About

Passages North was founded in 1979 at Bay de Noc Community College, now known as Bay College, in Escanaba, Michigan. The founding editor was Elinor Benedict, a prolific poet, journalist, and teacher. The current Editor-in-Chief, Jennifer Howard, attended early editorial meetings as a child with her father, who was on the founding editorial team. 

Later, the publication moved to Northern Michigan University, where it currently resides. Passages North currently publishes one print issue annually, in the spring. You can view the cover and contents of our current issue here, and recent issues on our Archives page in the site menu. The current issue and back-issues can be ordered via our Submittable page. We also regularly publish Bonus Content on our website, featuring poems and short-short stories. 

In our print issue, we publish a variety of short fiction, poetry, short-short stories, creative nonfiction, and visual essays. We print writings from every demographic and from all over the world. We are an accomplice to LGBTQIA+ communities, Black Lives Matter, and abolitionist movements wherever they may be found. Passages is comprised of many editors at the intersections of various communities, so we strongly encourage BIPOC, disabled, economically marginalized, and queer and trans writers to submit. We promise to treat our contributors’ work with care and to shout our love via our social media platforms.

Because we are a university-affiliated publication, we typically follow the academic schedule for accepting submissions. For more information about submitting your work, visit our submission guidelines page. 

Passages also runs two contests annually in our four sections, alternating year over year. The Elinor Benedict Poetry contest runs concurrently with the Ray Ventre Nonfiction contest, and the Waasnode Fiction contest runs concurrently with the Neutrino Short-Short contest. For more information about our current contests, visit our contests page.

Passages North has a table at AWP every year, where we offer our latest issue as well as back-issues available for purchase, along with t-shirts and other fun swag. If you are attending AWP, please stop by our table and say hello!

Passages is made possible by a team of undergraduate editorial interns, volunteer graduate student and alumni editors, a graduate assistant, and English department faculty.

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Editor-in-Chief : Jennifer A. Howard (she/her) lives in the lowest point in her neighborhood, making her an unwilling expert on sump pumps. Her collection of flash stories, How to End Up, was published by New Delta Review, and her second chapbook, You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories, was published by The Cupboard Pamphlet. She tweets at @jferhow.

Managing Editor: Selah Tay-Song is a fiction MFA candidate in her third year of graduate school at Northern Michigan University. She holds an Editing Certificate from the University of Washington. She started reading submissions for Passages in 2022, and volunteered as an Associate Fiction Editor the following year. She enjoys reading and writing stories with troubled characters and surreal or just plain weird elements. Selah’s fiction and non-fiction appears in Noisy Water Review, Heterophylla, The Mirstone Anthology, and several issues of the Whatcom Reads Anthology. When she’s not writing and editing, Selah is either swimming in the frigid waters of Lake Superior, or shoveling snow.

Fiction Editor: Esperanza Elizabeth Vargas Macias is a writer born in Mexico and raised in the U.S. (smh). She currently resides in the upper peninsula of Michigan where she is an MFA student at NMU. Outside of writing and working on Passages North, Esperanza enjoys singing badly, rewatching the same three animes, and shaking what her momma gave her. You can find her on Twitter @esperanzawrites.

Poetry Editor: Patricia Killelea is the author most recently of Counterglow (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019). Her work appears in cream city review, Quarterly West, Seneca Review, The Common, Atticus Review, etc. She produces poetry-films that have been screened in international film festivals (Det Poetiske Fonoteque: Nature & Culture Poetry Film Festival, REELpoetry International Film Festival, the Ó'Béal International Poetry-Film Competition, a Finalist for the Frame to Frames Ekphrastic Poetry Film Prize and Official Selection for the FOTOGENIA Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival, Honorable Mentions at Midwest Video Poetry Fest and Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival) and is a contributing writer at Moving Poems. Patricia Killelea is also a Poetry Editor at FENCE.

Nonfiction/Hybrids Editor: Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food (a Paris Review Staff Pick, and one of Ploughshares’ Best Books of 2015), Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer (a New York Times Editors’ Choice, NPR Notable Book, and New Yorker Book to Watch Out For), Pot Farm, and Barolo; the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and 2 chapbooks. He persevered through this past winter via the occasional one-handed cartwheel in his mind.