Ecotone

ABOUT

Ecotone was founded in 2005 at the University of North Carolina Wilmington's creative writing department, built around the idea of "reimagining place" — publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction attentive to landscape, environment, and region without confining itself to nature writing as a genre. Founding editors included David Gessner and Kimi Faxon Hemingway; the magazine is now edited by Anna Lena Phillips Bell. Twenty years and 38 issues in, it has become one of the more distinctive literary magazines built around a thematic lens rather than a house style, running regular features like "Climate Annotations" and "Out of Place" alongside standard fiction and poetry sections, and drawing contributors such as Camille T. Dungy, Lia Purpura, and Rajiv Mohabir.

Ecotone is a print magazine published out of an MFA program, meaning it runs on an academic-year cadence with issues sold individually or by subscription through its online shop rather than given away free online (though selected pieces are posted on the site per issue). As a university-affiliated journal, it typically reads through a submission manager during open windows rather than year-round, and as with most Wilmington-adjacent journals in this tier, contributors are paid for accepted work, though the site content here doesn't state a specific rate. Poets should expect a themed but not rigid editorial sensibility — work engaging landscape, ecology, or a strong sense of place fares well, but the journal explicitly resists being pigeonholed as a nature magazine.