January 30, 2022

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the fourteenth issue of Barzakh!

This is a special issue for us because it is the first “Winter” issue of the magazine. Until now, Barzakh has only published one issue a year, and as a graduate-student-run literary journal, this publication schedule made a lot of sense for us. SUNY Albany admits only one or two creative-writing students to its Ph.D. program per year, which limits the size of our editorial team. Plus, the editors at Barzakh work entirely on a volunteer basis, which is to say, they earn neither wages nor course credit for the incredible amount of work they do to put these issues together.

This goes to show that Barzakh really is a labor of love—our editorial team does this work purely out of a desire to amplify the voices of the artists and authors we publish. But it also underlines what an amazing expression of love it is to start publishing two issues a year. Switching to this publication schedule means that our editorial team has agreed to double the amount of work they are doing per year, and we don’t want this to go unacknowledged.

This issue doesn’t have an official theme, but as far as we’re concerned, its unofficial theme is “Teamwork.” It takes a team to put together an issue of Barzakh, and we, as Editors-in-Chief, could not be more proud of the work our editorial team has done to put our fourteenth issue together.

Luckily, publishing two issues a year doesn’t only mean twice as much work, it also means that we get to publish twice as much art, prose, and poetry as we once did. And we are very excited about the work that you’ll find in our digital pages.

As a journal with an “internationalist stance,” our mission is to publish the very best art and writing from around the globe, and we’re happy to report that our editorial team has really pulled through in this regard. On last count, the sixty-one artists and authors that have contributed work to this issue represent at least twenty-one countries across five continents. And as far as the quality of this art and writing is concerned, we genuinely believe that this is our best issue yet.

But it doesn’t just take an editorial team to put a literary journal together—it also takes contributors. A few of our past contributors were recently included on the list of Entropy’s favorite online fiction and short stories. And in the spirit of teamwork, we’d like to thank all of our contributors, past and present, for joining the Barzakh team. We feel privileged to have the opportunity to publish your work. Thank you for submitting it.

As we were reading submissions for this issue, we were happily surprised to find that we had received a few reviews of international prose and poetry. In the poetry section, Kiran Bhat reviews the poetry collection Turbulence by the Australian author Thuy On. In the prose section, David Herman discusses his translation of the novel Moss by the German author Klaus Modick, and Weining Wang reviews a classic of twentieth-century Chinese literature, Rickshaw Boy by Lao She. We want to highlight these reviews because, in our opinion, they do a wonderful job of helping Barzakh to accomplish its goal of amplifying the voices of international artists and writers.

Reading the digital pages of Barzakh means taking a trip across borders and boundaries of all kinds. Please, sit back and enjoy the ride.