Published in print and soon, online versions, Silk Road will feature writing that takes readers into locations--real or imagined, minute or vast, evolving or timeless. 

Editors of this new journal welcome submissions of American and international poetry, fiction, nonfiction, travel articles, environmental writing, translations, drama, critical writing, interviews, book reviews or any written or visual form that assumes where we are is crucial to who we are.

We are especially interested in writing that challenges what we know to be true about a place and the human connection to it.   We will print work that is bold, transformative and rich in implications.    

Pico Iyer writes that people today are "in this position of having hundreds of different cultures singing and clashing and conspiring within them.  I think that the global village is increasingly internalized within us."   Is location for many now primarily metaphysical?

Displacement and travel can result in a largely imagined homeland, but what of the physical places where we are born or harbor us over time?

Louise Erdrich says of personal geography:  "Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it's the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship.";

For Gretel Ehrlich "all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man in the great solitudes."  Going alone to the land, sea or air reveals for many writers the truth of things and the essence of what is and what we are. 

We also adopt new communities in hopes of transformation and redemption.  Virgil Suarez writes in one of his poems: "And then she'd start from scratch. Anew. In a place where nobody would know who she'd been. A proper place where she could finally mouth her own name, let others voice her true, god-given name."  

Each issue of Silk Road will present a vital and evolving conversation about the places we inhabit and pass through.