Dear Reader

Art By Marco Acerbi

A very warm welcome to New Word Order Issue 7. This project has been a difficult one but so unbelievably fulfilling. As a class of creative writing students, the opportunity to work with up-and-coming writers has been such a privilege. Our goal for this issue was diversity and we hope you’ll join us in agreeing we succeeded wholeheartedly.

We wanted to showcase themes, characters and stories that may have been overlooked in the past. We wanted to give all writers, no matter their age or their background a chance to have their writing shine in our journal. Our editors carefully selected through over two hundred and seventy submissions to make sure we reached our goal.

Although creating a journal in such a short amount of time is not an easy task, my team made everything feel like such a breeze and without their hard work and constant determination this would not have been possible. I am eternally grateful for each and every one of them, for putting their own individual mark on this issue and for making it stand out, for constantly hitting their deadlines and putting so much care into each step of the process. It has been a pleasure to do this with them.

Marcus Hartigan, Jude-Emmanuel Nwosu, Holly Mulligan, Colm O’Shea, Hannah Fox and Raghed Sunni worked so powerfully as our fiction team. They read through so many fantastic submissions, taking care to choose the ones best suited for the vision of our journal. They then worked collaboratively alongside our exceptional authors to edit these pieces for the final draft of our wonderful journal.

Being a poetry editor is no easy feat, but the brilliant minds of Dylan Nash, James Rutledge and Emily Reid made it their mission to select the pieces out of one hundred and fifty poetry submissions that promoted our idea of diversity, working with the authors to match them to the style of the journal and we cannot wait for you to read them. With a special thanks to Dylan who also did so much behind the scenes work for the team managing the submissions email and spreadsheet.

Rachel Shotunde and Teddy Pierce were the exceptional editors behind our non-fiction submissions. They worked tirelessly to not only edit the submissions but also the interview portions of our journal to make sure you got the best versions of these pieces for your reading pleasure.

The artist geniuses behind our art/photography submissions, Aoife Conneally and Aoibhe Dunne not only selected the amazing pieces for our journal and our cover but also did unbelievably work on the design of pdf, our submissions poster and worked on designs for our social media. Their work alongside the work of our wonderful marketing team, Chris Coleman and Roise Joyce greatly increased the number of submissions therefore enriching our goal of diversity by reaching more writers.

Chris and Roise also worked relentlessly to create a fantastic launch for all our writers and editors to enjoy, to bask in their achievement and meet the team behind the journal. We were so grateful to have such a fantastic evening to meet the writers and here some readings of the phenomenal pieces.

A huge thank you to our excellent web designer Alti Toktarova, who created the PDF for our journal so everyone could read the incredible work we selected and have such a beautiful token of all of the hard work our writers and editors did to make journal happen. Alti did tremendous work to make this happen in such a short space of time.

The most gracious thank you to our terrific managing editor Niamh Richardson who was a silent hero in this process, doing an insane amount of behind the scenes work to make things run smoothly and keep our whole team on track. Without her this would not have been possible, and I am so unbelievably grateful for her guidance and assistance through every step of this process.

I also want to give a massive thank you to the wonderful Priscilla Morris who was there for us through the creation of this journal, to guide and advise us on how to best creative the fabulous journal that we have created for all of you to now read and enjoy.

To everyone who submitted to us this year I want you to know that you made our jobs very difficult, the insane talent we have seen in each and every one of our submissions made the task of selecting very hard and we are so grateful that you submitted to our journal. To our contributors, thank you for giving such amazing work to our journal and for making it shine how it does, we are so grateful to support such fantastic up and coming, writers, artists and photographers.

A final thank you, to our readers, we hope you love this issue of New Word Order as much as we do and enjoy all the incredible work that we hope to bring light to. While this wasn’t an easy task, it was such a fulfilling one and we are so proud of what everyone involved has accomplished.

Happy reading,

Chloe Gahan, Editor in Chief