VOLUME 21

Dear Readers,

 

Welcome to Volume 21 of Lumina Journal. It is our utmost pleasure to share the following pieces of prose, poetry, and visual arts with you. After our revival in 2022, we have much to celebrate in what is only our third volume back after a momentary hiatus from spreading Lumina joy and radiance. 

 

We can’t thank our incredible, effervescent team enough. Your enthusiasm is unmatched. You are so hardworking, from providing meticulous edits to help these pieces shine, to keeping us all on the same page with color-coded spreadsheets. This is our biggest team since returning from our hiatus, and you bring us joy with your hilarious and delightful dedication to whimsy. Who else would look so diligently for a freelance magician? Our clear-visioned genre editors and copy editors worked together to make the words and images in these pages sparkle. Our fabulous Creative and Visual Arts Director, Arina Kole, PR Director, Dana Sirois, and Web Manager, Zoe Engel, helmed these three new and revisioned roles with gusto, including bringing Lumina to the city for a successful public reading at Jade Bar Brooklyn—the first such event in recent memory, and hopefully one of many more to come. 

 

You will also notice an upgrade to our web experience. In collaboration with our design and web teams, along with our Special Projects Manager Laura Martin, we have added a flippable digital volume to the website. In addition to individual webpages for each piece, our team has created a beautiful digital document that has the look and feel of a print journal. These pieces, this team, and these contributors will never again be collected in quite this way. With our inaugural, digital flipbook, we hope to capture the ephemeral joy of creating a singular piece of art.

 

We would like to thank our Managing Editor Shadows, Max Thibault and Tyson Berardo, who learned so much right along with us and were lifesaving partners as we put together this volume. We know that next year when you two take over the roles of Co-Managing Editors, you are going to do a fabulous job. We can’t wait to see how you show us up.

 

Many thanks as well to the SLC writing program, and our unparalleled faculty advisor, Maddie Mori. We are forever grateful for your guidance, support, and calm direction away from simple mistakes. We can’t think of a better person for measured advice (and fashion inspiration).

 

This volume would not be possible without our contributors in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, speculative fiction, and visual arts. Our contributors submit from many walks of life, in many different places—some our neighbors in NYC, and some internationally. They met the moment we’re in with integrity, allowing us to process themes of grief, transformation, and persistence in sustainable and extremely human ways. Though there was not a theme for the volume, you will notice common threads that have permeated our collective consciousness. From ghosts and hauntings, to multiple mentions of shrimp (yes, really), and explorations of desolation, religion, and transformation, we hope our audience will pick up on the takeaway that we did — human resilience through even the most impossible circumstances. 

 

Thank you again, contributors, for adorning our pages with porous, rousing, boundary-pushing fervor that speaks to the ethos of our journal. We could not be who we are or do what we do without you.

 

Lastly, thank you to you, reader, for being part of our Lumina community. We hope the magic of this volume is as incandescently charming to you as it is to us. 

 

With endless, luminous gratitude, 

 

Irini Konstantinou & Krista White