Barbara Lock MD, MFA

Many thanks to Alice Hoffman and the editors at Ploughshares for seeing the beauty and peril in my story "Keep You Safe," winner of the

Congratulations to our amazing Editor in Chief!

Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction. In the Ploughshares spring issue, just released, you can read wonderful poetry and prose as well as my responses to Lachlan Applegate's insightful questions about craft, peril, and the present moment.

Many thanks to Alice Hoffman and the editors at Ploughshares for seeing the beauty and peril in my story "Keep You Safe," winner of the

Long form submissions end this evening! Send what you have!

From "Mermua" by Gerardo J. Mercado. Read the rest in issue 22 of Variant Lit variantlit.com/mermua/

Spread the word

Poems and prose!

We’re thrilled to announce our Pushcart Prize nominations for 2026: “On Craft” by Erica Dawson “Clutch” by Stephanie Frazee “Holes” by Nicole Desjardins Gowdy “Cooking Lesson” by Shira Haus “Five O’Clock Shadow in Philly” by Allen Means “The Opposite of Dusk” by Ron Riekki

We are still reading for our Winter Issue!

G4 Solar Storm - Biggest Impact Still Coming | S0 News Nov.12.2025 youtu.be/wLUd961kzLk?si… via @YouTube

Very excited to announce our nominations for the Monarch Queer Literary Awards!

Less than a month left to submit!

Rhetorical Convergence The rapid collapse of stylistic variance as AI-assisted communication gravitates toward a single orthodoxy of clarity, conciseness, and civility. This is already happening in subtle ways: emails now read like press releases, short essays like complete ChatGPT drafts, X is a continuity of mindless Grokerbating, and even human argument is taking on the cadence and flow of optimized autocomplete. The issue is not merely aesthetic; it is epistemic. When the range of expression narrows, the range of thought constricts as well—because language is not simply the vehicle of cognition; it is part of its logical architecture. Skepticism, irony, and discovery all involve texture: hesitation, epoché, idiosyncrasy, rhythm, even the right to be mistaken. These signal the mind’s real-time grappling with asymmetry and ambiguity—something the emerging AI standard style will sterilize in the name of efficiency and correctness. We risk entering an era of rhetorical monoculture—a linguistic equivalent of nutrient-depleted soil. Every sentence perfectly optimized and every answer authorized - no weeds, no wild growth, and eventually, no fertility either. TES

More staff spotlights! Teddy is a production assistant and poetry reader at Variant and an editorial fellow at A Public Space. His poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Hobart, ExPat Press, Poet’s Row, and elsewhere.

Meet Prose Editor, Brandon Ahmad Haffner! He received his MFA from UNC Greensboro. His fiction appears in the Sewanee Review, New Orleans Review, Harvard Review, Carolina Quarterly, & other journals. He teaches creative writing at Longwood University and lives in Richmond, VA

The 2 questions we're most asked at the food ministry I volunteer at: 1. What hoops do I have to jump through for food? 2. Do I have to go to church for food? To which we answer: 1. As few as we can get away with. 2. No.

@mgnchols Where can I donate?

Meet Tori Walters, Managing Editor of Flash Prose and Micros! "I am looking for work that dives deeper, goes a shade more vulnerable—and does so in a way that feels fully realized within the constraint of flash prose."

Sunday reminder that we're accepting poetry & prose variantlit.submittable.com/submit

@VariantLit And Fiona Mckay!

Excited to see Variant contributor, Megan Hanlon on this list!