The Brooklyn Quarterly

The Brooklyn Quarterly is a new magazine of literature and public ideas. Featuring fiction, essays, interviews, and poetry, we aim to cultivate accessible discourse and an open community of writers, readers, and citizens. We ourselves are writers, professionals, activists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who believe in the power of narrative and the critical importance of public intellectuals rather than an exclusive intelligentsia.

The Brooklyn Quarterly is

• a forum both for established authors as well as the next generation of great American writers, journalists, and critics;
• a haven for creative writing that actively engages current social issues and public debates;
• an incubator for a reimagination of America’s political and cultural possibilities and a new narrative for progressive thought; and
• a multi-format platform spanning both print and new media, from letterpress editions to tablet- and mobile-friendly editions, along with readings and other events.

Brooklyn is the anchor for our endeavors for a multitude of reasons. In “Our City,” Walt Whitman referred to Brooklyn as “a mighty world in itself,” and that is just as true today as it was in 1842. Brooklyn is, to each of us, Our City — both home and workshop, a place of family memories and personal aspirations. With its proud and continuing history of openness and diversity, opportunity and invention, Brooklyn is in many ways America’s City. More recently, Brooklyn has become synonymous with efforts to reclaim the history and artisanship of a bygone America, as a nation of producers and not just consumers — efforts we aim to embrace and celebrate.

Above all, Brooklyn stands for tangible possibility, a city that welcomes and harbors the immigrant and dissident, the struggling and ambitious. Living and working here, Whitman wrote, “are people of all classes and stages of rank — from all countries on the globe — engaged in all the varieties of avocations — of every grade, every hue of ignorance and learning, morality and vice, wealth and want, fashion and coarseness, breeding and brutality, elevation and degradation, impudence and modesty.” We are The Brooklyn Quarterly because we believe this “mighty world,” both cosmopolitan and yet uniquely American, is still being built and deserves expression worthy of its grandeur. By naming ourselves in the tradition of Whitman’s democratic vision of America, we affirm our dedication to seeking out and publishing new voices and new ideas, raised throughout the country and around the world.