When a Magazine of Intersections Reaches Its Final Destination

I suppose the title above says it all. Now that we have finished posting work for Issue 25, Atlas and Alice is going to slink off into the night.

Running a literary journal is hard, and after 26 issues (don’t forget our special CNF Covid issue!), almost 12 years, a whole slew of anthology appearances, and hundreds of featured authors, the time feels right to take a long breather.

What does that mean? Well, for the foreseeable future, Atlas and Alice will not be publishing new work. Will we come back? Maybe? As those who know me can confirm, I find it hard to ever say no to anything. But for now, we’re turning in our (stupidly expensive) Submittable keys.

The Atlas and Alice website is not going anywhere, though. Authors, your links will not be disappearing! Readers, your favorite pieces will still be here! In early 2025, expect the official digital magazine version of Issue 25 to arrive on the site. I also plan on finally getting around to updating our author archive, which is very, very behind (sorry).

It is amazing that our little magazine lasted as long as it did. Conceived at AWP 2013, A+A was an opportunity for a bunch of recent MFA grads and friends to work on a project together. In a way, it was a glorified excuse to keep in touch. Our founder, Brendan Todt, bounced around a handful of ideas for a magazine that mixed art and science, eventually landing on Atlas and Alice, named after two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The concept felt right, and we were off to the races, launching our first issue (which relied on a fair amount of solicitations) in September 2013.

Mastheads shifted dramatically over the years, of course, but we tried our best to always honor the magazine’s original goal and to showcase authors the best we could. I can’t thank our former editors and readers enough for all of their work. Thanks to Whitney Bryant (here from the start!), Liz Ann Young, Cathy Ulrich, Lindsey Danis, Alton Melvar M. Dapanas, Eimear Laffan, Mána Taylor, Paige Lalain, Hannah Levy, Para Vadhahong, Katie M Zeigler, Sarah Twombly, Arielle McManus, Mark Wallace, Maggie Fulmer, Summar West, Kristen M. Ploetz, Mike Nagel, Emily Arnason Casey, Breana Steele, Donald Edem Quist, Sarah Seltzer, Liz Blood, Jon Cone, Mahtem Shiferraw, and of course, Brendan Todt, for everything. What a lineup of all-stars.

Thanks, too, to the authors and artists who trusted us with their work across these years. The list of names is far too long for this short missive, but know that you all hold a special place in the story of Atlas and Alice. And thanks to you, our readers, who clicked on our site to take in the stories, poems, essays, and artwork that we have been privileged to publish.

It has been a fun journey. Thanks for taking it with me, and with us.

Keep an eye out for Issue 25 in 2025.

— Ben