The Evergreen Review

The Evergreen Review seeks out underrepresented writers and artists, and at the same time continues its commitment to pay contributors a fair honorarium, a practice which has become increasingly difficult to maintain in the field of nonprofit literary arts publishing. Evergreen works to overcome borders, both physical and metaphysical—borders in language and geography as well as borders in established ways of thinking and preconceived social structures. Publishing art and writing that is openly accessible, without a paywall, is crucial to our magazine’s existence.

In the next several years, we plan to increase the honoraria paid to our contributing writers and artists, and hope to expand our programming and partnerships to include collaborative events and readings with other NYC-based community organizations. We also have the goal of digitizing all of Evergreen’s pre-2017 print issues. We’ve already made the first three issues (from 1957) available as PDFs free upon request and in facsimile paperbacks. We’d like to do the same with all the print issues of Evergreen, from 1960 up to the last print issue in 1984. Particularly urgent in these current times of renewed book bans and censorship in U.S. schools and libraries and beyond, we hope that the archive demonstrating Evergreen’s commitment to its mission for over sixty years can be a point of inspiration to a new generation of readers who may be unfamiliar with the U.S.’s history of censorship within publishing—and publications and editors like those at Evergreen who strove to stand by their political and philosophical ideals which stood in opposition to the mainstream. We aim to continue Evergreen’s powerful legacy by creating a vital, relevant, and thrilling publication for years to come.

With a part-time staff of nine, including one publisher, an editor-in-chief, an assistant editor, an art editor and assistant art editor, a poetry editor, and three active contributing editors--plus an on-call designer--we feel confident we can continue to meet the challenges ahead.

Our publication’s output has increased exponentially in the past few years. In our Spring/Summer 2021 issue, we published forty-nine writers and artists in twenty-nine pieces, a podcast episode which featured our editor-in-chief in conversation with writers we’d published, and a reading held in collaboration with Singapore Unbound featuring five Asian women writers to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. In our Fall/Winter 2021–22 issue, we published twenty-four pieces created by forty writers and artists, as well as a podcast episode. In our Spring/Summer 2022 issue, we published 69 writers (including poets and translators) and 41 artists in 64 pieces, including contributors from Algeria, Argentina, Canada, Denmark, Singapore, Somalia, Switzerland, Uganda, and Zambia; and based in England, Italy, Rome, South Korea, and Spain. Thus far in our Fall/Winter 2022–23 issue we have already published 45 writers and 24 artists in 42 pieces. Our readership has grown as well: we had 71,983 Evergreen users in 2022, versus 58,971 in 2021, a growth rate of more than twenty percent.