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 to submissions of poetry by emerging and established Asian American and diasporic writers. We publish English-language poems and translations of poems. Starting in late 2026, we will publish poems in our online issues instead of our weekly column Poetry Tuesday.
We pay contributors $50 to $90 (USD) for original and translated poetry; the fee varies based on the number and length of poems we publish. We may offer additional payment to the author of translated poems, depending on the work’s publication status. We do not pay for reprints.
Please allow four to six months for a response. Submissions close 11:59 EST.
We are open to all styles, forms, and subjects. We’re drawn to poetry that:
- Transforms the mundane into the magical with unexpected imagery
- Reflects on personal and/or cultural history
- Responds to or reshapes the view on current events and issues
- Introduces or reimagines historical and literary figures
- Illuminates through translation the work of an Asian author who is not known or read (widely) by a general Anglophone audience
- Challenges, subverts, or expands formal, linguistic, and genre conventions
- Explores humorous, abject, or profane languages and/or themes
Guidelines:
- Submissions should be no longer than 5 pages total. Each poem must start on a new page. Though we do consider longer poems, we tend to select poems no longer than 3 pages.
- If you are submitting translations, please acquire translation and publication permission from the author and/or press prior to submission.
- Please use a standard serif (e.g., Constantia, Garamond, Times New Roman) or sans-serif font (e.g. Arial, Calibri) in font size no smaller than 12, unless there is a specific formal and visual reason to do otherwise.
- We prefer submissions in the .docx form but also accept PDFs.
- We allow simultaneous submissions. If a part of your submitted manuscript has been accepted elsewhere, please send a message with the unavailable title(s) on Submittable. If your entire manuscript becomes unavailable, please withdraw the submission.
- Most of our submissions are individual works. However, collaborative work will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
- We do not require any preliminary information in the cover letter, though you are welcome to include pertinent or necessary details about yourself or the submission. We will collect your updated bio upon acceptance. (Nice notes and hellos do not affect the decision, but we do appreciate them!)
- We accept previously published poems, as long as they have not appeared digitally in other venues. Please note any previously published works in your submission.