Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to his or her times. Each issue includes fiction, poetry, memoir, and literary essays. The magazine has been honored with ten grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and writings from the journal have been regularly recognized in The Best American Essays, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

Launched in Detroit in 1987, Witness has published 43 issues, twenty of them focused on topics of contemporary interest. The magazine is best known for showcasing work the defines its historical moment; special issues have focused on political oppression, religion, the natural world, crime, aging, civil rights, love, ethnic America, and, most recently, exile. The issues "New Nature Writing," "The Sixties," "Sports in America," and "The Best of Witness, 1987 - 2004" eventually appeared as university press anthologies. (All of our special issues can be examined in the archive section of this web site.)

In 2007, Witness moved from Oakland Community College to Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. While the magazine continues to advance topics of special interest, mostly in portfolio form, it increasingly features writing that ventures away from the American experience and into international terrain. The magazine values the insights of authors everywhere who illuminate their circumstances in unique and startling ways, and it invites writing that promotes the modern writer as witness to his or her times.

Witness is distributed in the U.S. and Canada to subscribers, libraries, and bookstores, but we also direct our issues to specific audiences when it's appropriate. At least half a dozen of our special issues have been adopted as classroom texts at various colleges, universities, community colleges, and high schools.

Stuart Dybek
From its inception, the vision that distinguishes Witness has been consistent: it is a magazine situated at the intersection of ideas and passions, a magazine energized by the intellect, yet one in which thought is never presented as abstraction, but rather as life blood. Each issue is beautifully produced and eminently readable.

Paul Auster
Witness is an excellent magazine.

Maxine Kumin
Witness just keeps on getting better and better.

Mark Doty
In an era when too many journals seem merely lukewarm, Witness turns up the heat. This is a focused, passionate journal, one that matters.

Albert Goldbarth
It's not just that each further issue of Witness is dazzlingly strong, but that each new issue is a true anthology that deserves to be done in hardcover. It's one of the four-star sure-fire winners.

David Shields
Witness is one of the absolutely very best literary magazines in America. I am a particular fan of Witness' theme issues, which gain more ground on their subjects than most books do.

Ron Carlson
Witness is simply what it proclaims—a witness to our ungainly evolution. It is an irreplaceable window.

Carol Bly
I have felt proud to have my work in Witness—on a superficial level because the magazine's appearance is handsome and authoritative—and on a more serious level because Witness takes human meaning very seriously. Witness is the only literary magazine I've seen that is utterly clear of low-key, self-centered, mewling memoir. When the author's ideas are bigger than the author you get exuberant essay and energetic story.