Events

SAND 22 Launch Event promotional image

Completing our year of archaeology, SAND 22 feels its way through the junk, keepsakes, and spaces we leave behind. Making sense of the past means both taking it apart and putting it back together. In the prose, poetry, and art of SAND 22, our pasts and presents prove surprisingly malleable.

Clutter dug out of a childhood home is recast into invaluable relics. A photograph’s absence becomes more poignant than its subject. Meanwhile, a scientist and his octopoid muse compose a counterpoint of sensory observations, and, on the outskirts of Berlin, an island brazenly invents its history with an ostentation of peacocks and uncomfortable desires.

To celebrate all of this & more,on Sunday, 28 February 2021 we held a virtual evening of selected performances from the new issue, streamed live via our YouTube channel. You can watch a replay of the event here.

SAND 22 Virtual Launch Event Trailer

Lineup

The event featured short readings by eight of our SAND 22 contributors as well as appearances by members of the SAND team.

Readers: Claire Dodd, Viva Padilla, Dorsía Smith Silva, Carol Claassen, Tariro Ndoro, Rushika Wick, Erin Honeycutt, and R.M. Fradkin

  • Claire Dodd‘s work has been published in The Rumpus and Columbia Journal (online) and awarded an honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s 2019 Short Story Award for New Writers contest. She received a BA in English from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She currently lives in San Francisco with her partner and son.  → Read a story of hers here at the Columbia Journal.
  • Viva Padilla is a bilingual poet and writer from South Central Los Angeles. She’s the founding editor in chief of Dryland, an independent and grassroots print literary journal. Viva’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in the L.A. Times, The Acentos Review, Cultural Weekly, wearemitú, and Every. Thing. Changes., an art exhibition by the L.A. Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Viva is a first-generation Chicana. She dedicates her work to the memory of her father and the sacrifice made by both of her parents.
  • Dorsia Smith Silva is a Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Portland Review, Stoneboat, Storyscape, Pidgeonholes, Eclectica Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also the editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering and the co-editor of six books. She is currently finishing her first poetry book. → Read a poem of hers here at the Superstition Review with audio from the poet.
  • Carol Claassen‘s prose has been noted in The Best American Essays 2011, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, nominated for Best of the Net, awarded The Forge Flash Nonfiction Competition Prize, and is published or forthcoming in The Pinch, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, The Forge Literary Magazine, Pidgeonholes, and 3Elements Review. She is working on a memoir about her relationship with her father while riding out the pandemic in her mother’s basement in Easton, Pennsylvania.
  • Tariro Ndoro is a Zimbabwean writer. Her short fiction has appeared on various literary platforms, including Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories (amabooks, 2017), La Shamba, New Contrast, Fireside Fiction, and Hotel Africa: New Short Fiction from Africa (New International- ist Publications, 2020). Her award-winning debut poetry collection, Agringada: Like a gringa, like a foreigner was published in 2019 by ModjajiBooks. Tariro resides in Harare, where she is currently working on a collection of short stories.
  • Rushika Wick is a poet with an interest in visual poetry and how social contracts impact the body. She has contributed to various magazines including Ambit, Datableed, and Tentacular as well as anthologies including SMEAR (Andrews McMeel, 2020) and MIR16. Her debut collection is being published by Verve next spring. → Read one of her works of visual poetry here at Tentacular.
  • Erin Honeycutt writes poetry, exhibition reviews, and a variety of texts in collaboration with artists. She has read text at Kadett (Amsterdam, 2019), IÐNO Theater (Reykjavik, 2019), FotoTallinn (Tallinn, 2019), Dzialdov Gallery (Berlin, 2019), Reykjavik Arts Festival (2018), DA Space (Heraklion, 2018), Beyond Human Impulses (Athens, 2018), and Pólar Festival (Stöðvarfjörður, 2017). She has an MA in Art History from the University of Iceland and one in Religion from the University of Amsterdam, and now lives in Berlin.
  • R.M. Fradkin studied writing with Amy Hempel and Bret Johnston at Harvard and has had short fiction published in Cherry Tree, Theaker’s Quarterly, Cleaver Magazine, and Tincture Journal, among others. She is also Affiliate Editor of the Alaska Quarterly Review. She is beginning an MFA at the University of Idaho in the fall.

