SEAN BISHOP
MANAGING EDITOR

LAURA EVE ENGEL
POETRY EDITOR

RACHAEL MORRISON
ARTS EDITOR

EDWARD MULLANY
FICTION EDITOR

TARASHEA NESBIT
NONFICTION EDITOR

SOPHIE ROSENBLUM
FICTION EDITOR

KENT SHAW
POETRY EDITOR

Kickstart Us

Better has launched a Kickstarter campaign, running until April 5, 2013. We're trying to raise $6,000, and the rewards for donating include books by our poetry/fiction/nonfiction contributors, original work by our arts contributors, broadsides, t-shirts, tote bags, guest editorial gigs, and lots of other great stuff in exchange for donations of as little as $5. Your support will not only help us cover the basic costs of running the magazine, but also help us launch our inaugural contests in poetry and fiction (with prizes of $500 or $1,000, depending on the campaign's success), a monthly podcast, and a series of limited-edition broadsides. We're dedicated to remaining a 100% free journal, and your donation will help us do that. Click here to go straight to our Kickstarter campaign, or click here to learn more about our rewards and exactly where your money will go, if you choose to donate.

What’s Better

Better is a semi-annual magazine of culture and literature featuring articles, interviews, essays, artwork, stories, poems, and reviews by (and about) some of the best creative-types in the world today. Our goal is not to be the most prestigious, the most experimental, or even necessarily the best—we just want to be better. We think it's time to raise the bar on what an online magazine can be and do, by featuring audio and video of as many contributors as possible, and by privileging art, writing, and other media that couldn't be presented as effectively in a traditional paper-magazine format.

What We Want

We are currently reading submissions for issues three through five. Send us anything: articles, reviews, interviews, artwork, video, essays, stories, poems, songs, lists, manifestos, tirades, games, your new fashion statement, a detailed photo-catalog of your collection of vintage corkscrews, your pitches for post-apocalyptically marketed breakfast cereals—whatever you're proud of or excited about: We'll consider it. We have no length limits, but if that makes you uncomfortable, you can read suggestions on our submissions manager page. Simultaneous submissions are always acceptable, as long as you let us know if a submission has been taken elsewhere. We do ask, however, that you only submit one collection of work at a time, and that you wait until you receive a response before submitting again. If you have work to submit to our Wish List, however (see below), we'll allow you to submit up to two collections of work at any given time. You can submit to us here, and join our mailing list by filling out the form below. Full withdrawals can be made through Submittable, and partial withdrawals can be made via email to better.culture.lit@gmail.com.

The Wish Lists

Better maintains two “wish lists”—one for under-represented submissions, and one for donations of resources and production support. On the submissions side, note first that it is always always always in your interest to submit your best work, no matter what we say we want. Often even we don't know what we want, so just give us your absolute best work, whatever that is. That said, eligible Wish List submissions include cultural criticism and mixed-media work of any kind—particularly audio/video essays or interactive works that could not be published in anything other than an online format (e.g. nonlinear fiction or poetry, essays that require audio or video interludes, This-American-Life-style audio journalism, etc.) If you send work that fits our Wish List requests, you're permitted to submit to us in another genre at the same time.

Donate

As an impoverished startup venture with no intention of generating profit or paying its editors in the foreseeable future, Better welcomes donations of goods, services, or straight-up cash. (We ain't proud). Since we know it's often easier to volunteer materials than direct funding, we maintain a wish list of items and services that will help us to keep doing what we do, and more importantly, to do it better. If you're feeling generous between March 5 and April 5, 2013, we encourage you to check out our a Kickstarter campaign, where we're giving away lots of awesome things for as little as $5.

Who We Are

SEAN BISHOP is Better's Founding and Managing Editor. A poet, designer, and web developer, Sean also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he coordinates both the Graduate and Post-Graduate Fellowship programs. He is a former Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow, the former Director of the Houston Indie Book Festival, and the former Managing Editor of Gulf Coast. Sean's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2012, Boston Review, Harvard Review, jubilat, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere.

LAURA EVE ENGEL is a Poetry Editor at Better for issues one through three. She is the former Reviews and Interviews Editor for Gulf Coast, the 2011-2012 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Residential Program Director of the University of Virginia's Young Writers' Workshop. Laura Eve is the co-author of [Spoiler Alert], a collaborative volume of flash fiction available from Dzanc Books, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, VOLT, and elsewhere.

RACHAEL MORRISON is Better's Arts Editor. She is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the Museum of Modern Art's Library in New York, where she has curated an exhibition of poet-physicist Bern Porter's work, and most recently an exhibition of contemporary artists' magazines. Rachael has also programmed events at the Printed Matter NY Art Book Fair, Microscope Gallery, and The Public School NY. Her artwork has been featured on the BBC1 television program Imagine, in New York Magazine, and in Art das Kunstmagazin. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and is currently working on a documentary film about a blind telephone hacker named Joybubbles.

