Waccamaw is a graduate student and faculty collaboration featuring contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Our magazine is published online once a year, in the fall, by The Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University.

Our tenth anniversary print edition features selected work by a decade of contributors including Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Wilson, and Jake Adam York, alongside new and emerging writers and is available for purchase here.

Recent Waccamaw selections have won Best of the Net and inclusion in the Best American Series, and our contributors have gone on to win all manner of accolades, from Pushcarts to Poet Laureate.

We are a revolving, evolving crew. Here is our latest manifesto:  We hope to be a beacon to a kind of permeable shelter for the artist. We like work that digs into the belly. Listens carefully. Chisels to the heart. We are looking for distinct narratives, the unfamiliar in the familiar and the reverse. We find that homogeneity and dominant narratives are boring. We invite diversity in its every incarnation. We want fallen eyelashes, fists in the air, cracker crumbs, empathic truths and soul soothing fabrications. Fermented maybe. Soft maybe. But without delusion. Writers are not weak. We like bright characters and the court jesters of self. Thoughtfulness. Cavities. Laughter. Force us to roll our tongues in our minds eye. We love a tale and we love a hybrid. Literary/genre. Prose/Poem. Auto/fiction. We embrace satire. We want the rules and we want the breakages, but curate our experience so our center is opened. Let us taste the brine. We believe art should have an aura. Write us into spatial and temporal shifts, precise architectures, a museum for wanderers at the spine of the world. A continuation.

All material included in each issue is copyrighted by Waccamaw on behalf of the individual authors, who retain all reprint rights to their work upon publication.

Waccamaw banner covers in early issues were created from photographs of the Waccamaw River by Dan Albergotti.

Views expressed in Waccamaw, both in the creative work and in editorial comment, do not necessarily reflect the views of Coastal Carolina University, nor of its trustees, administration, faculty, staff, or students.

Waccamaw is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and is supported by the Department of English and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at Coastal Carolina University, as well as by a grant from Fred Hicks III.

ISSN 1944-5431