In Kimmery Martin’s second novel, one character tells another, “Sometimes there’s no antidote for what’s wrong,” to which they receive the response, “There’s an antidote for everything…sometimes you just have to figure out what it is…sometimes the cure is worse than the poison.” This sort of pragmatist logic and quasi-medical jargon pack the pages of the author’s sophomore effort. Throughout her latest novel, the doctor-turned-writer builds on the skills developed in 2018’s The Queen of Hearts and works to use the platform of fiction to draw readers into soapy drama structures while pointing to a more serious reality: discrimination in medicine.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our inaugural Black History Month Special Issue, in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. We want to thank everyone who submitted for creating art and sharing their work with us, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. All winners and runner-ups will be published on Wednesday, February 19th, or shortly thereafter.

For an afternoon, Georgie offered me friendship and $50 dollars’ worth of Kanekalon jumbo, included in the box style. Braiding hair, silk-soft and crimped, blackest at the tips. I took her offers, because I wanted a friend and saved enough money to buy a new version of myself that month.

The owner had been dead three weeks when the dog vanished.

Pay attention on the subway. Things can happen fast. Trains derail. Maybe the conductor will announce that your train will skip all stops between 149th Street and Grand Concourse and 42nd Street-Times Square because of track work. Don’t listen to music too loudly, so you can hear the announcement if the conductor decides to make it. You need to get from 149th street and 3rd avenue (in the Bronx) to 125th street (in Harlem) to pick up a pint of gin from the liquor store before you go to a new club in Bushwick. You don’t want to buy drinks inside the venue—who wants to pay $13 for an eight-ounce drink when you could just pay $7 for a whole pint? Sneak it in. You need to get the alcohol in Harlem because it’s cheaper, and your friend Isabella asked you to get it from this store, because the prices “are basically wholesale,” and you always take Isabella’s advice. Isabella. You always go out of your way for her.

“We’re not sure why the pond turns pink; I mean, there are theories,” Zed said, right hand forcefully punctuating his words, left hand on the wheel.

“It’s been twelve years of love and quiet work to get it here,” Douglas Stuart recently said on Instagram of his debut novel. “The first draft was 900 pages long and needed to be housed in two ring binders. There has been 13 drafts since, and lots of self doubt, laughter, and distractions along the way.” A similar range of emotions can be experienced when reading Shuggie Bain, a heart-wrenching tale that unfolds and unravels across 400 pages and more than a decade of love, loss, and pride.

National Book Award winner Lily Tuck is very familiar with tackling the plights of women characters across time and place in her writing. Her latest work, Heathcliff Redux and Other Stories, picks up on these themes while also playing with form. Comprised of a novella and four short stories, the collection looks at human situations with control and complexity as Tuck takes readers through a number of case studies where characters hope (mostly to little avail) to be an exception to the cruel rules of reality.

At the Columbia Journal, we believe in creating space for and celebrating traditionally underrepresented voices. We seek out and support marginalized writers year-round, but this March marks our first ever Womxn’s History Month special issue. Our website will feature writing and creative expressions from artists reflecting the diversity of non-men, non-binary folx, women, and all those of marginalized genders. We are particularly interested in work related to the intersectionality of gender and other identities, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration, age, sex, sexual and/or romantic orientation, class, and more.

The Columbia Journal is now open for submissions to our annual Spring Contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Our badass and wonderful judges include Melissa Febos in nonfiction, Analicia Sotelo in poetry, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine in fiction.

The last time it snowed in Phoenix I was nine and we all still lived together in the big house. In my mind snow was grouped with landscapes like forests and the ocean and with phenomena like the Northern Lights. In Phoenix snow was used as a decoration for Christmas—I remembered cutting tissue paper into snowflakes in second grade, and watching Dad hanging light-up icicles from the eaves of our house like earrings. I think we were both surprised when it snowed—me and my city.

The Columbia Journal is now open for submissions to our annual Spring Contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Winners of the Spring Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. Up to three finalists will also be selected and announced in each genre and published on our website, though there is no cash prize. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is February 23rd, 2020. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. More guidelines can be found here.

In an alleyway between the Uptown Theater and the Mister Maharashi Indian Restaurant, a cocaine dealer is waiting for a client. Warily, shiftily, he glances up and down the street. Occasionally he looks behind him into the alleyway, which connects to a second alleyway, which in turn connects to a third and a fourth, giving the dealer multiple paths of escape—lines of flight—if police come down the street to catch him. Like a woodchuck, he has left himself many exits from his burrow.

The winter my father’s mother moved out of our home was nothing short of fanged, for where we lived on the Gulf. The roads froze. My father drove us to visit the seniors’ facility after school twice a week, a 10-minute drive away. Her private suite had a little TV deep as it was wide; I could just barely wrap my arms all the way around. While she puttered around her stoveless, ovenless kitchen to fix us styrofoam plates of no-bake cheesecake she’d set in the fridge the night before, we would sit on her sofa and wait for the early-afternoon soap opera programming block to end and the late-afternoon game show programming block to begin.

Recently my colleagues in the English Department made a collective push to compel my getting a cat since, in their generous estimations, cats have shown a remarkable affinity for me and vice versa. It is true cats do appear to gravitate towards my presence in ways my colleagues do not when I visit their homes. I have no rationale for it since I’ve never owned a cat. I also haven’t thought much about acquiring any sort of pet as of late, either, in the midst of finishing my tenure review portfolio this term. In addition, I frequently make any number of the usual excuses for not getting a cat: the expense, the investment of time, the shredding of precious material items, what will happen if the match goes wrong, et cetera. But I don’t admit to them I’m the kind of soft-hearted libertine who enjoys other people’s cats because of my complete lack of responsibility for them, knowing they will return to their owners to commit the rank misdeeds I won’t have to encounter myself. Cuddle benefits, then, with none of the fuss and dander at my place. A solid deal for me, I’d concluded. This self-satisfied mentality of mine likely irritates my colleagues to no end about my resistance more than anything else, among my other notable shortcomings.

In the beginning, there were only two. My brother and I, the only children our father would ever have, a man whose face we never saw. We are War and Discord, here long before such titles existed. Long before their wise carpenter gave them a new God to follow. They came and they went, and we outlived them all.

We sit in the sauna talking, my baby brother and me. He’s twelve years younger, a serious just-turned-ten.

“More water on the rocks?” I ask. I peek up through yellowed light to the temperature gauge. It’s 75 Celsius, not as hot as we usually keep it. Even at 100 our grandparents won’t get out to cool off. We are Finnish, this is what our people do, have always done.

Dressing, not stuffing. That’s a distinction she clings to even after all these years up north. Her worn hands crumble cornbread and white bread together over a mixing bowl, skin papery, veins dark. Martha has been fascinated lately with her veins. Dark, protruding, obvious—they seem so very exposed. She pokes one, and watches it roll around on her wrist like a pitiful snake. Dave had loved her dressing.

Yi held his keys in his hand, ready to leave, but Crystal was blocking his way.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“Sweetheart,” he said. “I’m on my way to meet Alberto. We can talk when I get back.”

“I called the office yesterday. Alberto said you hadn’t been in all day.”

“Hello.” This time it was a sing-songy voice, twinkling with melody. They were all so different and yet, somehow, few sculpted a mental image in Diana’s mind. With each hello, she heard suggestions of the words that would follow, but often she saw only the gray of the screen, the purple logo, and the highlighted row of the call list.