About Us

Founded in late 2008, the mission of The Critical Flame is to spark intelligent discussions about literature and culture by publishing long-form literary and critical essays as well as conversations and translated nonfiction.

We encourage writers from all backgrounds to submit their work for consideration, particularly those who have encountered barriers due to their gender, sexuality, racial identity, disability, lack of academic credentials, or exclusion from social networks that generate opportunities. Click here to review our submissions policies.

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Daniel E. Pritchard, Editor, is the founder of The Critical Flame. A poet, translator, and essayist, his work has been published by Sepia, Pangyrus, The Wild Word, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. Find out more at his website.

Alison Lanier, Contributing Editor, is a Boston-based writer. She is one of the founding editors of Mortar Magazine and served as film editor and columnist at Atticus Review. Her reviews and essays appear at Ms. Magazine, Bitch, Counterpoint Magazine, and The Wellesley Review, where she also served as editor.

Nora Delaney, Contributing Editor, is a poet, translator, and critic. She holds a PhD from the Editorial Institute of Boston University. Her writing can be found in Literary Imagination, Two Lines Online, Absinthe: New European Writing, Subtropics, Pusteblume, Little Star, Fulcrum, The Arts Fuse, and elsewhere.

Valerie Duff-Strautmann, Contributing Editor, is a poet, editor, and critic whose writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, The Common, The Boston Globe, PN Review, and Harvard Review. Her book, To the New World (Salmon Poetry), was shortlisted for the 2011 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, St. Botolph Foundation, and VCCA, she is the poetry editor of Salamander Magazine and works as a freelance writer.

Chloe Garcia-Roberts, Contributing Editor, is the author of The Reveal (Noemi Press, 2015) and translator of Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions, 2014), which was awarded a 2013 PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, A Public Space, and Interim Magazine, among others. She lives in Boston and is the managing editor of the Harvard Review.

Matthew Jakubowski, Contributing Editor, is a fiction writer and literary critic. He has served as a fiction panelist for the Best Translated Book Award, interviews editor for Asymptote, and is a reader for the Open Prose Series from Rescue Press. His work appears regularly in a wide array of publications, including The Brooklyn Rail, 3:AM Magazine, Music and Literature, The Paris Review Daily, and Great Jones Street. He lives in West Philadelphia.

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, Contributing Editor, has published stories and essays in AGNI, Joyland, Post Road, The North American Review, and numerous anthologies including Walang Hiya (Carayan Press, 2010) and Screaming Monkeys (Coffee House Press, 2003). In 2013, he was selected as a NYC Emerging Writer Fellow from The Center for Fiction. Ricco received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has taught at Boston College and the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. He is a board member of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. Ricco is completing a PhD in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and completing his first novel.

Mia You, Contributing Editor, is a doctoral student in English at UC Berkeley. Her first full-length poetry book, I, Too, Dislike It, is forthcoming from 1913 Press. With Chloe Garcia-Roberts, she co-edits A. BRADSTREET, a journal on poetry and motherhood.

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress number for The Critical Flame is ISSN 2155-2347