SAND 22 Virtual Launch Event Read More »

On 11 October 2020, between the coronavirus lockdowns, we held a writing and reading event at Hopscotch Reading Room in collaboration with The Poetry Project.

We’ve been navigating a time in which communication has been largely limited to online interactions, all while we have a growing and pressing need to remain connected, and find new ways of connecting. Current and ongoing events have underscored our urgency, and a drive for immediacy. SAND and The Poetry Project (with the gracious assistance of HOPSCOTCH Reading Room) are coming together to explore what the intersection of multiple languages, some in the act of translation, can do to breathe more life into our sense of community– as well as to examine borders, both real and imagined.

We believe that poetry can and should be accessible to everyone– whether you’ve been writing for years, or you’d like to try your hand. In our effort to make this possible, we welcome you, regardless of your experience, to write and submit poems (on the day) that explore your own sense of urgency. The event will conclude with poetry readings reflecting our diverse experiences of the present moment. A selection of the day’s poetry submissions will be read, each by its author, alongside pieces contributed to the event by guest poets.

This event will be held exclusively OUTDOORS in the courtyard of Hopscotch. We’ll be following the most recent hygiene measures, so make sure to come early as we’ll have limited capacity. More info about our hygiene plan will be announced before the event.

Schedule:

  • 2:00pm: Meet & Greet & Write
  • 4:00pm: Deadline for submissions
  • Music
  • 4:30pm: Readings, Pt.1
  • 5:00pm: Intermission
  • 5:15pm: Readings, Pt. 2

The Poetry Project is a Berlin-based non-profit organization that helps young people with and without refugee backgrounds get to know one another and have their stories heard through the power of poetry. The Poetry Project was conceived with a focus on helping unaccompanied minors seeking refuge in Germany. Starting a new life in a foreign country presents many challenges, not least of which is the language barrier. As a response to this, we are a proudly multilingual organization working in four languages: Arabic, Persian, German, and English. We host readings, workshops, and publish anthologies presenting our poets’ work online and in print. Our objective is clear: we seek to break down barriers and make poetry accessible to everyone – we know that poetry is a language we can all speak. For more info, visit thepoetryproject.de.

Speaking of Urgency Read More »

SAND turns 10 this year, and we’ve got archaeology on the mind – from the origins of our journal, to the complex layers of our home city, Berlin, to the ways histories are mapped on our bodies.

The fiction, art, and poetry of our forthcoming issue examine aspects of the present that usually go unpreserved. How does it feel to be in our skin, in this place, at this time?

From 29 to 31 June 2020, SAND held a live-streamed weekend of readings, art explorations, musical performances, panel discussions, interactive sessions and more to celebrate the publication of SAND #21 and our 10-year anniversary.

Trailer featuring Paulina Domínguez’s animation of Vikram Ramakrishnan as well as readings by Rukmini Kalamangalam, Lizzy Yarwood, billy cancel, and SJ Fowler. Incorporating a clip from Claudio Herr’s opera Aquaria Palaoa.

If you missed the festival, you can still watch replays of the sessions on YouTube.

Programme

Friday, 29 May

SESSION ONE

Our first session kicking off the weekend includes three of the highlights from our event trailer above – the animated version of Vikram Ramakrishnan’s dystopian parable, Lizzy Yarwood’s experimental prose piece set in a Berlin public pool, and SJ Fowler’s poetic world tour of (teddy) bear species – as well as a studio tour with our cover artist, Morgan Stokes, and music by the acoustic duo flora falls

Welcome with Editor in Chief, Jake Schneider

Readings by Charlotte Wührer, Rachel Karyo, SJ Fowler, Kyle Snyder, Vikram Ramakrishnan, Natalie Crick, Lizzy Yarwood, Thomas Mixon

Art by Megan Archer and Morgan Stokes

Music by flora falls

 

Saturday, 30 May

SESSION TWO

In Saturday’s session, the German writer-translator Lucy Jones reads her translation of the German actor and columnist Mateja Meded’s polemic on the experiences of people of color in Germany. Look forward to Dženana Vucic’s “Vagina Guinusia,” an intimate story about a sea crab; Waverly SM’s venomous rattlesnake poem; a lyrical poem by our trailer’s Rukmini Kalamangalam; and more.

