THE MAGAZINE

Okay Donkey is a literary magazine that publishes the odd, the off-kilter, and the just plain weird. We like work that’s funny, that’s sad, and that’s both funny and sad. We especially enjoy experimental, surreal, magical realist, and genre-bending work. You like slipstream? Cool! We like it too.

Some of our favorite poets are Amy Gerstler, Danez Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Brenda Shaughnessy, Alison Benis White, Jericho Brown, Claudia Rankine, James Tate, Dean Young, W.S. Merwin, Russell Edson, and Ilya Kaminsky.

Some of our favorite fiction writers are Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Ha Seong-nan, Bora Chung, Carmen Maria Machado, George Saunders, Brian Evenson, Shirley Jackson, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Mariana Enriquez, Miranda July, and Ben Loory.

For a greater sense of our tastes, click HERE for our award nominations or HERE for our Bookshop storefront sharing staff favorites, curated reading lists, and books by our contributors. A portion of all sales goes to supporting Okay Donkey so feel free to purchase tons of books through our storefront.

THE ETHOS

Okay Donkey believes in anti-racist movements. We stand against bigotry and oppressive systems. We amplify marginalized voices to the best of our ability.

AI POLICY

We do not want anything written or translated by AI, LLM, etc. and, if you submit, we trust you understand that. This includes AI translation. We believe translation is a creative, human process.

In the rapidly-changing AI landscape, we may occasionally request writers provide evidence of human authorship. This will be done in good faith in collaboration with the writer. We may also use Pangram to spot-check submissions for potential AI-usage, though no decisions are ever made purely on the basis of Pangram analysis. We are particularly sensitive to the potential for false positives in AI detection software and to the addition of author text to any training corpus. Read more about Pangram here.