Our Mission

For more than four decades, Conjunctions has established itself as the preeminent home for writers from around the world who challenge convention with work that is formally innovative, culturally transformative, and ahead of its time. We embrace taking risks and pride ourselves on publishing established masters while debuting unknown writers.

Just a few whose work we published first or early in their careers are Nigerian-born Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, Nobel Prize-shortlisted Chinese surrealist Can Xue, Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Powers, Forrest Gander, and Rae Armantrout, National Book Award winners Arthur Sze and William T. Vollmann, MacArthur Fellows David Foster Wallace, Peter Cole, and Karen Russell, Rome Prize winner Mary Caponegro, as well as Isabella Hamad, Vanessa Chan, Brandon Hobson, Shelley Jackson, Colin Channer, and many others.

Among the contemporary masters featured in our issues are National Humanities Medal recipient Joyce Carol Oates, PEN/Nabokov Award winner Sandra Cisneros, 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Jayne Anne Phillips (whose winning novel Nightwatch was first featured in Conjunctions), 2018 National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez, some eleven Nobel Prize winners including Gabriel García Márquez, Yasunari Kawabata, Octavio Paz, and Claude Simon, as well as renowned authors Margaret Atwood, Julia Alvarez, William H. Gass, John Ashbery, and others whose achievement has been to push world literature in fresh directions. Interviews with Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, William S. Burroughs—the list is long—have been perennial favorites among our readers, as has our editorial embrace of speculative and horror writing by award-winning writers like Kelly Link, Brian Evenson, Carmen Maria Machado, Jonathan Lethem, Peter Straub, Elizabeth Hand, and China Miéville.

The biannual anthology of new writing appears every spring and fall in print 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.

 

Our History

Conjunctions was founded in 1981 by Bradford Morrow, who has continuously edited the journal since its inception. Initially conceived as a festschrift for New Directions’ founder, James Laughlin, our inaugural issue included such luminaries as Tennessee Williams, John Hawkes, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, and Paul Bowles. When further submissions of manuscripts came in from Guy Davenport, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Czesław Miłosz, Nathaniel Mackey, and Robert Creeley, Morrow determined to fill what he felt was the need for a dynamic new literary journal, a “living notebook” as he would later come to call it, of innovative writings. A second issue was published on a shoestring budget, then a third. Some eighty-plus other issues (and counting) would follow. Such longevity for a literary journal is rare, to be sure, and this run of Conjunctions now maps—over the course of more than 25,000 pages by some 2,000 writers—the development of an indispensable part of contemporary literature.

Since 1997, Conjunctions online has featured previously unpublished work that is not bound by a paywall or any print-issue themes, together with excerpts from print issues as well as multimedia, including historic readings and performances.

Conjunctions was published in its formative days by Morrow, with several other publishers such as David Godine and Collier/Scribner carrying it through its first decade. It has been published by Bard College since 1990.

 

Our Future

With the publication of our spring issue in June 2025, Conjunctions:84, We Love All We Voices, Bard College is stepping down as our publisher. In recent years, we’ve witnessed too many esteemed literary journals and independent presses fold. We refuse to let this broader trend suppress our vision and commitment to our readers and writers. Our plan is to continue publishing the journal beyond the auspices of Bard, as we did for many years before the college published us. Our fall 2025 issue, Conjunctions:85, will mark the beginning of a brave new unfolding of the journal as it seeks to continue charting the best in world literature today.

With the generous help of the CLMP, we have recently established a fiscal sponsorship under their aegis. We hope you will consider becoming a pioneering donor as we move forward into the exciting next chapter of our journey. Donate here by writing “Conjunctions” in the notes line.