Readings by Dženana Vucic, Gboyega Odubanjo, David Felix, Lucy Jones, Brad Garber, Waverly SM, Larry Brown, Rukmini Kalamangalam

Art by Carrie Crow and Siru Wen

 

PANEL: “How to Build a SAND Castle: Ten Years’ Tides of Literary Organizing”

with past and present editors of SAND, including our founding editor, Becky L. Crook

We look back on ten years of our journal with a few of the nearly eighty alumni who have built and shaped our publishing project and kept it going for a decade on a shoestring budget. What have we learned along the way? How has the literary and artistic landscape evolved since 2010?

With Jake Schneider, current Editor in Chief; Simone O’Donovan, current Managing Editor; Lyz Pfister, former Editor in Chief; Greg Nissan, former Poetry Editor; and Becky L. Crook, our founder.

 

 Sunday, 31 May

SESSION THREE 

Rounding out the weekend, we have performances plus discussions with current editors and contributors. 

We began with a reading by the mysterious billy cancel in a mask – a suddenly more familiar garment. Many of the other presenters engage with our new issue’s theme of archaeology, including Jeff Gu’s piece about editorial intervention in queer history, Zophia McDougal’s Ancient Roman anecdote, and Sinejan Buchina’s art (from the trailer), which offers residues of the past rearranged into messages for the present and reminds us “how we leave our marks behind.” Finally, Landers’ experimental folk rock brought us back into the here and now.

Readings by Jeff Gu, billy cancel, Jessica Robinson, Andrew Wells, Courtney Garvey, Scott Strom, Robin Gow, Zophia McDougal, JM Parker

Art by Javier Lozano, Casper Cammeraat, Sinejan Buchina

Music by Landers

 

FEATURE: Live Encounters: Contributors in Conversation with their Editors, and SAND Editors Answer Writers’ Questions”

Our final session of the festival featured current editors in conversation with contributors for SAND #21. Our editors also answered writers’ questions.

Poet Rukmini Kalamangalam speaks with Poetry Editor Crista Siglin about motherhood, migration, and what the reader brings to the poem. Art Editor Ruhi Amin and SAND #21 cover artist Morgan Stokes discussed the value of print publishing for visual artists. Prose Editors Ashley Moore and Melissa Richer conversed with Mexican author Karla Marrufo Huchim and literary translator Allison A. deFreese about experimental fiction, taking risks with narrative points of view, and the importance of literary translation.

This was followed by a Q&A in which our editors answered questions that authors, poets, and artists sent in before the festival.

 

Cover image by Morgan Stokes. Previews of works from SAND #21 by Megan Archer, Sinejan Buchina, Becky L. Crook, David Felix, Kyriaki Goni, Jeff Gu, Rachel Karyo, Celestine Krier, Fabrice Le Nezet, Karla Marrufo Huchim tr. Allison A. Defreese, Momtaza Mehri, and Vikram Ramakrishnan.

In SAND #21, archaeology is the study of context. It’s not just about digging up the past, but about reimagining the vanished context it came from, a day-to-day landscape in which the world made a different kind of sense. In Jeff Gu’s “The Grieving Emperor”, an editor puts a red pen to a Roman love story to highlight queer erasure in history. Zophia McDougal humanizes the same empire’s abstract units of measurement. J.M. Parker’s characters visit a Canaanite arch in the crossfire of the Israel-Palestine conflict, juxtaposing the old silenced stones against today’s cacophony. In Singapore, Hsien Min Toh describes a ledger of donations towards funeral expenses, a written record that swallows its wordless grief. (Read more…)

SAND #21’s cover artist is Morgan Stokes (b. 1990), an Australian emerging artist. After a four month residency in Berlin in 2019 followed by a year long practice in Germany, he is now located back in Sydney. Stokes holds a Master of Design from the University of New South Wales. Understanding the internet as a place where past and future coexist in the present, Stokes’ works draw from our fraught relationship with technology, juxtaposing the nascent visual language of digital screens with the tradition of oil painting. Stokes fragments and blends forms and ideas in order to challenge and explore identity, digital anxiety and the new, technology-centric human condition. See more of Morgan’s work on his website.

