What We Publish

Kartika Review publishes creative writing from Asian Pacific Islander American perspectives and creative writing that engages with Asian Pacific Islander Americans in thoughtful ways to challenge Orientalism, Yellow Peril, racism, xenophobia, American Empire, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.

Submission Guidelines

When you submit your work, please include a note in the cover letter area with a short bio and a comment about one or more individual works that you have enjoyed in our previous issues (list the author and title). You can read our archives online on our website.

There is no fee for submissions.

Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please withdraw your submission if it is accepted elsewhere. We do not publish reprints except as solicited by the editors.

Please submit your work for consideration only once each calendar year unless expressly solicited by the editors to submit revised or other work. This restriction applies separately to each category (poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction)—so you are welcome to submit more than once a year if your work falls in different categories.

Publishing With Us

If accepted, we will publish your work initially online and then in a print-on-demand anthology. You will retain copyright but assign us the rights to first publication online and the rights to reprint your work in the anthology.

We do not offer payment for work. However, you will have the chance to purchase print-on-demand anthologies at cost.

You will also be joining the network of authors we've published and interviewed in Kartika Review's pages, and we invite you to connect with us on social media.

Author Interviews

We publish interviews with Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) authors, discussing their writing, their writing process, and their experiences in the writing world. We tend to focus on authors with recently published books, especially debut authors, but we are also interested in interviewing more established authors with new books as well as doing retrospective interviews to reflect back on an author's work over time.

If you are an author, agent, or publisher with a suggestion for an author interview, feel free to email the editor at kartika.review@gmail.com. If we decide to conduct an interview, we would appreciate a review copy of the latest book. Although we are happy to consider your suggestions, please note that we cannot accommodate every request.

Our interviews are conducted by the editor of Kartika Review and contributing editors. If you have a particular interest in interviewing an author, feel free to email us with a brief statement of which author or authors you would like to interview and what your experience has been in the literary world. We are happy to work with interviewers who are authors themselves, librarians, journalists, literary studies scholars, community activists, and more.

APIA Commentaries

In the past, Kartika Review has occasionally published short commentaries on APIA authors' experiences in the writing world. Issue 7, for example, contained a special section in which a number of writers reflected on the idea of home in their work. And in Issue 16, we were honored to publish David Mura's "The Student of Color in the Typical MFA Program," a provocative essay considering the pervasive whiteness of the professional creative writing community.

Starting with Issue 17, these commentaries are a regular feature. We invite people to contribute their thoughts on the APIA Writingscape in the form of short essays, collected voices on a single topic, roundtable discussions, dialogues, and other types of writing about this writing world. We are interested in hearing from all who are engaged with the APIA Writingscape: writers, publishers, agents, readers, reviewers, teachers, librarians, and others who participate in all stages of the creation, publication, prize-awarding, marketing, circulation, and appreciation of APIA literature. If you have ideas or completed pieces you'd like to see published in our APIA Writingscape section, please email kartika.review@gmail.com.

We're happy to talk over preliminary ideas as well as to consider finished pieces. And if you have a topic you'd like us to consider for a collective piece but don't know who to contact to contribute, we're happy to work with you on soliciting contributions from other writers.

We hope the APIA Writingscape section offers an important space for us collectively to build APIA literary cultures and to support writers making their way in the larger writing world.

About the Publication

Kartika Review is an Asian Pacific Islander American literary arts journal that publishes fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, commentary on the writing and publishing, and author interviews. The journal launched in 2007 under Founding Editor Sunny Woan's guidance.

Starting in 2017, Kartika Review publishes three issues a year and a yearly print-on-demand anthology consisting of all three issues.

About Website Images

Unless otherwise credited, images on this website are in the public domain and found on Pixabay.com.

About Our Namesake

In Vajrayana (or Tibetan) Buddhist tradition, the kartika, a crescent-shaped knife, symbolizes the cutting away of ignorance and superficiality, with the hopes that it will lead to enlightenment. The kartika is kept close during deep meditation or prayer. It serves mainly as a metaphorical reminder of our self-determined life missions and never is it actually wielded in the offensive against others. We took on this namesake because the kartika best represents this journal’s vision.

About the Editor

In 2017, Kartika Review is edited by Paul Lai, an educator and editor who previously served as Fiction Editor for Kartika Review in 2011–2012. Paul has spent the last two decades studying, teaching, reviewing, and supporting Asian American literatures in various venues as a college professor, scholarly researcher, public librarian, book reviewer, community advocate, and general aficionado. He is excited to return to relaunch the publication.

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