To deepen our connection with Apogee members and advance our mission of nurturing underrepresented writers, we now offer manuscript consultation services. By becoming a member or making a one-time donation, you can partner with a member of our editorial team to revise your literary work.
To ensure an effective fit, please indicate which editor you’d like to work with. We will prioritize editorial competencies and identity affinities over interests in the editor’s own creative work. We will strive to find the most effective editor for your work even if that isn’t your preferred editor. We reserve the right to deny consultation services for content that is racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, etc.
Please email editors@apogeejournal.org to set up your manuscript consultation. You can also find more information regarding pricing on our support page.
If you are interested in manuscript consultations and cannot match these price points, please reach out and we can discuss ways of working together on a case by case basis.
Fiction Manuscript Consultation Guidelines
Consultation pricing
- $10/month for six months = up to 10 pages of fiction line edits, up to one page of holistic feedback, a twenty-minute call to dialogue about the manuscript (every six months of active membership)
- One-time donation of $75 = up to 20 pages of fiction line edits, a one-page feedback letter, and a 30 minute phone call to answer questions
- One-time donation of $150 = up to 25 pages of fiction line edits, a one-page feedback letter, and a 50 minute call to answer questions
Brian Lin is a Ph.D. student in the creative writing and literature program at USC. He has participated in the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. He is a 2020 Desert Nights, Rising Stars fellow and a 2021 Ragdale resident. Brian is working on his first books of prose.
Interests and specialties: As a writer and editor, I am committed to de-centering the white gaze, sustaining narrative momentum, and achieving effortless clarity. I admire writing that is equally interested in language, ideas, and story. I am especially invested in work that subverts dominant representations of Asian Americans and that explores interracial love between people of color.
Miriam Kumaradoss‘s writing has been published in Apogee, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Literary Hub, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. They currently live with their family and several frogs and geckos in Tamil Nadu, India, where they are at work on their first novel.
Interests and specialties: Flash fiction, magical realism, speculative fiction, horror fiction, queer fiction, South Asian literature, gender studies, fairytales, coming-of-age fiction, the intersection of “literary” and “genre” fiction.
Mina Seçkin is a writer and editor from New York City. Her debut novel, The Four Humors, is forthcoming from Catapult. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Interests and specialties: diaspora literature, Middle Eastern literature, narratives on spirituality, narratives on capitalism, historical fiction, family sagas.
Alexandra Watson is a founding editor of Apogee Journal, where she has helped secure grant funding for community arts projects from the New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Brooklyn Arts Council. She is a full-time Lecturer in the First-Year Writing program at Barnard College. Her fiction, poetry, and interviews have appeared in Yes, Poetry, Nat. Brut., Breadcrumbs, Redivider, PANK, Lit Hub, and Apogee. She’s the recipient of the PEN/Nora Magid Prize for Literary Magazine editing. Find her work at alexandrawatson.net.
Interests and specialties: Postcolonial literature, Black literature, POC travel narratives, coming-of-age stories, family sagas, female friendship, works about incarceration and its effects, bilingual (English & Spanish) stories.
Poetry Manuscript Consultation Guideline
Consultation pricing
- $10/month for six months= up to 5 pages of poetry line edits and one paragraph feedback every six months, and a short 15 minute call to answer questions
- One-time donation of $75 = 10 pages of poetry line edits and one-page letter of feedback and a 25 minute phone call to answer questions
- One-time donation of $150 = 25 pages of poetry line edits and one-page letter of feedback and a 35 minute call to answer questions; will consult on the possibility of the work being a chapbook or how it might build towards a full-length poetry collection
Muriel Leung is the author of two poetry collections, Imagine Us, the Swarm (Nightboat Books) and Bone Confetti (Noemi Press). A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is the co-host of The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. Currently, she is a Dornsife Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY.
Interests and specialties: Asian American literature, critical race theory, trauma studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, gender studies, hybrid genre work, collaborative text, music composition and poetry, experimental literature, visual text, digital literature, essays, affect theory, creative writing pedagogy, epistemological violence, fairytales, serial poems, making a full-length poetry book, book contests.
