Amherst, MA— The Common magazine, the award-winning literary journal based at Amherst College, has been selected for a 2019 Amazon Literary Partnership grant. Since 2017, funding from the Amazon Literary Partnership has helped further The Common’s mission of publishing and promoting emerging and diverse authors who deepen our individual and collective sense of place.
Since 2009, the Amazon Literary Partnership program has awarded more than $12 million in grants to more than 150 organizations, including the National Book Foundation, PEN America, and Poets & Writers amongst others. Through these grants, the Literary Partnership program helps to uplift and amplify marginalized voices in order to promote a more diverse literary community. In 2019, the Amazon Literary Partnership worked with the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses to establish a new Literary Magazine Fund, and The Common is one of only 15 magazines awarded a grant from the Fund in its inaugural year.
“The Amazon Literary Partnership’s goal has been to support organizations that are vital to sustaining the literary culture of their communities,” said Neal Thompson, Manager of the Amazon Literary Partnership. “By funding organizations working to uplift the voices of underrepresented writers, we hope to champion the writers of the world we live in now.”
With this grant, The Common plans to continue its series of portfolios featuring translated Arabic fiction, co-edited by Jordanian author Hisham Bustani, with an upcoming collection from Sudan. This portfolio by Sudanese writers, a literary community often overlooked even by Arabic publishers, will follow The Common’s Issue 11 portfolio, featuring 26 authors from 15 Arabic countries, as well as portfolios of Jordanian and Syrian writers in Issues 15 and 17, respectively. In fall 2018, the Amazon Literary Partnership helped fund a portfolio of writers and artists from Puerto Rico, responding a year after Hurricane Maria.
“I’m delighted that the Amazon Literary Partnership program recognizes the important work The Common is doing,” said Amherst College Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein. “With these funds the magazine can continue to broaden readers’ horizons and support diverse writers from around the world.”
About The Common
The Common is an award-winning print and digital literary journal published biannually. The magazine is based at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Since its debut in 2011, The Common has published more than 830 authors from 42 countries. Pieces from The Common have been awarded the O. Henry Prize, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Award, The Pushcart Prize, and have been selections and notable mentions in multiple genres in the prestigious Best American series. The journal’s editorial vision and design have been praised in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Slate, The Millions, Orion Magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. For more information and to read or subscribe, visit www.thecommononline.org.
About The Amazon Literary Partnership
With the goal of helping writers tell their stories and find their readers, the Amazon Literary Partnership supports nonprofit literary organizations that share the organization’s obsession with empowering writers to create, publish, learn, teach, experiment, and thrive. Amazon provides grant funding to innovative groups that support a diversity of voices and strive for a lasting impact not only on writers’ lives, but on the broader literary and publishing communities. To learn more about the Amazon Literary Partnership, visit www.amazonliterarypartnership.com.
About CLMP
The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses ensures a vibrant, diverse literary landscape by helping small literary publishers work better. CLMP communicates the art of literary publishing to readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, educators, funders and other literary stakeholders and works to bring all of these communities together. Learn more about CLMP.
