Founded in 1925, The Mekong Quarterly was established to publish fiction, essays, and poetry of unusual distinction, with particular regard for work shaped by borderlands, crossings, dislocations, and the persistent instability of place. Though founded by expatriates residing in Southeast Asia—and shaped in part by earlier writers who passed through the region—its interests remain international. The journal has long been drawn to writing touched by river cities, colonial afterlives, vanished itineraries, and those private acts of reinvention by which one life is exchanged for another.Over the decades, The Mekong Quarterly has maintained a quiet reputation among readers and contributors who value literature not merely as self-expression, but as a mode of witness, inquiry, and risk. Its pages have often made room for the reflective essay, the unsettling story, the travel-worn lyric, and the account—part recollection, part invention—that declines to separate experience too neatly from atmosphere. While never bound permanently to any one school or region, the journal has been especially hospitable to writers whose work bears the marks of distance: humid ports, inland capitals, border crossings, consular waiting rooms, guesthouses, riverboats, monsoon streets, and the particular moral weather of expatriate life.
The current editors remain committed, in principle, to the founder’s view that literature should enlarge the known world rather than merely decorate it. We seek writing that is lucid, shapely, and durable; writing alert to history, power, absurdity, longing, and the comedy of displacement. We continue to prefer the singular over the programmatic, the memorable over the timely, and the genuinely venturesome over the merely well-behaved..SubmissionsWe are not seeking submissions for the Summer 2026 issue at this time, but check the Calls for Submissions Page for topics on future issues.The Mekong Quarterly welcomes unsolicited submissions of fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and formally indeterminate work that may not sit comfortably within a single category. We are especially interested in writing with imaginative risk.We accept submissions year-round. Please submit only one prose piece at a time, or up to five poems in a single document. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, provided you notify us promptly if the work is accepted elsewhere. We ask that all submissions be previously unpublished. Response times vary, though we aim to reply within twelve weeks.SubscriptionsAnnual subscriptions to The Mekong Quarterly include access to all current issues and archived selections published during the subscription term. Subscribers sustain the magazine’s independence and help support new work that might otherwise remain uncollected, unseen, or unclassifiable.
For subscription inquiries, submissions,institutional rates, or questions regarding back issues, please contact the editors through the journal’s main page or email to [email protected].Home →