Notes from Crew Quarters: March Madness!

This week, we asked our editors: If you were filling out March Madness brackets for literary journals instead of basketball teams, who would make your Final Four?

Robin McCarthy, Managing Editor

Bracket theme is VIDA performance and Final Four are: Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, and Cincinnati Review based on crushingly high representation of women writers in 2014, and we'll throw Ninth Letter into the mix as a wildcard, based on fabulous 2013 numbers followed by a shocking upset last year that kept them out of the sweet sixteen altogether. No telling what that journal's gonna do!

Jacque Boucher, Spoken Word Poetry 

I gotta go with my gut and say Bat City Review, Barrelhouse, Cartridge Lit, and Cream City Review. The theme of this is, of course, "let's bump your weird stuff up against my weird stuff and see what kind of weird stuff we can make together."

Hayli Cox Associate Nonfiction Editor

The Sun, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and of course Passages!

Sara Ryan, Associate Poetry Editor

Poetry, Muzzle, Winter Tangerine, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal are some of my faves right at this moment.

Jason Teal, Associate Nonfiction Editor

The Atlantic, Huffington Post, The New Yorker, and Heavy Feather Review.

Ashely Adams, Associate Nonfiction Editor

People have been counting them out, but I think the Journal of Endocrinology has a real chance for an upset.

Matt Weinkam, Managing Editor 

In the Midwest bracket, Booth wins in an upset over the Indiana Review. Despite the best efforts of Hayden's Ferry and Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review takes the South. It's a Cinderella story in the East for The American Reader which somehow beats Story Quarterly and Ploughshares only to go down in the elite eight to perennial powerhouse Conjunctions. And in the West, McSweeney's and Tin House end up destroying each other leaving the bracket wide open for an online journal like DIAGRAM to sneak into the final four.

Patricia Killelea, Poetry Editor

Waxwing, Yellow Medicine Review, As/Us and Mud City Journal all put out serious work that moves my spooky soul.

Jen Howard, Editor-in-Chief 

In the tournament in my short-short heart, publishers of tiny, oddball, surprising work take down the big dogs one by one. My final four: Paper Darts, Smokelong Quarterly, NANO Fiction, Cheap Pop.