Thin Air :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines
Thin Air
c/o NAU English Department
Box 6032
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
Phone: (928)523-6743
E-mail: editors[at]thinairamagzine[dot]com
Simultaneous submissions: yes Email submissions: no (use online submission manager or send hard copies) Reading period: ongoing, with response time slower in the summer Response time: 1-4 months Payment: contest winners, contibutor copies Contests: yes (see website) ISSN: 1099-0308 Founded: 1995 Issues per year: 1 Copy price: $10 Average pages: 100 Sample price (postpaid): $5-10
Publisher’s description: Thin Air is an annual gatherer of original, thoughtful voices of varying aesthetic and genre, especially from new authors. In each issue, editors attempt to garner an intriguing mix of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, and interviews. We seek to balance the raw, the playful, the deeply joyful and mournful, work that bends convention, work that capitalizes on tradition, the tightly woven, the dreamy, and all things delicate or extravagant. Given the journal’s location in Flagstaff, Arizona, a mountaintop land where different climates and cultures meet, editors have a special interest in work that explores the significance of “encounter”—people with people, body with space, human with self.
Past contributors include Pam Houston, Rick Bass, Matthew J. Spireng, Damon Falke, W. Todd Kaneko, Darrell Dela Cruz, Katherine Polak, Benjamin F. Bird, Josh Bettinger, Barry Benson, Jay Rubin, Matt Shumacher, Hoa Ngo, Sean Brendan-Brown, Tanya Chernov.
Recent issues:
The spring 2012 issue features work by Rich Ives, Elise Kaplan, Marjorie Maddox, Derek Palacio, William Greenway, Leslie Gottesman, Kirk Pinho, Paul Pekin, Tihomir Tikulin, Octavio Quintanilla, Danielle Shutt, R.T. Jamison, Jackie Bartley, David Dodd Lee, Benjamin Seanor, Eleanor Bennett, Meredith Devney, Zachary Asher Greenberg, William Greenway, Enerest Williamson III, Leslie Pietrzyk, Brandon Getz, Jannet Highfill, Andrea Janelle Dickens, Jennifer Krueger, Susana H. Case, K.A. McGowan, Duncan M. Hill, Michael S. Morris, and Tyler Heath.
This year, we at Thin Air thought about genre boundaries, conventions, why they exist, and how the academy speaks often of bending them to rearticulate parts of the world that exist outside/beyond them: poetry that reads like prose, fiction that reads real, and work that takes the term “meta” to a new level, circling around on itself in layered and complex ways. But why talk about the importance of blurred genre if it is not rewarded when people write it? For this year’s “Shades of Gray” issue (17, Winter 2011), we asked readers to send us their best work that blurs conventional category and show us just how many unique, uncoded ways there are to see the world. Genre-Blur Contest Winner: Andrea Lewis. Judge: Jeff Gundy