“Social Distancing,” by Stanley Siegel, was named runner up of the Columbia Journal‘s Special Issue on Loneliness.”

“Feeding the Birds,” by Margaret Hetherman, is the winner of the Columbia Journal‘s Special Issue on Loneliness in the art category.

“I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest.” —Ralph Ellison. We understand art-making as a kind of uprising—an uprising of spirit, an uprising against limits, an uprising of new ways to think about and perceive the world around us. How do we imagine the polity in our art, to paraphrase Robert Hass, and how does that energize our politics?

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners for our Special Issue on Loneliness. In selecting finalists, our dedicated Reading Board worked closely with Shir Kehila, online nonfiction editor; Sylvia Gindick, online poetry editor; Victoria Rucinski, online fiction editor, and Eiliza Callahan, art editor.

Embrace reduced visitor capacities as a temporary reality for art museums

We grow up thinking love is effortless, or at least I did – that you find someone, you just “know,” and then you trail off towards a sunset that is the rest of your life. We see it in movies, in perfectly arced stories with happy endings, but out here, in the real world, love is rarely a straight shot to paradise. In fact, what is most ironic about the Happy Ending trope is how the story cuts off before we see the bumpy, nauseating cycle of push and pull that so often exists after two people have decided they love each other.

The global conversation around data privacy and the surveillance state has exploded in the past three years – keeping pace with dramatic developments in current facial recognition technologies. But in her recent novel, Little Eyes, triple Booker nominee Samanta Schweblin moves away from state-level conversations, instead examining our complicated relationship with surveillance on a personal level. Set in the very near future, she presents an opt-in surveillance community where little eyes are not only watching you, you’re fully aware and pay $279 for them to do so. Welcome to the latest global fad: the kentuki.

Anne Enright’s latest novel Actress begins with a question: “What was she like?”. The she in question is Katherine O’Dell, famous actress of the stage and screen, an Irish icon and, most importantly, the mother of our narrator, Norah. It’s a question that sounds simple and it’s one that Norah is asked frequently enough to anticipate its patterns: she knows that whoever is asking will search her face for resemblances with “a growing wonder, as though recognizing an old flame after many years”. She knows that sometimes they want to know what Katherine was like as a mother, or as a “normal person […] in her slippers, eating toast and marmalade”. And she knows that usually they are asking what Katherine was like before her infamous mental breakdown, “as if their own mother might turn overnight, like a bottle of milk left out of the fridge”. But this deceptively simple question continually haunts the novel: what was she like? Not who was she, really? Or, what did you think of her? But what was she like? The phrasing here is important because Enright is, from the very offset of her novel, insinuating that we are remarkably satisfied with just that: what things are “like”, how things seem. And by doing that, she is setting us up for the questions that inevitably follow: if this is just how things seem, then when will we know how they really are?

UPDATE: Submissions for this special issue are now closed. We look forward to reaching out to our winners in the near future. Keep checking our site for upcoming special issue and contest submission opportunities (and for daily content, of course), or submit for regular publication at any time to our open categories, which are updated in the Submit section at the top right of our homepage or viewable in our Submittable portal.

Constructs of American Violence consists of nine small paintings, which are details of a Civil War monument and a Civil War era cannon that reside outside the city courthouse in Traverse City, Michigan. A common sight in many towns large and small in the United States, these paintings are an investigation of the scarred and weathered surfaces (physical and cerebral) of these very American constructs to violence.

Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by Christian iconography, especially the statues of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the saints, and especially with images of the cross. I attended a Catholic school from first grade through my sophomore year in high school, and consequently my classmates and I went to mass in the adjacent church several times a week, on top of going on Sundays with our families. Because I was an altar boy, I sometimes went to church every day of the week, as I was often called upon to serve on Saturdays, at weddings, and at funerals. Occasionally, I served two or three masses in a single day.

Anne-Flore arrived early one dawn as the inescapable proof of the mercy of God. She was born in October 2019 during the height of what came to be known in Haiti as peyilok, a country-wide lockdown stretching over a period of about three months that was radical and revolutionary, but also violent, disorganized and ultimately trying for all parties involved. The early morning of Anne-Flore’s birth was similar to many others during that period. It followed a long, tension-filled night, the darkness of which was broken by barricade fires, and the light of rubber tires aflame. Whirling smoke suffocated the moon and the stars.

I was introduced to Paola Antonelli— the Senior Curator of Architecture & Design from the Museum of Modern Art—at her lecture at the Lenfest Center for the Arts in October 2019, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival. I didn’t know how it would feel to have the Senior Curator of Architecture & Design from the Museum of Modern Art stand in front of a decent, 140 or so person crowd and tell me that our extinction was imminent. I knew it to be true already, I learned it in high school in World History: Empires Fall. But I never had anyone say it right to my face. It felt like this:

An interview with Ruth Madievsky, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest poetry judge. Conducted by Matthew Dix, print poetry editor.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our inaugural Black History Month Special Issue, in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. We want to thank everyone who submitted for creating art and sharing their work with us, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. All winners and runner-ups will be published on Wednesday, February 19th, or shortly thereafter.

At the Columbia Journal, we believe in creating space for and celebrating traditionally underrepresented voices. We seek out and support marginalized writers year-round, but this March marks our first ever Womxn’s History Month special issue. Our website will feature writing and creative expressions from artists reflecting the diversity of non-men, non-binary folx, women, and all those of marginalized genders. We are particularly interested in work related to the intersectionality of gender and other identities, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration, age, sex, sexual and/or romantic orientation, class, and more.

Your memories of the museum are from your college years: visits and winter work terms when you come from Vermont and stay with the Siegels, your parents’ best friends. You feel valued, part of a family again, especially as a young woman among their three sons, always one of them in the midst of some sixties rebellion. The museum is a favorite destination. You head first to the top floor rotunda around the dome where most of the Monets are hung. There you can stand close to the paintings, examining the brush strokes, the mix of colors. But you can’t step back to see how they compose an object; you’d be in midair, three stories up. Somehow this delights you.

What do you want people to say at your funeral?
From the comfort of the casket, would you prefer a weeping violin or a cheerful trumpet? And what about the reception—still or champagne? Waterworks or fireworks?

An interview with Ottessa Moshfegh, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest fiction judge. Conducted by Elliot Alpern, print fiction editor.

An interview with Ada Calhoun, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest nonfiction judge. Conducted by Rachel Keranen, print nonfiction editor.