About Place Journal‘s May 2026 issue, The Ground Beneath Us: Place, Power, and Resistance, is a bold and unflinching issue that centers place as a living force shaped by history, marked by power, and sustained through resistance. In a political moment defined by state violence, environmental crisis, and struggles over bodily autonomy, this collection refuses neutrality. Instead, it asks what it means to belong, to remember, and to fight for the ground beneath us.

Bringing together poetry, essays, fiction, hybrid work, and visual art, the issue moves across landscapes both physical and imagined. Here, land is not backdrop but witness: to displacement and diaspora, to gentrification and ecological grief, to sacred memory and communal care. Each piece contributes to a larger tapestry that maps not only geography, but survival, resilience, and transformation.

About Place Journal‘s latest issue, “On Freedom,” features poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, visual art, video, and hybrid works that question what freedom means in our turbulent world. The pieces in this issue explore freedom’s dual nature: liberation from oppression and the power to create, speak, and flourish. Authors and artists also speak to the small habits that sustain our daily capacity for liberty. Through formal innovation and boundary-crossing creativity, our contributors show how art itself is an act of freedom as they map territories of intimate personal moments and bold political landscapes.

“Careful/Care-full Collaboration,” the May 2025 issue of About Place Journal, is now available for readers to enjoy open-access online in addition to the publication’s full archive.

“Creative collaboration,” write the editors, “is an opportunity to summon and practice ways of being in the world that honor multiplicity, reciprocity, reflection, and, foremost, care. Challenging myths of exceptional individualism as constructed within colonial and capitalist contexts, collaboration arises as a method of and commitment to seeding and nurturing webs of knowledge, histories, practices, and relationships with each other and the places that are sacred to us. Guided by these understandings, the most recent issue of About Place Journal contemplates what it means to entangle in co-creative practices and processes that are both careful and full of care.”

About Place is a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute, dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society.

About Place Journal October 2024 issue is titled, Shaping Destiny: Election Season, Before, During and After, with contents that respond to the realities of the most important election of our times. Democracy or dictatorship: these are the stakes. Through poetry, prose, and graphics, Shaping Destiny explores the current national and international situation, focusing on ways in which social and environmental justice are created or destroyed, and relating these—as is the focus of the Black Earth Institute—to matters of the spirit. Many rights have been lost or are threatened, as is the integrity of the election. It is our hope that Shaping Destiny will inspire you to do the work that is in front of all of us.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Maybe now, in this time when the myth of human exceptionalism has proven illusory, we will listen to intelligences other than our own, to kin. To get there, we may all need a new language to help us honor and be open to the beings who will teach us.” . . . In this issue of About Place, co-editors Nickole Brown and Erin Coughlin Hollowell gather work galvanized by this challenge. The result is an extraordinary chorus of writers and artists, each attempting to decenter our human story to speak not just about plants and animals but for them, bringing awareness to life beyond our human realm. Cover art by Rebecca Clark.

About Place Journal is published by the Black Earth Institute with each issue having a specific theme and edited by one of their BEI Fellows. The July 2023 issue is themed ‘On Rivers.’ Rivers are deep sources of connection and memory, holding very different meanings for different communities, and this issue seeks to honor the many types of relationships we have with rivers. Coeditors Teresa Dzieglewicz and Laura-Gray Street, with consulting editors Lucien Darjeun Meadows and Irene Vázquez, have curated a wide range of prose, poetry, visual art, and hybrid and multi-modal work, creating a collective view on rivers that is expansive and surprising.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!