2020 marks 10 years of publishing SAND, and we’re celebrating this milestone with a special “anthology” section in SAND #21, which revisits a few highlights of our past 20 issues. It’s wonderful to see how our past contributors’ careers have developed since they first submitted to SAND, from Momtaza Mehri, who became the Young People’s Poet Laureate for London, to Elvia Wilk, who published her debut novel, Oval, last year with Soft Skull Press and Saša Stanišić, who won the prestigious German Book Prize in 2019 for his novel, Origin (Herkunft). Momtaza, Elvia, and Saša’s contributions are all reprinted in the new issue.

Highlights of Lineup

 

Here were some of the highlights:

◦ Exclusive micro-readings from more than two dozen contributing poets, essayists, and fiction writers over the course of the weekend.

A few of the readers, clockwise from top left: Dženana Vucic, Gboyega Odubanjo, Zophia McDougal, Jeff Gu, and a masked billy cancel in the center.

◦ Artist talks, including a visit to the studio of our cover artist Morgan Stokes during Session 1 on Friday.

Visit to Morgan Stokes’s studio. (Painting on left: Man In Green II, 2020)

◦ On Friday, a short animation by Paulina Domínguez of Vikram Ramakrishnan’s story “Eggs,” which is published in the issue.

Still from Paulina Domínguez’s animation

◦ On Saturday, a panel discussion with SAND alumni editors from the past ten years, including our founder Becky L. Crook, reflecting on how we got here. How do you build a “SAND castle”? What makes an independent literary organization last?

An earlier cohort of the SAND team on a retreat in 2011

◦ On Sunday, a feature where our editors and contributors meet “face to face” and discuss their mutual experiences of the publishing process. This part will be just as exciting for our editors, but also for writers and artists who are curious for a look behind the scenes.

◦ Experimental folk rock by Landers and an acoustic set from flora falls, both based in Berlin.

And even more.

10th Anniversary & SAND 21 Launch Read More »

On 22nd November 2019, the SAND team launched SAND #20 Taboo at Prachtwerk Berlin. SAND #20 is full of taboos and transgressions, secrets and profanities, all of which would likely be censored in many times and places. Mothers walk around both inspiringly and obscenely naked, a 16th-century fire consumes gay men and furniture as equally disposable, pro-democracy poets embrace profanity as resistance, shameful body parts become the center of eroticism, lovers battle polar bears alongside the confines of monogamy, and mothers hide their real monsters in the euphemism of bedtime stories, all while the young women in Sookoon Ang’s cover art refuse to be the types of bodies that are put on magazine covers.

The SAND team are extremely grateful to Kfir Harbi, achso! Media for his photography at the event and all of our guests who joined us to launch our 20th issue in style. If you’d like to know more about Kfir’s photography, please check out his Instagram.



 


Love SAND? Please consider donating to our winter funding drive. As we prepare to ring in 2020 and celebrate our 10-year anniversary, we’d like to invite you to become part of it all with a donation that will support independent literature and art. It doesn’t matter whether you can give €5 or €50: your donation provides an all-important space for creativity, diversity, experimentation, and community.

We’d love for you to be a part of our community.

SAND 20 Launch: Taboo Read More »

At sunset on 22 August 2019, SAND hosted an open-air reading in a circle of stones at Tempelhofer Feld, a former airfield turned public park in Berlin.

Readers

BENJAMIN WAGNER is the author of two illustrated books of erasure poetry, A Race with The Sea and Nightlight (Die Oase) and the forthcoming novel Hideaways. His work has appeared in many hard-to-pronounce publications such as Isthmus, Neologism, and Vaidapé. He creates installations of non-invasive graffiti poetry around the world.

ROSE WARNER MILES grew up in New York, where she worked at the amazing Museum of Natural History surrounded by minerals and fossils. She likes to write about “modes of interrupted or mediated experience, such as vicarious trauma, mistranslation, or abandoned living spaces.” She’s recently had poems featured in FU Review and she’s working on her first collection.

CASS EDDINGTON is a poet from Utah who’s also a teacher. Her manuscript if the garden was a finalist in Kelsey Street Press‘s 2017 FIRSTS. She teaches creative writing online, has done community arts organising, and is working on a PhD in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

IAN ORTI was born in Canada to Ecuadorian and Irish parents. He has won awards for both of his two novels, The Olive and the Dawn and L , and has most recently published a story collection called Royal Mountain City Fugue. You can also find his writing in McSweeney’s, in Canadian French, and in SAND.

