HOPKINSON: Tell me a little bit about Platform Review.
CREWS: For many years now in our community of writers and artists with ARTS By The People we have celebrated the platform as a metaphor for helping to give others voice. Years ago it began as an open mic / reading series in the Madison-Morristown area of New Jersey. In 2018 we launched a print journal and put out two really nice issues. But we wanted to reach a larger audience, and so just this spring we launched a new online literary and artistic venue.
HOPKINSON: How/why was Platform Review originally started?
CREWS: The original journal was simply another way to connect our local family of artists with the greater community. We realize now that by being available online / for free we are able to connect with more readers, writers, and visual artists. To make our project more nuanced, last year we launched too the Platform Chapbook Series, in which we selected two writers—one in prose, one in poetry—to each have one-hundred handmade and numbered books created by artist LK James. The books selected were Jen Soriano’s Making the Tongue Dry and Bruce Lowry’s Boyhood, Louisiana. They were both beautiful and we were overjoyed with what the first year of the project had become.
HOPKINSON: Who is your target reader audience?
CREWS: Really, anyone. At ARTS By The People we truly believe in the democratizing power the arts can bring to communities. Our mission is “to establish, operate, promote, and conduct educational programs, opportunities, classes, and sessions in the creative arts for the public, especially seniors and youth. Our goal is to empower individuals through collaborative acts of self-expression. It is our belief that the arts can also bridge social divisions and strengthen understanding, collaboration, and acceptance in communities of diversity and need.”
HOPKINSON: What type of work are you looking for?
CREWS: At the moment we are looking for poetry, prose, and visual art. The prose can be anything from fiction to memoir, drama to nonfiction. We would definitely like to read more lyric and experimental essays. And the poetry editors enjoy prose poems too. For visual art we ask for submissions that are a series of artwork that exhibits a specific voice, style, form, and theme. And when individuals submit we want to see at least (8) pieces or more in high-resolution JPG or GIF format so that we can fill the homepage “windows” of our review.
Eventually, however, we do plan to expand this platform of artists and work. With ARTS By The People, almost all our projects include collaboration—Moving Words finds and workshops spoken word pieces and then university students from around the world turn them into film shorts; Jump the Turnstiles takes spoken word pieces and brings film, music, and eventually dance together into a final performance; Intonation is a new project this year in which seven writers each had a poem turned into a musical composition via the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and will eventually end in a performance with the musical score and a dance ensemble.
To that end, we want Platform Review to also have these sorts of collaborative energies. Moving forward, people should continue to visit our submissions page because we will have calls for special projects… for example, video poems! (more to come)
Finally, during the month of March (and this will most likely be extended through April) we are accepting chapbook manuscripts in poetry and prose. There is a $15 reading fee but this is meant to help us produce and keep the project alive since we are a nonprofit and would not be able to operate otherwise. The writers selected receive fifteen copies of their finished book.
HOPKINSON: What do you wish you’d see submitted, but rarely comes in?
CREWS: Right now, we would like to see more lyric and experimental essays. We do not get many of those. And I know the poetry editors enjoy prose poems.
HOPKINSON: What are some of your favorite lit mags/journals?
CREWS: I got some input from the other editors and kept it to online venues to stay specific: Atticus Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, Driftwood Press, The HOPPER, Jacobin, Lime Hawk, Lunch Ticket, N+1, Pank, Storyscape, The Adirondack Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Winter Tangerine.
HOPKINSON: What is your favorite part of being on staff with Platform Review?
CREWS: This may sound a bit sentimental but we are all part of an ARTS By The People community that often feels like family. Our staff has worked on and participated in many collaborative projects over the years and this, Platform Review, is simply another one. Many of us too went to MFA together, share some of the same mentors in poets like Ross Gay and Judith Vollmer.
Personally, the writing life can sometimes feel a bit lonely—this voice calling into the void—and I’m curious at the moment even writing this how voice and void look like the same root, how we can imagine both as space on empty space. With that said, anyone local to the Morristown area of New Jersey should come by and share in some of our events—the monthly Platform open mic / reading series, the monthly Cellar Door writing workshop, or (virtually) our arts podcast exhibitA—and most will quickly see these spaces are filled with individuals who are nurturing, inspiring, and care deeply about sharing in the arts.
Just this year ARTS By The People received an award from the National Endowment of the Arts for a continued online / virtual offering of events to keep our local and greater communities alive with the arts. there are a lot of exciting things happening there and people should check us out to see how they might get involved: artsbythepeople.org.
To join as a reader simple send an email to platform@artsbythepeople.org with Virtual Platform Reader in the subject line, as well as your name in the body of the email. Each reader will have a time limit of three minutes. To join as an audience member, please send an email to platform@artsbythepeople.org with Virtual Platform Audience in the subject line. Both readers and audience members will receive an email with sign-in details the morning of The Platform.
HOPKINSON: Where can we send submissions?
CREWS: https://platformreview.org/submissions
HOPKINSON: If someone has a question, how can they contact you?
CREWS: We have an email that comes to the editors on our About page. But you can also find our journal and many of our editors on Instagram and Twitter—we are all visible and an encourage group and people should feel welcome to reach out to us. Thank you for the opportunity to share some of these projects!
Click here to read submission guidelines.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Dec. 20, 2020 for the Spring 2021 issue (Open year-round, rolling)
FORMAT: online
SUBMISSION FEE: None
PAYMENT: None
FORMS: poetry, prose, visual art
DUOTROPE: https://duotrope.com/listing/26294/platform-review
SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
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