Guide to Literary Magazines
Santa Monica Review
Santa Monica College
1900 Pico Boulevard
Santa Monica ,CA 90405-1628
Phone: (310) 434-3597
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:
21.2, Fall 2009, edited by Andrew Tonkovich, includes work by award-winning novelist and short story writer Peter LaSalle (Strange Sunlight, The Graves of Famous Writers), filmmaker Steve De Jarnatt (“Miracle Mile”) and San Francisco diarist Matthew Crain. Also featured are stories by SMC writing students Dawna Kemper and Nina Dutkevitch, both veterans of Jim Krusoe’s popular long-running fiction-writing workshop at the college.
21.1, Spring 2009 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.