DEMI ANTER is a poet and spoken word artist who has been on stage at the Glastonbury Festival, and on paper in places like Ninth LetterThe Selkie and MOJO. She’ll be performing at the Edinburgh Fringe and Electric Picnic next month.

EMMA FLYNN is an Irish writer whose fiction, non-fiction and reviews have been published by The Cardiff ReviewThe Stinging FlyBustle, and more. She’s now working on her first novel.

RAPHAEL KORANDA is another writer from Ireland, who also grew up partly in Germany. They write poetry and prose about place, language, and belonging and perform regularly at open mics.

SIOBHAN LEDDY is an editor, writer, and researcher. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in CatapultEntropy, and more. She’s interested in amateur microbiology, geopoetics, and weird invisibilia.

Photos by José Ibáñez.

SAND Open Air Read More »

Image: “Hair Vigilante” by Vicky Charles, 2018.

We’ll be launching our new issue, SAND 19, on 24 May 2019. Come and celebrate with us!

From Istanbul to Greenland, Nigeria, and the Caribbean, the prose, poetry, and art of SAND 19 resound with dissonance, disconnection, and things not quite where they should be…

Join us at ACUD MACHT NEU to toast the new issue with a night of our signature micro-readings and music until late.

Exclusive live readings from SAND 19 contributing writers:

KRISTINA ANDERSSON BICHER is a poet, essayist, and translator living in New York City. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, Plume, Denver Quarterly, and others. She is the author of the poetry collection She-Giant in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again, due out from MadHat Press in Autumn 2019.

CANDICE NEMBHARD is a Birmingham-born writer, poet, and artist based in Berlin. She is the founder of the Afro-European archive The Black Borough and co-founder of writers’ and artists’ collective Poet & Prophetess.

ARIANNA REICHE is an American writer based in London. Her short fiction has been published by Popshot, Ambit Magazine, and Lighthouse Journal. She won first prize in Glimmer Train’s 2017 Fiction Open, and is represented by Curtis Brown UK.

MARINA REZA was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh and raised in New York City. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Newtown Literary Journal, Bone 140 Bouquet, Having A Whiskey Coke With You, First Times: A Collection of Stories, and Künstler Künstlerin.

Followed with music from PAY RISE until late.

Details

When 8 pm on 24 May 2019ACUD MACHT NEU, Veteranenstraße 21, 10119 Berlin, Germany

 

SAND subscriptions at special launch-day discount prices will also be available on the night.

For more, RSVP on Facebook.

Based in Berlin, SAND is a nonprofit literary journal featuring writing and art from around the world, particularly from underrepresented perspectives.

Out of Place: Launching SAND 19 Read More »

Who, if not contemporary writers, are better qualified to reflect on the absurd, the utopian and the dystopian implications of Brexit? Who better to riff on the intentionally and unintentionally amusing, the realer than real and the weirdly surreal?

In the run-up to midnight, when Britain was set to officially leave the EU, join us at the Literaturhaus Berlin to grieve, commiserate and attempt — with a pinch of black British humour cut with courage and cynicism — to find comfort and new beginnings in literature, music and art. Throughout the night, an exciting lineup of writers will respond to Brexit and tackle the question “And Now What?” featuring authors including: Priya Basil, Patricia Duncker, Ben Fergusson, Alec Finley, Jo Frank, Lucy Jones, Scott Martingell, Kate McNaughton, Jacinta Nandi, Alistair Noon, Musa Okwonga, and Paul Scraton.

Take part in a fully immersive evening that celebrates the imperviousness of British literature and culture to borders and customs administration. Anglophiles of all nationalities are in for a night of readings, music from the band BBXO, and discussion, as well as typewritten, specially commissioned texts from the writers’ collective Literatur für das, was passiert, Yael Inokai, Daniela Dröscher, Christian Dittloff, and Paula Fürstenberg, and work from the Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Clemens Wilhelm.

Fueled by British refreshments, there’s no reason not to keep calm and carry on till midnight.