EDWARD MULLANY is a Fiction Editor at Better (and served as both Fiction Editor and Poetry Editor for issue two). He is the author of If I Falter at the Gallows (Publishing Genius, 2011) and Figures for an Apocalypse (forthcoming). His writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Tampa Review, Green Mountains Review, Gesture, and other journals. He keeps a blog called Notes From a Resuscitated Man. He grew up in Australia and in the Midwest.

TARASHEA NESBIT is Better's Nonfiction Editor. Her first novel The Wives of Los Alamos is due out drom Bloomsbury in 2014, appearing in the US, UK, and Germany simultaneously. Her prose, poetry, and criticism have been featured in Quarterly West, The Iowa Review (Online), Hayden's Ferry Review, The Laurel Review, and other literary journals. She teaches creative writing and literature courses at the University of Denver and the University of Washington in Tacoma, facilitates writing groups at The Gathering Place, a day shelter for individuals experiencing poverty and homelessness, and serves as an editor for Kore Press. A graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, TaraShea is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, where she is a Presidential Fellow.

SOPHIE ROSENBLUM is a Fiction Editor at Better. She is a former Rice University Parks Fellow, and her novel-in-progress was recently a finalist for the James Jones Novel Fellowship. She is a doctoral student in Literature and Creative Writing at Florida State University, where she is the Berger Fellow. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, New Letters, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is also the web editor at NANO Fiction.

KENT SHAW is a Poetry Editor at Better, and has been the president of the board of Directors at River Styx, as well as a reader for Boulevard. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia State University. Kent is a former Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast. He leads the Poetry Workshop for the Washington University Summer Writers Institute. His first book, Calenture, was published in 2008. His poems have since appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, Witness, and elsewhere.

OUR DONATION WISH LIST:

Better is running a a Kickstarter campaign from March 5 to April 5, 2013. During that time, we hope you'll consider donating through Kickstarter.

We're on the lookout for individuals or organizations willing to provide any of the following goods and services, free of charge or on the cheap. Because we can't become a 501(c)(3) non-profit until 2014 at the earliest, in-kind donations may not be tax-deductible. But we can promise you our eternal gratitude! All donations will be acknowledged in this Wish List unless otherwise requested by the donor.

Material items may be sent to the attention of Sean Bishop, Editor / Better: Culture & Lit / 946 E. Johnson St. #1 / Madison, WI 53703. Electronic deliveries may be sent to better.culture.lit@gmail.com. Thank you!

SERVICES:

(1) High-bandwidth web-hosting with unlimited server space and, ideally, SSL encryption. This will allow us to deliver multi-media content efficiently to our readers, and to maintain an extensive archive of audio and video.

(2) "Premier Plan" or "Enterprise" membership to Submittable, so that we may continue to allow potential contributors to submit to us free of charge.

(3) A subscription to DropBox's 100G "Pro" membership level, so that we can provide contributors with the means to upload large-format video and audio of their works.

(4) A subscription to Airdropper, which will allow contributors without DropBox memberships to upload large-format audio and video efficiently and easily.

(5) A LegalZoom membership (or if you are an attorney who specializes in US copyright law and licensing issues, your volunteered time and energy). Because Better aims to report on issues of immediate cultural importance, we are constantly opening ourselves up to potential copyright and licensing disputes. Help us keep fighting the good fight for fair use and journalism.

(6) A Skype Premium membership, which will help Better continue to be a journal whose editors, contributors, and correspondents are selected not for their geographic proximity to one another, but for their skill and expertise.

(7) A Facebook and/or Google Ads subscription.

(8) Other gratis advertising space of any kind.

MATERIALS & SOFTWARE:

(1) A new or lightly used Mac Pro. We'd bake you ohsomany brownies for this one. Editing and exporting 45-minute, single-shot videos for web requires massive amounts of memory and processor capacity—hence the request for such a high-powered machine.

(2) Various pieces of recording equipment to help us feature better-quality audio, including a Rode Podcaster USB Microphone, a Mackie Onyx audio mixer, and Wirecast streaming software, so that we can deliver large-format or live audio/video efficiently.

(3) A licensed, legal copy of Adobe CS6 Design Standard for Mac. Currently we're limping along with a six-year-old edition of the Adobe Creative Suite that is increasingly incompatible with the other software we use.

(4) A licensed, legal copy of Adobe Premiere CS6 or Final Cut Pro X for Mac, in that order of preference. As the magazine develops, we hope to include professional-quality film and video in every issue. This will require advanced video editing software.

(5) A licensed, legal copy of Adobe Audition CS6, Logic Pro, Amadeus Pro, TwistedWave, or WavePad for Mac, in that order of preference. Better wants to feature more professional-quality audio for future issues, which will necessitate more advanced software than the open-source options currently available to us.