The Common

About The Common

The Common is a nonprofit literary magazine based at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, with its website at thecommononline.org. Founded by editor-in-chief Jennifer Acker — an Amherst College graduate of the class of 2000 — with a prototype issue in October 2010 and a first full issue in April 2011, the magazine publishes stories, poems, essays, and images twice a year in print, alongside a steady stream of online publication. Its organizing motif is "a modern sense of place": the magazine seeks to put international and American writers and readers in conversation with one another, publishing literature and art "powerful enough to reach from there to here." It is published by The Common Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Overview

The Common has distinguished itself in a crowded field of literary journals through a single, capacious idea: place. Every piece it publishes — fiction, poetry, nonfiction, visual art — engages with a modern sense of place, whether that means a rural Maine hometown, a megacity abroad, or the interior landscape of migration and belonging. The biannual print issues are substantial, beautifully designed volumes pairing prose and poetry with carefully curated black-and-white photography and art. As of April 2026 the magazine had published 31 issues, and its fifteenth anniversary, marked in 2025–2026, confirmed its status as an award-winning fixture of American literary publishing with a genuinely global reach.

Jennifer Acker and the founding idea

The magazine was the brainchild of Jennifer Acker, who found herself at a professional crossroads and began thinking hard about what she wanted from literary magazines as a reader and writer. Raised in a small town in rural Maine, she had been shaped by how profoundly a sense of place affects a life and a worldview. She settled on the word "common" — in New England, the town common is the public space where everyone is welcome to gather and exchange ideas, and every culture has its own version, from the piazza to the zócalo. The idea of place, she has said, was specific enough to give the magazine a real focus but capacious enough to publish a wide range of work by a wide range of authors. Acker has served as founder and editor-in-chief since the beginning, and she is also the author of the novel The Limits of the World, set among the South Asian diaspora of East Africa.

The Amherst College partnership

In early 2011 Acker secured an investment from Amherst College to launch The Common as a literary magazine rooted on the campus. The college provided an on-campus office, a website, funding for start-up costs, and the budget for a staff of student interns; the magazine's offices are housed in the college's Robert Frost Library. The partnership extends well beyond administration: the English Department, the Creative Writing Center, and the student-run prose and poetry magazine Circus have all collaborated with The Common on events, public readings, book fairs, and writing workshops. Professors including William Pritchard and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur have served on the magazine's editorial board, and Vanity Fair editor-at-large Cullen Murphy, an Amherst graduate of the class of 1974, sits on its advisory board.

From prototype to first issue

The Common's prototype, Issue 00, appeared in October 2010, testing the concept and the design. With the college's backing secured in early 2011, the magazine launched its first full issue, Issue 01, in April 2011. Early coverage in the campus press praised its professional, minimalist aesthetic, impressive typography, and satisfying physical feel — a print object designed to be kept and reread. From the start the magazine published both local and international authors side by side, embodying its mission of bringing the world into the magazine and the magazine to the world. Issue 06, released in October 2013, was already being hailed as evidence that the young journal had built both an audience and a name for itself.

"A modern sense of place"

The magazine's mission statement commits it to publishing work animated by a modern sense of place, and successive issues have explored what that means across genres. Issue 06 examined how connection to a place — a home, a land — gives characters, narrators, and even nations the strength to face intimidation, fear, and loneliness. Issue 08, a 206-page volume, centered on finding a place of belonging and finding oneself, opening with an essay by Acker on travel, authenticity, and fitting in, drawn from a pilgrimage-like walk through Tuscany. The through-line is always the same: place as lived experience, as identity, as the ground from which stories grow — whether the writer is rooted in one spot or writing from displacement and diaspora.

Editorial leadership and staff

Jennifer Acker has led the magazine as editor-in-chief since its founding, shaping its aesthetic and its international ambitions. The managing editorship has been held since 2016 by Emily Everett, following Diana Babineau, a former Amherst student intern who became the magazine's first full-time managing employee under Acker — a neat illustration of the magazine's pipeline from campus internship to professional publishing. Acker also runs a literary publishing internship for Amherst undergraduates, mentoring the next generation of editors and publishers; she has described editing as a discipline that teaches young people to get inside another writer's head and think structurally about pieces of writing. Since the founding, Acker has also taught periodically at the college, including courses built around The Common's own pieces.

Print issues and design

The biannual print journal is the heart of The Common. The issues are substantial volumes — Issue 08 ran to 206 pages — pairing short fiction, nonfiction, and poems with black-and-white photography and visual art, all composed with a professional, minimalist design sensibility. Reviewers have consistently praised the physical quality of the magazine: the typography, the paper, the considered pairing of text and image. Each issue opens with a statement from the editor that functions as a primer for the volume's themes, making the magazine feel curated rather than merely collected. The print issues are complemented by the magazine's online publication, which carries additional fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews between print releases.

International reach

From its earliest issues, The Common has published writers from around the world alongside American authors, and its international dimension has only deepened. The magazine's name itself gestures outward — the common as a universal human institution, not just a New England one — and its contents regularly include translations and work by writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Acker has spoken of the juxtaposition of the local and the global as central to the magazine's identity: the presence of international writers shapes the mission as much as the mission attracts them. The result is a journal that reads as genuinely cosmopolitan while remaining rooted in its Amherst home.

Education, events, and community

Beyond publishing, The Common functions as a literary organization: it sponsors publishing internships and educational programming, hosts readings and collaborations, and curates subscription writing prompts for its audience. Its events bring writers to Amherst and take the magazine's community outward, while the internship program gives undergraduates real responsibility in a working literary magazine. The fifteenth-anniversary reflections in Poets & Writers described the organization's aim as deepening "our individual and collective sense of place" — a mission pursued as much through teaching and gathering as through the printed page.

Recognition and the road ahead

The Common's work has been recognized with literary awards and reprinted in the Pushcart Prize and other annual anthologies, confirming the judgment of early reviewers who called it "uncommonly good." Fifteen years after its prototype issue, it remains an independent nonprofit publishing house for place-driven literature, still led by its founder, still housed in the Robert Frost Library, and still committed to the idea that literature and art can reach from there to here. Its website at thecommononline.org carries the online magazine, submission information, subscription options, and news of the print journal — the front door to one of the most distinctive literary magazines of its generation.