Best of Devilfish Review

Year 5 of publishing Devilfish Review did not go the way we pictured. (I’m not sure that any aspect of 2016 went the way anyone pictured.) We only put out a single issue, due to a lot of things, mostly personal, but in very large part monetary. We love that we pay our authors, even if it is a token payment. For most of 2016 this became something that was beyond our ability. We are looking into ways to avoid that for 2017 that don’t include just getting better paying jobs. Devilfish Review survived a year that saw the loss of bigger, better established journals and presses. We may be limping into the new year, but we’re still on our feet. That won’t change. We’re remaining closed to submissions while we look into low and no cost alternatives to Submittable. If you do have something in progress with us, submission wise, we should have that queue cleared by the end of January. There is an abundance of amazing work giving us some agonizing choices to make.

Speaking of agonizing choices, we decided to give ourselves some by putting out a Best Of issue. It has been five years, and in that time we’ve gained a lot of new readers who may have missed some of our favorite stories. It seemed like a good idea to do a best of/retrospective. Then we realized that we just wanted to put all five years in front of you again, and that is not actually how a best of works. Damn. Our poetry editors came together and worked out their picks, working their magic as always. Sarah and I have wildly different tastes on occasion, and so we both picked one story per year.

Let’s close the year out with some literature. Or maybe start the year with some tomorrow. Whenever you read this, we’re glad you’re reading it. Happy New Year!

Cathy’s Picks

Sarah’s Picks

Katie, Shannon and Minadora’s Picks

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