 

Credits

Curatorial support: Charlotte Wührer

Host: Asmus Trautsch

Illustration: Tom Moore

 

Details

Tickets [email protected]

When 29 March 2019

Time  7.30 pm – midnight

Where  Fasanenstraße 23, 10719 Berlin

 

A cooperation with the Humboldt University Berlin’s Centre for British Studies, the University of Oxford’s Faculty of English, Torch, SAND, and Deveron Projects.

Brexit… And Now What? Read More »

March 2019

SIX FEET UNDER POETRY: an immersive theatre experience feat. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

6 March 2019, Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde, Bergstr. 29, Berlin 10115 (U8 Rosenthaler Platz or S Nordbahnhof)

SAND presented a unique immersive literary event, curated by Jos Porath and Corinna Duemler, within the walls of a historic Protestant cemetery, Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde Berlin.

On 6 March 2019 – the 213th anniversary of Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s birth, and two days before International Women’s Day – Berlin’s iconic Sophienkirche Cemetery II became the stage for multi-sensory literary performance. Inspired by the tradition of promenade theatre, five locations around the historic cemetery served “stages” for  literary-theatrical episodes celebrating Browning’s life and work, and how it continues to resonate almost two centuries on, exploring themes of confinement, nature, privilege, revoluionary politics, paganism, Christianity, the “fallen woman,” the limitations of words, and more.

Carrying candles through the dark, the audience discovered Browning’s poetry, translations, and prose, as well as her incredible biography: from navigating the artistic patriarchy of her era, to campaigning for the abolition of slavery and child labour.

 

Credits

Directorial Team:
Jos Porath and Corinna Duemler

SAND Event Coordinator: 
Joey Bahlsen

Set and Costume Design: 
Jos Porath

Sound Design: 
Shattercones

Vocals: 
Kyriaki Kardelis

Performers: 
Mai Harper, Nechama Rothschild, Laurean Wagner, Alice Colley, Ivana Sokala

Guides:
Crista Siglin, Matthew Deery, Corinna Duemler, Jake Schneider, Joey Bahlsen

Other Volunteers: 
Ruby Mason, Melissa Richer, Joshua Williams

 

Directors

Jos Porath is a director of immersive installations, born and raised in Berlin, Germany. They have studied, trained, lived and worked in Germany, the United States, England, Bolivia, France and Austria. Jos has been directing and producing immersive installations since 2014. Their work has been shown in various off-site venues internationally, including as part of theater and performance art festivals, in Germany, UK, Columbia and Bulgaria among others. They have trained with immersive theater pioneers SIGNA (Denmark/Austria) and Punchdrunk (UK). Jos’ installations explore notions of accountability, self-determination, vulnerability and poetic experientiality in non-traditional immersive formats.

Growing up in Berlin, Corinna Duemler developed an early interest in theater, photography and film. After she completed her further education at Emerson College in Boston and Goldsmiths University in London, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. Having completed her studies, she returned to her hometown to work as an assistant for numerous theater productions at such institutions as the Komische Oper, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Volksbühne Berlin. Recent years have seen her realize own projects on and increased involvement with new forms of theater. Her collaboration with Jos Porath began with “The Shells – Ausflug nach Neu-Friedenwald,” a production for which she served as dramaturge. With her interests firmly rooted in the intuitive qualities of theater, she now seeks to apply her professional practice and unique point of view to developing advanced theatrical contact through the immersive format.

 

Details

When 6 March 2019

1st performance: 18:00-19:00, 2nd performance: 19:15-20:15 (sold out)

Where  Friedhof Sophien II, Bergstr. 29, Berlin 10115 

Six Feet Under Poetry Read More »

Main image designed by Bárbara Fonseca incorporating the issue cover photograph of Elina Bergmark Wiberg’s ‘Still Life with Grapes’, 2017, mixed media including silicone, soap and legumes, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist.

Who are our people? What came before us? How far back can we go?

Our 18th issue features work from Brazil, the Philippines, Nigeria, and everywhere in between, seeking to find long-lost relatives, question identities, and reckon with personal histories.

Come and toast its launch with us, enjoy micro-readings from SAND’s extended family and a party until late.

Readers

SASKIA VOGEL is a Berlin-based writer and translator who grew up in the US and Sweden. Her debut novel will be published in 2019, and her work has previously been published in Granta, The Paris Review, The White Review, Sight & Sound, The Offing, and more.

