Guide to Literary Magazines

Santa Monica Review

Santa Monica College

1900 Pico Boulevard

Santa Monica ,CA 90405-1628

Phone: (310) 434-3597

Web: www.smc.edu/sm_review/

Simultaneous submissions: yes Email submissions: no
Reading period: year-round Response time: 2 mos. Payment: copies and lifetime subscription Contests: no ISSN: 0899-9848 Founded: 1988 Issues per year: 2 Distributors: Armadillo, Ingram
Average pages: 200 Cover price: $7 Sample price (postpaid): $7 Subscription: $12

Publisher’s description: Santa Monica Review is sponsored by Santa Monica College. SMR features avant-garde, smart, funny, politically-engaged, language and character-driven literary fiction and nonfiction. In past years we included poetry and published an anthology, Absolute Disasters, with work by Aimee Bender, T.C. Boyle and Jervey Tervalon.

SMR features both first-time writers and established literary authors, focusing for twenty years on work by Southern California and Pacific Rim writers. Its current concentration on prose makes it a dense, exuberant, complex magazine which eschews trends, genres, television fiction and easy arcs in favor of experimentation, dreams of real life, and everyday wonder. SMR is not undergraduate writing. It is full of words; no photographs or artwork inside, just compelling and necessary writing to remind, provoke, teach, awe and engage serious readers.

Its editor proudly boosters work by California writers Diane Lefer, Gary Amdahl, Sharon Doubiago, Michelle Latiolais, Trinie Dalton, Benjamin Weissman, Greg Bills and James Brown, in addition to debuting new stories by SMR founding editor Jim Krusoe and recent discoveries Jonathan Cohen and Janice Shapiro. Fiction by contributor Steve De Jarnatt will appear in Best American Short Stories 2009.

Recent issues:
21.1, Spring 2009
The Spring 2009 issue includes work by California novelist Louis B. Jones (California's Over) and acclaimed LA short story writer Michael Jaime-Becerra (Every Night is Ladies' Night) as well as an essay by screenwriter Ellie Herman and stories from frequent contributors Alisa Slaughter, Dave Peters and novelist Michael Cadnum (The King's Arrow). West Coast writers and themes predominate, as in a story about the Rose Parade by first-time-in-print contributor Sean Howell.