OUR MISSION
Gordon Square Review is online literary magazine published biannually by Literary Cleveland to showcase emerging writers nationwide, award editing mentorships, and provide a venue to spotlight Northeast Ohio writers.
Why Gordon Square?
Gordon Square Review is published by Literary Cleveland, a nonprofit organization working to nurture a vibrant literary arts community in Northeast Ohio. Literary Cleveland is headquartered in the Gordon Square Arts District, which serves as the cultural heart of Cleveland’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. Gordon Square Review embraces its namesake’s ideals surrounding creativity, artistic exploration, and the value of supporting and celebrating emerging talent.
What does Gordon Square Review publish?
Gordon Square Review considers submissions of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from writers across the United States and internationally. We feature emerging writers no matter their geographic location, but we also reserve a special place for Northeast Ohio writers.
Northeast Ohio Writers
Every issue of Gordon Square Review will spotlight at least one writer in Northeast Ohio—an area that, by our definition, includes the Cleveland, Akron/Canton, Youngstown, Kent, and Lorain/Elyria/Oberlin areas. Northeast Ohio writers are particularly encouraged to enter our inaugural contest.
Editorial Mentorships
As part of its mission, Gordon Square Review strives to mentor emerging writers. During the selection process, each editor will each choose a piece of writing from the general submission pool and work with the author in revision. Completed drafts resulting from these mentorships will be published in Gordon Square Review and accompanied by micro essays from the respective contributors and editors. These competitive editing mentorships will help guide emerging writers through the revision and publication process. All writers who submit to Gordon Square Review are automatically considered for a mentorship.
Gordon Square Review is published by Literary Cleveland, a nonprofit organization working to nurture a vibrant literary arts community in Northeast Ohio. Literary Cleveland is headquartered in the Gordon Square Arts District, which serves as the cultural heart of Cleveland’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. Gordon Square Review embraces its namesake’s ideals surrounding creativity, artistic exploration, and the value of supporting and celebrating emerging talent.
What does Gordon Square Review publish?
Gordon Square Review considers submissions of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from writers across the United States and internationally. We feature emerging writers no matter their geographic location, but we also reserve a special place for Northeast Ohio writers.
Northeast Ohio Writers
Every issue of Gordon Square Review will spotlight at least one writer in Northeast Ohio—an area that, by our definition, includes the Cleveland, Akron/Canton, Youngstown, Kent, and Lorain/Elyria/Oberlin areas. Northeast Ohio writers are particularly encouraged to enter our inaugural contest.
Editorial Mentorships
As part of its mission, Gordon Square Review strives to mentor emerging writers. During the selection process, each editor will each choose a piece of writing from the general submission pool and work with the author in revision. Completed drafts resulting from these mentorships will be published in Gordon Square Review and accompanied by micro essays from the respective contributors and editors. These competitive editing mentorships will help guide emerging writers through the revision and publication process. All writers who submit to Gordon Square Review are automatically considered for a mentorship.
Meet Our Team
LAURA MAYLENE WALTER
EDITOR-IN-CHIEFLaura Maylene Walter is a writer and editor in Cleveland. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, the Sun, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was a Yaddo Fellow, a Tin House Writers’ Workshop Scholar, the recipient of the Ohioana Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant, and a past Fiction Editor of Mid-American Review. Her debut story collection, Living Arrangements (BkMk Press), won the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize, a national gold IPPY, and a Foreword Book of the Year Award. Laura holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University, is a contributing editor for Cherry Tree, teaches workshops for Literary Cleveland, blogs for the Kenyon Review, and works for Cleveland Public Library. She is no stranger to rejection.
