Paintings meditating on the ocean, ecology, and a vision for a better world.

By Avot Yeshurun, translated by Dan Alter

A day will come no-one reads my mother's letters.
A pile I have of them.
Not from a her
No word.

By Alex Wexelman

Roughly a decade after it became the predominant style in the art world, Minimalism—a pared down writing style influenced by the likes of Ernest Hemingway—became a popular trend in literature

By Maeve Barry

Stefan’s adopted mom told him I got into Showstoppers cause I’d have no problem wearing the skanky outfit. Stefan’s adopted mom told him this to make him feel better because he didn’t get in. He told me. I am eight and three quarters and I don't care.

By Rachael Greene

Everything you think you might do in a threatening situation melts away. This is it, I thought. Though my mind could not quite accept what it was. My hands raised of their own volition, pointlessly, to shield my more vulnerable parts, and my mouth uttered, like an invocation, the name of the only person who could hear me.

By Fran Matos

The skeleton in my neighbor's front yard
holds a sign that reads “come closer for a spell”
but I’m not looking for signs anymore.

By Kerry Kurdziel

The surcharge for being alive
has risen again. The bells won’t stop
weeping. We keep sinking
each other and calling it
tragedy -

The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2024 Online Contest will accept submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation from February 21 through March 20, 2024.

By Alex Wexelman

The short story, like many of Friedman’s, concerns a working-class Jewish family and the intra-family struggles for success and financial freedom in America.

By Kaci X. Tavares

It’s been too long since I’ve tried to write my Chinese name 黃曉殿 Húang Xǐaodìan. Muscle memory—barely. In Chinese, your family name comes first, the unit identified before the individual. My family: orphaned sisters who borrow a benefactor’s name. Me: Daybreak over a Palace. I cannot find the palace—

The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2024 Online Contest will accept submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation from February 21 through March 6, 2024.

By Salvador Espiru, translated by Andrew Kaufman and Antonio Cortijo Ocana

After, when it had already
caused me much harm and
I could do almost nothing but smile,
I chose the simplest
words, to tell myself

By Mariam Syed

For the past few weeks, I’ve interviewed Lila Abu-Lughod to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of her essay and the tenth anniversary of her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?. We discussed the ongoing and heightened significance of her projects given our new political reality: Muslim women are leading global liberation efforts, the United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan, and most recently, has staunchly supported the Israeli army’s full-scale assault on Gaza. This interview was conducted over email.

By Mandira Pattnaik

Let’s accept that your infobahn alias is a pariah, and let’s assume that you’ve begun to acknowledge three things: That ghosts haunt your computer, your internet, and everything that exists in a parallel non-physical plane. That ghosts are malleable, can take any form, just like social media profiles and bios. That ghosts aren’t bothered by your rules and/or miscellaneous conventions and laws of the land.

By Sergei Linkov

Sometimes, when my mother partook of vodka, she would become convinced that she was the illegitimate daughter of some nobleman. She spoke of his estate on the Neva river, where she recalled herself toddling along poplar-line alleys and hiding alder cones under the Roman columns of the gazebo.

By Liz von Klemperer

Aube Rey Lescure’s debut River East, River West is a searing social commentary that spans decades and perspectives.

Columbia Journal Issue 61 is available for purchase.

By Victor Barall

Now there is a gradual dying away, a diminution by degrees of the small talk among the great ones as the rumor diffuses through the stadium that the sovereign has been seen stepping out of his chamber, or if not the sovereign, then at least the large white feather that invariably accompanies him on the days he dons, at a rakishly oft-kilter angle, his black velvet beret.

By Jane Marchant

The taxi’s side mirror reflects the driver’s lit cigarette as he maneuvers through the night’s warm exhaust, dust, and sand. Yellow streetlights illuminate the concrete buildings and air conditioners flashing by. After checking into my hostel, I climb into a rickety bunk bed graffitied by past travelers. I am nervous. I am the only guest in the five-story building down a back alley off an alley somewhere in the haze of a city whose language I can neither read nor speak.

By Alex Wexelman

Rivera wrote on her official website, “Growing up, I was steeped in the oral tradition,” the inflection evident in her confident prosody.