Press Release, May 11, 2026

The Periodical is a non-profit publisher and magazine dedicated to creative writing, criticism, and conversation about literature and the arts, including poetry, fiction, theatre, music, photography, film, and new media. Each issue brings together new writing and portfolios on the past, present, and future of artistic expression. Based in New York City, the magazine was founded in late 2025 by its editors Margarida Coelho de Assis, Lachlan Brooks, Geoffrey Lokke, Eduardo Pavez, and Ali Yalgin. The magazine will publish its inaugural print issue in 2027. Preorders and annual print subscriptions can be purchased on the magazine’s website, theperiodical.org. Readers can also support the non-profit through Patreon—paid subscribers will have access to the magazine’s exclusive digital-only content including weekly reviews, essays, and recommendations.

Literature and Translation

The magazine’s founding editors first met in graduate school at Columbia University and bring their diverse interests, experience, and expertise to the publication. Lachlan Brooks, an actor and poet, is the magazine’s poetry and fiction editor. “My taste as a reader is eclectic: I gravitate toward poems and stories that use language in surprising ways, and will as happily read an experimental, avant-garde work as a conventional one. E. M. Forster, Machado de Assis, Daniil Kharms, and Anne Carson are equally welcome on my bedside table, and may be happy antidotes to one another.” According to Brooks, the simple pleasure of reading is still the be-all and the end-all, whether it comes from a work’s emotional effect, or (conversely) its undercutting of an emotional effect, its edifying power, “or simply the remarkable feeling I sometimes get that an author is enlightening me. The poetry and short fiction section of The Periodical magazine will have room for new works in the modern and postmodern traditions and works that cleave to traditional forms, as well as writing that forges its own path.”

Margarida Coelho de Assis, a writer and filmmaker, is interested in the art and study of translation. “I do think there are too many festivals, too many talks, too many films, too many magazines out there. But so much chaff calls for more wheat—and The Periodical magazine is a fruit of that urgency. I see it as a repository for the work that, for its truth, can’t find a space in the perfunctory, performative outlets we’ve structured our world around. We invite thinkers and artists to bring and reflect on their true obsessions: what they left unfinished, what they keep coming back to, what seems too far-fetched.” She notes that the magazine’s translation section will be devoted to the practice and its thinking, “from works in progress, or snapshots of them, to interviews and debates on what translation is and isn’t. We’re not interested in translation as a metaphor for just any kind of transference or communication, but in its ins and outs as a task and a radical act of otherness, at a time when curiosity seems to stop at the edges of the self.”

Media and Performance

Geoffrey Lokke, who has edited a number of volumes on contemporary cinema, is the magazine’s film and media editor. “I want our readers to hear from artists and critics who are as attuned to history as they are to our present circumstances, whether it’s in the form of melodramas by Alice Diop, or Mark Jenkin’s explorations of time, sound, and the landscape. One of my favorite documentaries is Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra’s Voyage in Time, in which the filmmakers mapped out what eventually became their masterpiece Nostalghia. Accordingly, I would love to stage and visualize the creative process for readers, which could take the form of publishing drafts, memos, storyboards, breakdowns and pencils, or photographs from location scouting. Above all, I am as fascinated by sequential art as I am the moving image, and I would love for both to be represented in our magazine.” 

Eduardo Pavez Goye, a writer, musician, and photographer, is the magazine’s photography and music editor. He is also interested in the study of memes. “Memes aren’t just internet jokes, but actual evidence of how culture moves. I’m fascinated by ideas appearing simultaneously in different societies, or jokes emerging in seemingly unconnected cultures. The memetics section will be a space for exploring the world by publishing interviews with online curators, theoretical essays on meme propagation, close readings of certain formats, and works examining the social economy of repetition. I am interested in curating a space to explore how collective memory reproduces itself through us rather than by us.”

Ali Yalgin, a scholar whose work explores environmental issues in the humanities, is the magazine’s editor focusing on theatre and performance. “I have always been mesmerized by the collective energies of rehearsal rooms, the tangential ideas within creative processes that never quite make their way into the finished pieces, and the small obsessions that preoccupy theatre and performance artists and nourish their thinking and practice. In that spirit, I hope to make the theatre and performance section welcoming to commissions ranging from interviews with established playwrights about their practices, directors’ journals accompanied by reflective essays, clowns thinking seriously about the past, present, and future of their craft, and anti-mainstream performers writing about the projects they never had the chance to realize, coupled with short plays or performance guidelines that we, as a public, would benefit from remembering.”

Submissions

The magazine’s editors welcome submissions and proposals from writers and artists for upcoming issues. In terms of creative writing, the editors prefer work that plays with and questions aesthetic modes rather than recapitulates established form and methods. Criticism should be warm, lively, and written for an inquisitive general audience without sacrificing intellectual rigor. We welcome reviews and analysis of works new and old, classic and forgotten. Although the magazine does not publish academic essays, the editors welcome writing from scholars who want to reach new audiences.