New Print Issue 2025
We’re finishing up the mailing of the new print issue, which was also distributed at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in March. You can find a version of this issue, including this year’s Design Statement and contributors’ audio, at the Current Issue.
The 2025 print issue explores concepts of trickster, chance, and shifting expectations. The design of this issue of Tab Journal echoes this duality, complementarity, and contradiction with the contrast between striking color and stark black and white, as well as the layered scapes that alter reality into warped realms that redefine portals, trap doors, and concealed dead ends and loops. Typography and alignment shift playfully between order, disorder, and reorder to mirror the trickster’s sleight of hand in the process of reading the poem. The format revisits the large sheet of earlier print issues, folded to create the expectation of order but ultimately revealing deconstructed panels and variations of skew.
If you would like to distribute the print issue to your class or share it with your library, please use the Contact form to request copies, if they remain available. If you are a contributor to this issue and did not receive a copy, please contact Editor Anna Leahy directly.
As is tradition, other issues in the volume will be available online only. The summer issue is in production and features the winners and honorable mentions in the California Coastal Commission K-12 Poetry Contest. When that issue is published, it will become the Current Issue, and the first issue will move to the Archives.
Temporary Hiatus
In 2025, Tab Journal features the print issue to launch this year’s volume and follows with the issue dedicated to the California Coastal Commission K-12 Poetry Contest. We’ll then take a hiatus from publishing issue for the remainder of the calendar year to make changes in the project and account for the Editor’s sabbatical. Unfortunately, the much-needed university budget enhancement for Tab Journal—the first since the project’s inception—that was supposed to kick in for the 2024-2025 fiscal year was rescinded last fall as part of larger university budget tightening. We plan to rethink this project over the next several months (our last major overhaul was in 2020), resume issues in early 2026, and open submissions accordingly. We appreciate your support through this brief respite and look forward to a strong return.
