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. 80
Ways of Water
Spring 2023
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

September 20, 2023
The Rachel stands tuned  
            to multiplicities, 
aslant in a territory of longing,
            where she becomes foreign.

            What has she found?
She listens, acknowledges another sound,
            diffuse, multiple,  
pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings,
            never only one.
September 13, 2023
I had yet to discover the source of that star, it came and it passed but from where it sprang and then fell to fading remained a mystery. In cycling its light lent its powers to coloring my tablecloth a lighter shade, relieving pigment from its duty to darken, except for those spots where I placed my bottles and cups, shielding only parts of the piece from fading, threads left closer to their original hues hewed to others abandoned as wraiths to their fates, a darker ring the mark of those who stayed behind.
September 6, 2023
Where the trees blackened, I saw,

Quickly, three deer lean into goldenness.

It seems, although wildfires rage

Out of control, this world remembers

Some portion of its first purposes:

Superfluous beauty