Cleaver Magazine

Cleaver Magazine Cleaver Magazine publishes sharp-edged art & literary work by established & emerging voices. To “cleave” is both to stick tight and to fall away.

Cleaver Magazine shares “cutting-edge” artwork and literary work from a mix of established and emerging voices.We publish a quarterly literary magazine with poetry, short stories, essays, flash prose, visual art, graphic narratives, and visual art. Look for the literary quarterly in March, June, September, and December. In each issue we present several emerging writers and alongside established wr

iters and artists. We see ourselves as facilitators and stewards of the literary and artistic work that we publish. In addition to our literary quarterly, we publish weekly and daily features, including Life As Activism (poetry and prose with a social justice theme), writer-to-writer craft essays, author interviews, travel essays, and reviews of books from small and independent publishers. Our weekly in-house advice columnist, “Ask June” opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Our podcast On The Edge is a virtual poetry reading series, available for download on iTunes and SoundCloud. Our radio plays feature original short scrips performed by professional actors. The scripts are available for download as PDF files; the recordings are free for listeners on iTunes and SoundCloud. About our name: “cleave” is a Janus word, also known as an “auto-antonym”, meaning both itself and its opposite. A cleaver is the most broad-edged and brutally efficient kitchen knife, designed to be swung like a hammer for the most effective channel of force. “Cleave” also means to come together with strong attachment. Submissions guidelines at the Cleaver Magazine website. For book review queries, see the masthead on our website. For other queries, email: [email protected]

Rev up your writing with our next generative masterclass, READY! SET! WRITE! with Kathy Fish, on Sunday, September 28, a...
09/05/2025

Rev up your writing with our next generative masterclass, READY! SET! WRITE! with Kathy Fish, on Sunday, September 28, at 2pm Eastern.

In this engaging, interactive two-hour session we will begin with a series of fun and interesting activities and prompts that will prime our brains for creative expression.

Next, we’ll put together “toolboxes” for story writing, equipping ourselves with our own unique word banks, vocabulary, images, characters, settings, even titles. Finally, we’ll draw on these tools to draft rich, resonant stories that might not otherwise be written had we not arrived at the page primed, prepared, energized, and inspired.

Register now! https://cleavermagazine.submittable.com/submit/327547/kathy-fish-ready-set-write-september-28-2025

It's our turn!On Sunday, September 14 at 7pm, Cleaver Faculty, Staff, and Editors take over our Zoom account for a very ...
09/03/2025

It's our turn!

On Sunday, September 14 at 7pm, Cleaver Faculty, Staff, and Editors take over our Zoom account for a very special reading. Please join us to celebrate the working writers behind our magazine. Register now to receive the link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/X73kcTZzQgKhFxdE_3TkkA

Featuring:
Andrea Caswell
Mark Danowsky
Hana Elysia
Jennifer Fawcett
Kathy Fish
Marnie Goodfriend
Moriah Hampton
Sam Heaps
Beth Kephart
Autumn Konopka
Kathryn Kulpa
Andrea Marcusa
Ilana Masad,
Tricia Park,
Lisa Romeo
Jess Silfa
Francine Witte

We see you. That is, we want to see you. The deadline for our 2025 Visual Poetics Contest has been EXTENDED to Monday, S...
08/31/2025

We see you.

That is, we want to see you. The deadline for our 2025 Visual Poetics Contest has been EXTENDED to Monday, September 15, 2025!

That's two more weeks for the artist-poet in you to submit work that veers from the concrete. We want to see poems that play with images, typography, visual structure. Show us poetry that is meant to be SEEN.

https://www.cleavermagazine.com/contests/


Some work needs to be seen to be fully understood. VISUAL POETICS, the Cleaver Poetry Contest judged by Kazim Ali, is op...
08/27/2025

Some work needs to be seen to be fully understood. VISUAL POETICS, the Cleaver Poetry Contest judged by Kazim Ali, is open through Monday, September 1, 2025.

Show us 1-4 poems that engage with visual life, whether this is as a traditional poem accompanied by a single photo, or a complete re-imagining of how language can live on the page. Show us your family albums gilded with language, your graphing calculator love letter, your rendering of a casserole recipe in the shape of Mt. Fuji.

For more info, please see our website.
https://www.cleavermagazine.com/contests/

"My goal was to write about Cuba in such a way that my reader would feel like they were there alongside me, riding on my...
08/25/2025

"My goal was to write about Cuba in such a way that my reader would feel like they were there alongside me, riding on my shoulders as I open each door along my pilgrimage: drumbeats and dances that invoke the gods and the animal sacrifices that feed them; ancestral altars and séances that bridge the living and the dead; pilgrimages—ten thousand strong—that honor and celebrate Cuba’s spiritual mothers, Ochún, and Our Lady of Charity."

Karla Cordero was is conversation with Rebe Huntman, author of MY MOTHER IN HAVANA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC & MIRACLE (Monkfish Book Publishing). Read the interview now on Cleaver. https://www.cleavermagazine.com/a-conversation-with-rebe-huntman-author-of-my-mother-in-havana/

"I talk to my students a lot about access points, and we play around with them in class. And for 'Deaf Heaven,' I wanted...
08/21/2025

"I talk to my students a lot about access points, and we play around with them in class. And for 'Deaf Heaven,' I wanted to try something I hadn’t tried before, so I took a bit of inspiration from Flannery O’Connor and tried to get into my story via mood and tone."

Jen Michalski was in conversation with Curtis Smith, author of DEAF HEAVEN (Running Wild Press). Read the interview now on Cleaver. https://www.cleavermagazine.com/a-conversation-with-curtis-smith-author-of-deaf-heaven/

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