About Lunch Ticket
Editorial Statement
June 17, 2017
One side of our mission at Lunch Ticket is to publish writers and artists who have been marginalized and underrepresented, and work that engages with issues of social, economic, and environmental justice. The other side is to allow our volunteer editorial and production teams, staffed entirely by Antioch University MFA students and alumni, to engage with the greater literary community and gain professional experience working in the publishing industry. In that balance, we strive to build community and work toward a future with equity in publishing. This is a living statement, evolving as we do, and represents our effort to make this process transparent, as we endeavor to best embody our mission.
How we read submissions for our biannual issues:
What do we mean when we say we read nameless, and why? We ask our submitters to remove all identifying information from literary and art submissions, translator and artist statements. Our assistant genre editors review submissions without identifying information; they do not have access to cover letters or any other information provided by the submitter. They read nameless to learn to evaluate craft on the basis of the piece of writing or art alone. Since we understand the negative aspects of reading nameless, including—especially in an MFA environment—inherent bias toward mainstream literary language, only our assistant editors read nameless. Our genre editors read cover letters and additional information, and share details with their reading teams during discussion of submissions, once the readers have completed their initial read. In this way we balance the charge of training staff for realistic roles in publishing, where nameless reading is still widely practiced, with our intention to read conscientiously and to publish diverse work from writers whose perspectives are historically underrepresented.
When our editorial teams discuss submissions, they are empowered to seek out diverse voices: international voices; urban voices; rural voices; new voices; historically underrepresented or misrepresented voices. Our teams read for work that resists stereotype; work that interrogates; empathetic work; work that strives for a more just world. We do not publish work that profits off someone else’s trauma, or work with perspectives based in hate—homophobia, misogyny, racism, or otherwise.
Our Weekly Projects
- Friday Lunch! Weekly Blog is a series of essays written by the current Lunch Ticket blog team and our guests, published every Friday.
- Amuse-Bouche offers little bites each Monday to keep you satiated between issues.
- Amuse-Bouche: Spotlight is a regular series published every other Monday throughout the year, showcasing an individual writer or artist. We review literary submissions in all genres for Spotlight during January and July. Art is selected from submissions to the Visual Art category during the main Lunch Ticket review periods.
- Amuse-Bouche: Writers Read is an occasional series showcasing craft-based reviews of published works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and translation. This category is only open to submissions from Antioch University MFA students and alumni, on a rolling basis. We give preference to annotations of books that are on-mission.
- Amuse-Bouche: À La Carte is a curated occasional series featuring short pieces that engage with one aspect of our mission. This series highlights:
- Work by writers from underrepresented or historically misrepresented communities
- Writing that engages with issues of social, economic, and environmental justice
- Amuse-Bouche: Litdish is an occasional series of interviews with writers and artists in conversation with our staff about literature, art, social justice, and community activism.
A Word from the Editor
“Like the mutability of social strictures in my lost and new homelands, my work embraces ambiguity and uncertainty,” Tatiana Garmendia writes about her portfolio Migrations. Garmendia’s work “wrestles with conflicting moral intuitions, with the personal and the historic.” Whether the medium is writing, painting, or even dance, the creative mind is driven to tell our passions and histories through narratives.
Our stories can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell. In her essay “Alone in Company,” Chelsea Bayouth reflects on the role of an artist at the end of 2018: “For me, it is to fear that every word or image is a window into public, political, and social tumult. It means you have to be more vulnerable than you or anyone in times previous has ever been.” If we continue to write, to paint, to dance, to show up for ourselves and our art every day, we might find that our work transcends ambiguity and discomfort to reveal a greater insight into ourselves, and if we are lucky, into the world.
More from the Editor-in-Chief, Kori Kessler »
Mission Statement
Established in 2012, Lunch Ticket strives to balance cutting edge literary and visual art with conversations about social justice and community activism. We publish interviews, personal essays, and craft annotations alongside the best in creative nonfiction, fiction, flash prose, literary translation, poetry, visual art, and writing for young people by new, emerging, and established writers. …
Lunch Ticket Staff
Please visit the Winter/Spring 2018 Masthead to view the editorial staff for the issue that is currently live. (Additional Lunch Ticket staff members are in production for Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2018, which launches in June 2019.)
View the current Lunch Ticket Staff »
Contact Us
Drop us a line!
Submission Guidelines
- Main Issues are published in June and December, with reading periods from February 1 to April 30 and August 1 to October 31.
- We are proud to host two prizes in each of our main issues: the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction and The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. Both prizes are open for submissions in February and August.
- Our Amuse-Bouche: Spotlight series is published every other Monday throughout the year, showcasing an individual writer or artist. We accept literary submissions (all genres) during January and July; art submissions are reviewed during the main Lunch Ticket review periods.