A quick search through my computer archives recently reminded me that I first started submitting to literary journals in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A decade out of school, I had amassed a small collection of short stories on my hard drive, some of them early, rough drafts of pieces that would eventually appear in Strivers and Other Stories. With some summer workshop praise to build on, I thought I was ready.
The Callaloo literary journal was among the first I submitted to, back in the days when sending your work out wasn’t accomplished with just a few keyboard clicks. It meant writing a cover letter, printing three copies of your piece, and mailing everything through the U.S. Postal Service. I imagined my stories rising to the top of enormous slush piles thanks to some clever opening line. Looking back, I now recognize that impulse as a telltale sign of amateur writing: trying to knock readers flat right out of the gate. Some provocative dialogue, maybe profanity. Violence. Shock. Awe. Blood first, scene-setting later. (That approach has long since lost its appeal for me as a writer. But I sometimes wonder whether those early instincts anticipated the attention-grabbing tactics of today’s creator economy and social media platforms?)
While none of my early submissions were ever accepted for publication, Callaloo provided my first real affirmation that contemporary literary fiction was indeed for us and that there was a pathway, however uncertain, for me into that world. At the time I knew almost nothing about the literary marketplace. I had no idea who read the slush piles, how publishing decisions were made, or how a journal credit might advance a writer to whatever the “next level” was. But the very act of submitting, and knowing a journal devoted to Black diasporic writing even exited, offered a first taste of…possibility.
Over the years, Callaloo became a recurring and aspirational presence in my writing life. I read it whenever I could, appreciating the accessibility and relatability of the work it published. I applied multiple times to the fiction workshops it sponsors and was eventually admitted to the one held at Oxford in the UK. There, I had the chance to workshop with Ravi Howard, a great Black Southern writer whose aesthetic and sensibility I feel a deep kinship with. And, of course, there was the dreaminess of spending a week wandering the halls and yards of Oxford University, pinching myself when I stumbled into an outdoor performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
From that participation and validation, I was eventually published in Callaloo with the story “Cotton Compress.” That publication felt less like an arrival and more like a continuation and another marker along a road I had been traveling for years. Life’s a journey, not a destination.
This year, the newly appointed editorial team at Callaloo invited me to serve as a volunteer reader and referee. In practical terms, that means I’m now part of the group that takes a first look at incoming submissions. I’m on the other side of the once-mysterious slush pile (which, in this era of Submittable and organized digital workflows, probably deserves a better name). Committing just a few hours a week, I now get to read from a vantage point I once could only imagine.
The best part is getting to see the wild creativity in contemporary fiction representing the Black diaspora. That work feels especially vital now, at a moment when erasure and marginalization in the political world have seeped into artistic and cultural spaces. Callaloo has endured, adapting and holding space, and in 2025 it finds a new institutional home at Brown University.
Founded in 1976 by Dr. Charles H. Rowell at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Callaloo has long been more than a journal. It has been a beacon for and a record of Black intellectual and artistic creativity and thought. I’m grateful to play a small role in its editorial process going forward for fiction, even as I continue shaping and slogging through my own future writing projects. Becoming a reader for Callaloo feels like a full-circle moment, sitting where I once hoped someone else was sitting and thinking: yeah, this is good!