About Us

Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow.
Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow.
A Letter from the Editor
Bard College’s literary journal Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For some four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous quality. We are committed to launching and supporting the careers of unknown authors—William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Karen Russell, Isabella Hammad, and Raven Leilani all had some of their very first publications in Conjunctions—while providing a space for better-known voices—like John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, William H. Gass, Sigrid Nunez, or Joyce Carol Oates—to work outside audience expectations.

The biannual anthology of new writing appears every spring and fall in print and e-book editions, and generally collects pieces that form a conversation around a central theme—new-wave fabulism, Caribbean writing, sanctuary, desire, climate change, and so on. Because these volumes are book-length, we’re able to publish long-form work, which other journals often cannot accommodate.

The free weekly online journal showcases the work of a single writer each week. It gives us a place to publish the exceptional work that doesn’t fit into the theme of a given anthology. Our website also features a multimedia vault of recorded readings, unavailable elsewhere; as well as full-text selections from the anthologies, and a constantly updated table of contents for the issue we’re putting together.

Published by Bard College, with editorial offices in New York City and Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Conjunctions is a cornerstone of contemporary literary publishing. Since 1981, the journal has been a living notebook in which authors can write freely and audiences read dangerously.

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In Print

Vol. 82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

April 24, 2024
The July morning was alive with a sound in the air, strange communications, the acoustics of the big yard amplifying each rustle, each wave. Odd creatures glittering on the ground. Herds spread lavishly, a wilderness of transparent wings, bug eyes, a mosaic of glassy fragments. Glinting. They covered the grass, the sidewalk, covered the branches of the trees.
April 17, 2024
The sound reverberated in my sense of what was right and reliable in the world like drone weaponry, and what I wanted to ask was: what business have you left undone, and did you do a thing you so regretted that you can’t let go of it, was there a person you cut off, when sympathy would have been the better gesture, was there a person you trod on to get ahead in your sales job, speaking ill of them, so that they were forever harmed, did you say something awful about a friend in school, did you call a friend the worst of names in middle school, because it was a thing they said then, the boys did that, only to find, later on, that you loved that boy in a way . . . .
April 10, 2024
I do not like old water.

The water in the ocean is old

The lake is old

But maybe it’s not

Subject to the logic of time, of old and new.

Water.