About

The Forge Literary Magazine was founded by volunteers from the Fiction Forge, an international online writers’ forum, which counts amongst its members and alumni winners of numerous literary awards, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, O. Henry Prize, the Bridport Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Pinch Literary Award in Fiction. Former members’ novels have been published by Bloomsbury, Chatto & Windus, Sceptre, Headline and Little, Brown. Our all-volunteer staff shares editorial duties equally, we pay our contributors, and our taste is wide-ranging and eclectic. The Forge Literary Magazine is a project of Forge Literary Press, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization (tax ID: 82-0910097) incorporated in the state of California. Questions? Please email us.

  • John Haggerty is the Founding Editor of the Forge Literary Magazine. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. He has received an MFA from San Francisco State University.

  • Sara Crowley

    Sara Crowley is a co-managing editor of the Forge Literary Magazine. She adores stories and her own have been published in many lovely places.

  • Our senior editor Valerie O’Riordan holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. Her work has been been published in LitMag, The Manchester Review, Tin House online, Unthology, Fugue and more. She was amongst the winners of the 2019 O. Henry Award. She co-runs the review site, Bookmunch.

  • Sommer Schafer’s latest stories are in Cold Mountain Review, Monday Night, Boulevard, Hobart, North American Review (a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2019), Catapult, The Carolina Quarterly and Fiction.

  • Sarah Starr Murphy is a co-managing editor at the Forge Literary Magazine working from rural Connecticut. Her work can be found in The Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, and Atticus Review. She reads pretty much everything and runs pretty much everywhere.

  • Damyanti Biswas is the author of the Amazon bestseller You Beneath Your Skin (Simon & Schuster India, 2019), her debut literary crime novel which focuses on class and corruption in India. Her short fiction has been published at Litro magazine, Bluestem magazine, Griffith Review (Australia), and elsewhere.

  • Rachel Wild is a published writer who lives in East London. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Sussex University. Her first love is short fiction, but she is currently working on a novel.

  • Katrin Gibb received an MFA from San Francisco State University. She’s published in Confrontation, Fourteen Hills, Glimmer Train, Hobart, and Water~Stone Review among others. She lives in San Francisco with her husband.

  • Jacky Taylor writes long and short fiction. Her work has been published in Foundling Review, Everyday Fiction Three, The Bridport Prize and Asham Award Anthologies. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chichester and won the 2015 Momaya Short Story Award.

     

  • Sarah Broderick grew up in the Ohio River Valley and resides in Northern California. She served as Diaspora Editor for Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince published in 2017 by Verso / Voice of Witness. Her work has appeared in Moon City Review, Atticus Review, Necessary Fiction, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere.

  • Heather Cripps recently received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Kent. Her work has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, The Purple Breakfast Review, and Wax Paper Prose. She is working on her first novel.

  • Yosh

    Yosh Haggerty is the publisher of the Forge Literary Magazine. She’s a translator of four published books.

Readers/Interns

Fiona McPhillips, E.L. Cork, Jillian Luft, Ashley Espinoza, Paul Chuks, Maggie Ayala, Daniel Andrade Amaral, Shelby Lummus, Carol Ermis, Taylor Raucher

Past Readers/Editors

Valerie Waterhouse, Stephanie Doeing, Dylan Brie Ducey, Dan Malakin, Frances Gapper, Barbara Barrow, Sandy Kline, Diane Hall, Sam Nicol, Katie Oliver, Mary Thompson, Jim Toal, Ana Robbins, Chelsea Thornton, Briana Loveall, Anna Bowen

Author payments in 2023 are made possible, in part, by a generous donation from Louise Haggerty.

Places We’ve Been

Here is a partial list of where we’ve published collectively (in no particular order): Tin House Online, The Manchester Review, LitMag, Fugue, The Lonely Crowd, Unthology, Hobart, Glimmer Train, Carolina Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Santa Monica Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, New Orleans Review, 3:AM, frigg, Smokelong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Fiction, Water~Stone Review, Baltimore Review, Ambit, Bridport Prize Anthologies, monkeybicycle, matchbook, Catapult, Cimarron Review, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Literal Latté, Confrontation, North American Review, Corium, Forge Literary Magazine*, Lunch Ticket, Jellyfish Review, Vestal Review, CRAFT Literary, Pithead Chapel, wigleaf, Atticus Review, Moon City Review, Fractured Lit, Hot Metal Bridge, Coachella Review, Everyday Fiction, Virago Press (Asham Award), Bath Short Story Award anthology, IS&T, among many others.

(*Occasionally, our published authors subsequently join our editorial team, foregoing their right to publish further work at the Forge Literary Magazine.)

Our Copyediting Policy 

FLM does not use a standard style guide, striving, instead, to achieve accuracy and internal consistency within each published piece. We aim to respect the voice, language choices and personality of each individual writer, reflecting the wide range of English variants used internationally. Punctuation and spellings of certain words (eg color/colour) will therefore vary from piece to piece. Editors will, at their discretion, make suggestions for improvements but changes are discussed with the writer before publishing.

Donate

If you are able, please consider supporting the Forge Literary Magazine, an independent, non-profit, all volunteer-run publisher. All proceeds go to paying writers and running the website. Your donation to the Forge Literary Magazine is tax deductible to the full extent of the law.