Zefyr Lisowski is a Southern trans poet and the author of Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). She’s received support from Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center and elsewhere; her work has appeared in Muzzle, DIAGRAM, Literary Hub, Nat. Brut., and more, and she’s a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Zef’s the recipient of a 2020 Center for the Humanities Incubator Grant for Wolf Inventory, a collaborative film about ghost stories and sexual violence, and lives in Brooklyn.
Interests and specialties: trans and queer writing, hybrid genre, grief studies and the politicization of grief, visual poetics, disability poetics, hauntologies, intersections of ethics and writing, writing through persona, feminist literary traditions (and their problems), whiteness studies, writing through and about horror, writing through and about class, fairy/folk traditions, issues of collective identity/myths of the individual, writing through and across the bodymind, sequencing longer poems and texts, anti-oppressive pedagogies.
Crystal Yeung is a queer femme Asian American poet with an MFA in Poetry from the College of New Rochelle. She holds a BA in English literature and was a part of the CCNY Language & Literacy MA program. Her writing can be found in Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Poets & Writers, Perigee, TAYO, and descant. She is recipient of Poets & Writers Amy Award and descant Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award, serves as chairwoman for the PEN Prison Writing Program, and Poetry and Reviews Co-Editor at Apogee Journal. She is currently serving her AmeriCorps year at Asian Americans for Equality.
Interests and specialties: Asian American literature, multilingual narratives (Chinese and English languages), diasporic writing, intergenerational stories, feminist and gender theory, critical race theory, QTPOC representation, queering/queer reading, postcolonial living and bodies, inheritance and trauma, prison or justice literature/abolition/reform, astrophysics and science writing, video essays, critical/Freirean pedagogy, linguistics and etymology, Biblical hermeneutics, relationships with food/cooking/eating, poetic forms.
Nonfiction Manuscript Consultation Guideline
Consultation pricing
- $10/month for six months= up to 10 double-spaced pages of nonfiction line edits and one paragraph feedback every six months, and a short 15 minute call to answer questions (every six months)
- One-time donation of $75 = 20 double-spaced pages of nonfiction line edits and one-page letter of feedback and a 25-minute phone call to answer questions
- One-time donation of $150 = 25 double-spaced pages of nonfiction line edits and one-page letter of feedback and a 35-minute call to answer questions
Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel If You Leave Me was named a best book of 2018 by multiple outlets, including The Washington Post, Booklist, Literary Hub, and Nylon. It was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction Novel Prize. Kim was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in Elle Magazine, The Paris Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She teaches at Columbia University.
Interests and specialties: Narratives that de-center the white gaze. Work that investigate the self as well as the systems that surround us. Essays focused on family, nuanced Asian-American experiences, diaspora. Although these are particular interests of mine, I am open to many nonfiction forms and topics.
Alejandro Varela (he/him) is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in various journals and magazines. He’s a 2019 Jerome Fellow in Literature. He was a resident in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2017–2018 Workspace program and a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction. You can find his writing here: alejandrovarela.org.
Interests and specialties: Anything that leans toward collective liberation. Tales of empowerment. Queer living and loving. Humor. Work that’s clearly marinated for some time but still retains its urgency. Attacks on capitalism. Writing that is self-aware and unafraid of contradictions.
Anya Lewis-Meeks is a writer from Kingston, Jamaica. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in Fiction, and an AB from Princeton University. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English at Duke University, where she works on the intersections between folklore and speculative fiction in contemporary Caribbean fiction. Her work has been published in Panorama Journal, and Winter Tangerine.
Interests and specialties: Fragmented and otherwise nontraditional forms. Autofiction and nonfiction that decenters the “I”. Black diaspora writing (particularly of the Caribbean). Autotheory, or other work that is at the intersection between creative nonfiction and literary scholarship. Writing about the body. Writing that interweaves the speculative with the literal. Open to memoir and excerpted works, in addition to essays.