Laura's preferred aesthetic : I am equally enamored with the contemplative realism of Tessa Hadley or Alice Munro as I am compelled by the magic of Aimee Bender or Lesley Nneka Arimah. Lucy Corin’s apocalypses, Brenda Peynado’s “Yaiza,” and Wendy Oleson’s “How I Liked the Avocados” are just a few examples of short fiction that catches my eye. For nonfiction, I’m drawn to a gorgeous essay like Jaquira Diaz’s “Beach City,” but I also love work that blends the personal with research, like “On Not Eating the Marshmallow” by Helen Betya Rubinstein or just about anything by Roxane Gay. I welcome writing that takes risks, whether in terms of structure, content, or language. |
ALI MCCLAIN
POETRY EDITORAli McClain is a poet, educator, consultant and youth advocate. She directs one of the city's most successful after school and summer program for girls ages 10-18 at West Side Community House. Ali has been writing and performing poetry for over 15 years. She has taught and performed at Playhouse Square, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Juvenile Detention Center, various schools throughout Cuyahoga county and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of acerbic, which is an arts collective dedicated to providing a safe and resourceful home to artists of color. She is currently working on her first collection of poetry and is a current graduate student for poetry at Cleveland State University's NEOMFA program. Her work has appeared in A Race Anthology: Dispatches and Artifacts From a Segregated City and she is the recipient of the 2016 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize for her poem “Kinsman.”
Ali's preferred aesthetic: I admire poetry that is clear and meaningful and rich with imagery. My favorite poets use imagery to intensify language and ground the reader in the scene. I’m also attracted to poems that are structurally interesting in terms of how they appear on the page. I respect poets who know the rules, but also break the rules and I believe poems should always have clean lines, unblinking honesty and energy. A few poems I admire include: From “summer, somewhere” by Danez Smith; “Bullet Points” by Jericho Brown; “Spring” by Chloe Honum; and “The Shoots” by Shane McCrae. |
MATT WEINKAM
PROSE EDITORMatt Weinkam is a writer, editor, and college instructor with published work in Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, New South, Quarter After Eight, Split Lip, DIAGRAM, and Electric Literature. He is founding editor of Threadcount Magazine and a former Managing Editor of Passages North literary journal. He holds an MA in creative writing from Miami University, an MFA in fiction from Northern Michigan University, and he has taught creative writing as far away as Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China. Originally from Cincinnati, Matt moved to Cleveland the same month LeBron broke the curse.
Matt's preferred aesthetic : I admire prose that gives me a new way of seeing the world. Most of my favorite writers twist or upend our preconceived ideas about what a story or an essay should be. I’m drawn to those who reinvent structure (Teju Cole, Maggie Nelson, Ander Monson), mingle genres (Amber Sparks, Charles Yu, Colson Whitehead), funk with language (Lindsay Hunter, Junot Díaz, Susan Steinberg), reveal untold perspectives (Valeria Luiselli, Svetlana Alexievich, John Keene), and generally get weird (Jesse Ball, Jen George, Alissa Nutting). “Post-Mortem” by Traci Brimhall has a lot of what I look for in a nonfiction piece: attention to language wrapped in an unconventional structure that is expertly designed to deliver emotional gut punch. “The Alive Sister” by Megan Giddings tackles topics so big in such a small space that only metafiction can allow for such meaning and emotion. A perfect display of everything fiction can do as well as why we continue to write it. |
ABOUT LITERARY CLEVELAND
The nonprofit organization Literary Cleveland serves as publisher of Gordon Square Review. Literary Cleveland was founded in 2015 to offer the region’s journalists, novelists, poets, short story writers, essayists, bloggers, authors of children’s and youth literature, technical writers, playwrights, and songwriters the opportunity to network, learn, and develop their skills. Literary Cleveland hosts the annual Inkubator conference as well as dozens of classes, workshops, readings, panel discussions, and other literary events that have served thousands of writers across Northeast Ohio.
CONTACT US
To submit work, see our Submit page. Send general inquiries* to info@gordonsquarereview.org
* Please do not inquire about a submission until at least three months have passed.
* Please do not inquire about a submission until at least three months have passed.
