The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is a nonprofit dedicated to publishing and amplifying Asian diasporic literary culture. The Margins is our award-winning magazine of arts and ideas dedicated to charting the rise of the Asian American creative class through essays, interviews, and creative writing.
We publish: 1) original creative writing, including poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and interdisciplinary work; 2) essays on literature and politics by sophisticated thinkers who can speak to a general audience about race, gender, sexuality, immigration, postcolonialism, pop culture, and diaspora; 3) reportage about immigrant communities in the United States by narrative storytellers who can set a scene with rich imagery and descriptive detail.
Our stories have been linked to by the Wall Street Journal, the New Inquiry and the New York Times. Our contributors have included Jessica Hagedorn, Hanya Yanagihara, Chang-rae Lee, Bhanu Kapil, Ashok Kondabolu, Jenny Zhang, Katie Kitamura, Hua Hsu, Kim Hyesoon, Alexander Chee, Vijay Iyer, and Yoko Ogawa. See below for ways you can submit your work!
The Margins is open for creative nonfiction submissions, with a particular interest in lyric essays and pieces that incorporate historical and/or cultural analysis. We’re also interested in essays that play with genre, including zuihitsu, flash essays, and more.
Submission guidelines:
- All work must be previously unpublished.
- Submit either: a single piece of up to 3,500 words OR up to three flash essays of no more than 1,000 words each (please submit the pieces in a single document).
- We accept submissions in translation; please confirm you have secured the rights to translate the original piece before submitting.
- We accept simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if the work has been accepted elsewhere by messaging us through Submittable and indicating which pieces are no longer available.
- Pieces must be your original work, authored or written solely by you, and may not include material generated by AI.
- We welcome submissions from Asian and Asian diasporic writers, including those that identify as South, Southeast, East, North, and Central Asian; SWANA; Pacific Islander; and Indo-Caribbean.
We’re looking for pieces like:
- Nina Li Coomes’s essay on breastfeeding during a heatwave;
- Sarah Aziza’s lyric investigation into language and her family history in Palestine;
- Maddie Mori’s piece on wine;
- Daphne Palasi Andreades’s hybrid essay featuring Filipino nurses during the pandemic
- Tina Chang’s zuihitsu considering violence against Asian women.
We pay for all published pieces. Rates for writers are here.
Writers can expect to hear back on their submissions within four to six months.