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her projects given our new political reality: Muslim women are leading global liberation efforts, the United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan, and most recently, has staunchly supported the Israeli army’s full-scale assault on Gaza.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-lined 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. 

By Saúl Hernández

I lick every drop of sperm off a white man"s navel, / put my lips on his shaft, / his hand grips the back of my neck, / I open my mouth to swallow again, / Tell me something in Spanish. / Sound of my slob in the air, / Tell me something / in Spanish, Tell me / something in Spanish, / Tell me something / in Spanish. /That’s how English asphyxiates me.

By Aura Christi, translated by Gabi Reigh

There’s nothing to be done.
The sun swallows the room where I write -
The pleasant tomb of before, tomorrow, after.
A white vulture splits the window
And its wax shadow tips
The whole house skywards.

New work from Brooklyn-based painter Clara Curbera.

By Alex Wexelman

In 1982, Eavan Boland wrote an essay titled “On Religion and Poetry” for The Furrow, a monthly journal for the contemporary Church. Eleven years later, The Columbia Journal reprinted the tract in its No. 18/19 issue.

By Madeleine Voge

I was never chosen to be the naptime fairy, the one who tiptoed around the classroom and waved a wand with bells on the end of it because instead of curling up and closing my eager eyes, I stacked blocks and whispered with Brooks, the boy with long eyelashes who was allergic to bees.