editors' note

The spring 2026 issue is the Journal’s 37th, the start of its 19th year: somewhere near four hundred pieces, maybe a million and a half words, a Pushcart, a few dozen writers going on to publish books and chapbooks, a notable place in LitMag rating sites, a whole lot of really fruitful communication with writers and also, in big a way, between us, the Journal’s two editors. Not to hype the innocence, but there has been a kind of joyous surprise watching the Journal, like a story itself, set its tone, focus on its justice angle, find its voice, ask its questions. And grow up. If you’ve read the Journal over the years, you’ll know that for us it’s always character first, “history” written from the inside, and in that way the justice in J is never as legal as it is moral.

​

And aside from the milestones and recognitions (which, honestly, would be earned by any journal that lasted) and the legions of followers/readers we (don’t) have, one of the sustaining pleasures these nearly 20 years is the way we disagree and how often it happens. The editing challenges have evolved. The first few issues of the Journal were a little like a date—laughter tentative, opinions couched in questions—until we began to understand that two heads in this business really are better than one, two heads with similar tastes and each with its own language. That’s when we began to argue vigorously the merits of a piece: its originality, authenticity, voice, conflict, themes, sentences, its weight. Plenty of times we landed on opposite sides, and those disagreements, hours or days long in some instances, always led us to the virtues or the glitches, and to the layers of meaning in a story, a poem, that we would not have reached if we’d followed an impulse to pass and not listened to the other one say, “Hold on a sec.” At the end, there are no concessions.

​

The work here, which we’ve happily argued into the issue, runs a range of experience—first publications, an undergrad, a recent grad, journalists, professors, established authors, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers—and comes together in a collaborative whole that is J Journal ’s 37th.

.

​

Adam Berlin, Jeffrey Heiman

New York City

May 2026