Air Force Academy Lit-Pub Targets War in First-Person

Founded in 1990, the War, Literature & the Arts is an international journal of the humanities published by the Department of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colo. The annual journal is published both in print and online.

"From time out of mind, and in all cultures, war and art have reflected one another," its mission statement reads. "WLA seeks to illuminate this intersection. We publish short fiction, poetry, personal essay/memoir, visuals, and scholarly essays for a general audience."

The editors continue:

If it seems to fall to the historian to make distinctions among wars, each war’s larger means and ends, the trajectory for the artist, regardless of culture or time, seems to fall towards an individual’s disillusionment, the means and ends of war played out in the personal. For the individual soldier, the sweeping facts of history are accurately written not in the omniscient, third-person plural, but in the singular first. We live in a culture that values the individual. Our works of art about war mirror this welcome bias.

For the current (2012) issue, visit here. An online archive back to Winter 1999 appears here.

Submissions are welcomed year-round via on-line portal here. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable; materials previously published in other venues are not.

The journal also maintains a Facebook page here.

There is also an occasional but heavy-lifting blog here.

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Note: This content regarding military writing is underwritten by Victor Ian LLC, a military media and gaming business. The business publishes Lanterloon, an eclectic lifestyle, technology, and military blog; has a physical retail storefront called "Dragons and Dragoons" located in Colorado Springs, Colo.; and hosts military-writing workshops and other events under the "Sangria Summit" brand name.