About Lunch Ticket

Editorial Statement

Shari Epstein, Rescue

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 We do not publish work that profits off someone else’s trauma, or work with perspectives based in hate—homophobia, misogyny, racism, or otherwise.