the blueshift journal
blueshift / ˈblo͞oˌSHift / noun
the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving toward the observer.
Meet the Judges
What elements of a good poem or story excite you?
Poetry: Jess X Chen
"AN EXCITING POEM is one that ignites the imagination. These poems give us permission to be intimate with all the darkest corners of our own imagination, and cross all the borders ever drawn. These poems dissolve the membrane between the page and our hearts until we feel safe enough reclaim the fearlessness we were born with. They remain true to the aching needs of our times and ecology but are wrought with the spirits that makes it possible for us to wake up one more day and keep championing our art, our love and our existence."
JESS X CHEN is a filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist/activist and nationally-touring poet. Her work exposes narratives of colonial trauma, diasporic love and collective protest by connecting the violences between the queer and colored body and the body of the Earth. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, her work has appeared in Asian American International Film Festival, The Huffington Post, The UN Human Rights Council, and at the Asian Cinevision Diversity Screening at the New York Times. Her poetry has appeared in Nepantla: A Journal For Queer Poets of Color, Hyphen, The Margins and is forthcoming in The Offing. She is a recipient of the 14th Armed With a Camera Fellowship for emerging Asian-American filmmakers. Through art, organizing and education, she is working toward a future where migrant and indigenous youth of color see themselves in stories, whole and heroic, on the big screen & then grow up to direct their own.
Prose: Jeffery Renard Allen
"I LIKE STORIES that delight in the pleasures of telling stories. I love when a writer knows how to push the language, so that you feel the writers owns a story and tells it in a way that no one else can, a rare gift."
Jeffery Renard Allen is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Allen is the author of five books, most recently the novel Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2104), which is loosely based on the life of Blind Tom, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who was the first African American to perform at The White House. The novel was featured as the front-page review of both The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle ; it won the CLMP’s Firecracker Award; it was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and has been nominated for the Dublin Literary Prize. Allen is the author of two other works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, which won The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction, and the short story collection Holding Pattern, which won The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Allen has received other accolades for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Whiting Writers' Award, and was an essayist in Blueshift's Stories of the Invisible series. His website is www.jefferyrenardallen.com.