Father Can You Hear Me,” a
meditation on absent fathers and
different kinds of love; it appeared
in the print biannual Harpur Palate
(harpurpalate.binghamton.edu). Edited
by students in the English department
at Binghamton University in New York,
Harpur Palate features poetry, fiction,
and nonfiction. “Our editors seek to find
the best-quality work and acknowledge that oftentimes the best
work falls under categories most literary journals won’t consider,
such as genre fiction and longer verse poems,” says departing
editor in chief Heather Humphrey, who will be succeeded
by current fiction editor Kelly Neal. The editors are currently
working on increasing the journal’s web
and social media presence; submissions
in all genres will open in September. uu “I
like the way it brings together an anthology
of fiction and blends it with splashes of
photography, poetry, and essays to make
its theme come to life,” says Allen about
Hair Trigger (ht20.colum.edu), an online
quarterly edited at Columbia College
Chicago, where Allen was enrolled in the
undergraduate creative writing program
and graduated in 2017. Dedicated to publishing work that is
“reflective of the diversity of contemporary fiction,” the journal
also publishes some poetry and nonfiction, including “Full
Service,” Allen’s essay about her experience flying to Chicago and
being questioned at airport security. (“I am exhausted entirely
by the subject of my skin causing people of my flesh to deal
with unnecessary roughness,” she writes.)
The quarterly primarily publishes work by
Columbia students, but the editors devote
one issue each year to work by nonstudents;
submissions in all genres open in July via
Submittable. uu Throughout her book,
Allen considers what people—friends,
parents, classmates, strangers—are often
unwilling or unable to acknowledge. In
“The Cheapest Casket,” she writes of herrelationship with her mother: “We can talk
about her dying or me dying but we cannot
talk about the lives we are living.” Allen
placed the essay in Habitat (habitatlitmag
.com), an annual journal of poetry, fiction,
and nonfiction, in 2016. “Habitat is a place
that really cares about artists’ integrity and
pushing rising voices,” says Allen, who
also contributed to the magazine’s blog
for two years. Established in 2015 by poet
Josh Corson, the online publication is currently on hiatus; back
issues can be read on the website. uu “We love the hell out of
the cross-genre scientists, the visual inventors, plucky linguists,
non-narrative narrators, and especially the experimental weird
babies,” write the editors of the quarterly journal Five:2:One
(five2onemagazine.com). Allen clearly falls within that group,
because after she had received multiple rejections of her poem
“Mama Said on Motherhood” from other magazines, Five:2:One
published it in 2017. It was her first poetry publication. She
discovered the journal, which is dedicated to “the transgressive,
the progressive, and the experimental,” only after she started doing
“proper research,” skimming magazines and paying attention to
their aesthetic and goals. “Whenever I submit somewhere, I ask
myself if my work is for their particular audience, and are they
the type of publication that would be willing to take a risk if it’s
not,” she says. “Now that I understand those politics a little bit
better, I try to pitch and submit to places that pay and decide
what work I’m willing to sacrifice for no pay at all.” uu One journal
that does pay is Frontier Poetry (frontierpoetry.com), in which
Allen placed her poem “Your Name Was Supposed to Be Africa.”
The online publication features new poems every week and pays
$50 per poem (up to $150 for three poems) by poets who have
not published more than one full-length
collection of poetry. The editors also seek
to promote work by marginalized writers.
“We take our role as gatekeeper between
poet and world extremely seriously and wish
to use our platform as fairly and justly as
we can,” they write on the journal website.
Recent contributors include Isabel Acevedo,
Leila Chatti, and Carlina Duan. Submissions
are open year-round. –DANA ISOKAWAIn her debut essay collection, When You Learn the Alphabet (University of Iowa
Press, April), Kendra Allen blends personal anecdote and cultural commentary in poems and short essays
that address race, gender, and family. “I just really want readers to leave this book seeing Black women
of all intersections as human,” says Allen, “and to feel equal parts harm and healing.” Kiese Laymon,
who selected the book as winner of the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, praises it as “a roaring
meditation on what Black daughters in our nation do with what and how they’ve been taught.” Allen has
also published work in Brevity, the Rumpus, december, and the five journals below.19 POETS & WRITERScarla lee