Guernica is a magazine of art and ideas that author Howard Zinn called "an extraordinary bouquet of stories, poems, social commentary, and art." In its short time online, it has grown from one of the web's best-kept secrets to one of its most acclaimed new magazines.

2009: Guernica is called a "great online literary magazine" by Esquire.

Guernica contributors come from dozens of countries and write in nearly as many languages. They include acclaimed writers like Mark Dowie, Jonathan Steele, George Szirtes, Adonis, Victoria Redel, Norman Solomon, Julian Rios, Tom Engelhardt, Alimorad Fadie Nia and Shelley Jackson, as well as brilliant younger writers like Rivka Galchen, Mark Binelli, Monica Ferrell and Laura van den Berg. Guernica guest fiction editors include Sam Lipsyte, George Saunders, Francisco Goldman and Ben Marcus.

"Guernica, and its editors, respect the life of the mind with an intensity rarely seen these days." —George Saunders

But Guernica has launched brand new voices too. After the magazine published her first poem, poet Sandy Tseng wrote to say thanks, then told the editors offhand she'd won the "Discovery" Prize, awarded by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation magazine.



Guernica interviews have featured heads of state and Nobel Prize winners (Costa Rican President Oscar Arias ), lawmakers and cabinet members (Congressman John Conyers and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo) as well as writers, directors, critics, historians. Just a few of the personalities you'll find in Guernica interviews: Joan Didion, Samantha Power, Tony Kushner, Don DeLillo, Mia Farrow, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ha Jin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Russell Banks, Sally Potter, Eric Reeves, Ali Allawi, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Irshad Manji, Howard Zinn.



Awards

5/2009: EC Osondu is shortlisted for the Caine Prize for his Guernica story, "Waiting."


5/2009: Matthew Derby's short story "January in December" won a Dzanc Books Best of the Web 2009 award. The Best of the Web 2009 anthology will be available in July.

In July 2008, Okey Ndibe's essay "My Biafran Eyes" (August 2007) won an inaugural Best of the Web prize by indie pub powerhouse Dzanc books.

And Guernica poetry (namely, Rebecca Morgan Frank's "Rescue") was recently chosen for the Best New Poets award (2008). The Best New Poets 2008: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers anthology is available here.

Read more about Guernica in our press section below. And to help support us, keep reading, tell a friend about us, sign up for our newsletter, or make a donation here:

For submissions, or to contact the editors, go here. To meet our staff, go here. To subscribe to our free newsletter, go here.

Press

5/04/09: A Writer's Violent End, and His Activist Legacy
PEN, an international association of writers dedicated to defending free expression, along with Guernica, the online literary magazine, sponsored the panel with Mr. Patterson, Mr. Ndibe and Ken Wiwa, Mr. Saro-Wiwa's son, to discuss Mr. Saro-Wiwa's literary and political legacy. More>

1/22/09: Great Online Literary Magazines Online literary magazines have long been the sad step-sister of print. But in case you haven’t heard, print’s dying. Instead of wringing your hands over the future of publishing, you could accept that it’s arrived, and that it’s called the Internet. More>

11/28/08: Guernica editor Joel Whitney discusses the magazine's coverage of the presidential election.
Inside Government
"We've tried to find ways to poke holes in what seemed to be a lot of repetition of some silly ideas, such as John McCain talking about how terrifically the surge worked, or the news media talking about Obama's Reverend Wright problem." More>

4/30/08: Guernica nonfiction is hailed by Salon.com

"In that opening paragraph, with its extraordinarily evocative image of an Indian girl whose nose ring signifies a very special kind of outsider status, you can find grist for a thousand dissertations on postmodern identity and culture. But Akshay Ahuja's "Death Metal and the Indian Identity," published in the April issue of Guernica, never succumbs to the fatal flaw of over-analysis. It is simply closely observed, thoughtful and exquisitely written. More>

4/08: Guernica’s Crisis Darfur debut event at PEN is written up (twice) in NEW YORK MAGAZINE:


4/30/08: Bernard-Henri Lévy, Mia Farrow, and Some New Age Music Open the PEN World Voices Fest
At last night’s lecture at the French Institute Alliance Française (complete with both Perrier and Evian bottles for the guests), their methods of publicizing the crisis were markedly different: He was the head and she was the heart. More>


Guernica Editors Michael Archer and Joel Whitney with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Dinaw Mengestu and Mia Farrow at the Crisis Darfur event at PEN World Voices—a moment of levity before a grave discussion.

4/29/08: Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Lévy Decide to Issue Joint Darfur Demands, Over Lunch
Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Lévy just finished a late lunch at the Carlyle Hotel, where the Darfur activists discussed what they should talk about during their two-hour "Crisis Darfur" panel at the PEN World Voices Festival tonight. More>

[Listen to the whole program here. See the pictures here.]

10/22/07: Guernica Editors Michael Archer and Joel Whitney talk with Publishers Weekly
Guernica: Lit Mag Beats the Odds
Former M.F.A. students Joel Whitney and Michael Archer had no grand plan, much less a business plan, when they started the online-only lit mag Guernica. Compelled by a shared passion for international literature and serious journalism... More>

Guernica Poetry Editor Erica Wright on Cross-Cultural Poetics
10/14/07
Episode #148 Outernationale
Erica Wright, poetry editor for Guernica, discusses the online journal in the climate of a "fear of foreign-ness." With Peter Gizzi. More>

7/12/07: Editor Joel Whitney on Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW, with actor Charles Dumas and musician David Lester (Mecca Normal)
Art & Politics
Art is all about aesthetics. Except when it's not. Some art is also very political. Think Guernica. Think Vaclav Havel. What role do artists play when it comes to social criticism and commentary? More>
[Whitney joins discussion at 14:20]


Events

Guernica live programming has synched up with Amnesty International, the United Nations, Fordham University, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and in 2008 Guernica's Crisis Darfur was the opening event of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, filling the auditorium at the Alliance Française’s Flourence Gould Hall in New York City.