About Us

Founded as a journal—an annual—of the finest work produced by participants in the University of Washington’s Creative Writing Summer in Rome Seminar (the honorary first edition being Jay Thompson’s photocopied pamphlet of 2002-03), Mare Nostrum features the best of these summer sessions, while aiding and abetting work by other travelers, actual or armchair, similarly moved and transformed by their experiences of Rome, of Italy and Greece et al, in ligature and legacy, of the complicated fructifying cross-currents of Mediterranean climate, geography, and civilization, broadly and generously defined. The Greek historian Polybius coined the phrase marenostrum to commemorate the Roman victory over Carthage, but our sea begins in the hot seams of earth’s tectonic crust and bubbles up through waves of trade and history and myth, entering the heart’s heart, the mouth’s truth, the mind’s eye’s wandering, the ear’s outward yearning to adhere.

Whether poetry, fiction, or fable, essay, travelogue or tale, it’s those forays into depth and intensity, archaeological and humane—where a potsherd or postcard is cued to time’s customary lags and snares—that we hope to track and amplify, in the historical here and now.

For more information on the Creative Writing Summer in Rome program, please visit the program web site.

 

Masthead

Editor — Kevin Craft

Senior Editor — Rebecca Hoogs

Associate Editor — Sierra Nelson

Web Designer — William Bernhard

 

Advisory Board

Janet Trask Cox
Richard Kenney