BRADLEY SCHMIDT is a Leipzig-based American translator and editor of the literary blog “Leipzig Is Lit”. He’ll be reading his translations of Maren Kames’ poems, one of which, “Sendoff Salvos” from “halb taube halb pfau”, appears in SAND Issue 18.

ALEXIS SMILEY SMITH is a Berlin-based writer originally from Oregon. “Uncle of Things”, a piece of creative non-fiction featured in SAND Issue 18, is part of her thesis work entitled “Liminal Spaces: Essays On the Beautiful Terror.”

ELINA BERGMARK WIBERG is a multimedia artist based in Stockholm, whose work features in SAND Issue 18. She’ll be talking about her artistic practice, including her unique use of a range of materials in her installations, from soap and silicone to legumes.

DJs

Readings will be followed by DJ sets from James Falco (aka Mary Scherpe & Florian Duijsens) and Rawry D.

Details

When 8 p.m. on 30 November 2018

Where 
Marie-Antoinette, Holzmarktstraße 15-18, Jannowitzbrücke, 10179 Berlin 

Doors open at 8:00pm
Entry €5
Reduced entry
€4
Entry + Issue 18 at the door €12 

Transportation S+U Jannowitzbrücke

For more, RSVP on the Facebook page.

Based in Berlin, SAND is a nonprofit literary journal published twice a year by a team from the city’s international community. Featuring work by writers, translators, and artists from around the world, SAND seeks out fresh and underrepresented perspectives.

Family Issues: Launching SAND 18 Read More »

We will be sharing a stand called Indiecon Island with this fantastic lineup of independent magazines from Germany. So stop by and say hi to us and our fellow magazine makers. Jake and Ashley from SAND will be there in person on Wednesday and Thursday, but copies are available all week and we have special dispensation from the book fair to sell them.

Looking forward to meeting some of you in Frankfurt, and extremely grateful to Die Brᵫder from Hamburg for making IndieCon Island happen.

Here is a bit more about the other magazines at our stand (all of them are published in German apart from gentle rain; tau prints the original language beside German translations):

  • Brasilia tells stories by designers, for designers.
  • Graustufen is an audio magazine of design and society. Each episode of the podcast is devoted to a topic that we discuss and explore with designers and figures from the cultural and creative scene.
  • Das Wetter is a quarterly magazine of writing and music. Originally founded as a music magazine, it has grown into a platform for a wide range of artists who work with the medium of text.
  • Die Epilog is a magazine from Weimar and Berlin that theoretically examines the present moment with a focus, an attitude, and an edge.
  • Since its founding in 1993, Edit has become one of the most important journals of contemporary German-language literature, releasing three issues per year of poetry, prose, drama, new translations, and literary esays.
  • FROH! Magazine believes that good stories can change society, looks for joyful leeway in daily life, and tells stories about people who shape their surroundings.
  • gentle rain is a magazine about Hamburg. It looks at co-existence in urban space, portrays people in the city, and shows how they live and work. We also make excursions into the creative habitats, urban enclaves and nearby retreats in and around the metropolis that is our home.
  • If intellectuals express simple things in complex ways and artists do the reverse, where do publishers fit in? Korbinian Verlag, founded in 2015, seeks to redefine this profession for today by remembering Berlin’s 1920s publishing scene. Currently shortlisted for the Berlin Publishers’ Prize.
  • Missy magazine is a feminist magazine of pop culture, politics, and style for a generation of women who take their lives into their own hands.
  • Prothese magazine brings together essays and articles from various perspectives in monothematic issues: a cross-section of open-minded thought in mint condition.
  • Samlung Walter is a new fashion and interiors label. Each product is developed in three variations of equal value based a common original idea: either homemade, manufactured, or created individually by the designer and craftsperson. 
  • Slanted, founded in 2014, is a prizewinning semiannual print magazine of international design and culture.
  • tau is a new literary journal from Hamburg that selects writing and art on pre-announced themes across genre boundaries and with a strong translation focus.
  • ZurQuelle is a colorful, playful magazine of national and international reportage that sheds light on pop culture and social discourses but isn’t above making the odd dirty joke.

SAND at Frankfurt Book Fair Read More »