The following is a press release from SMC.
Santa Monica College (SMC) is pleased to announce the release of its fall 2025 edition of the Santa Monica Review (SMR), SMC’s esteemed national literary arts journal. Published twice yearly, the Review showcases the work of established authors alongside emerging writers, with a focus on narratives of the West Coast. The journal is the only nationally distributed literary magazine published by a U.S. community college.
To celebrate the fall 2025 edition, Santa Monica College will hold an issue launch party featuring readings by Review authors. The party — “Santa Monica Review Presents…A Celebration of the Fall 2025 Issue with Readings by Recent Contributors” — will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 26, in The Edye at the SMC Performing Arts Center, 1310 11th Street (at Santa Monica Boulevard), Santa Monica.
Tickets for the launch party — available at smc.edu/tickets— cost a suggested donation of $10. Refreshments will be served. Copies of SMR will be available for purchase. Abundant free parking available on premises. Seating is on a first-arrival basis.
The celebration, to be introduced by Review editor and Emcee Andrew Tonkovich, features a special welcome by writer Stephen Cooper (River of Angels) and readings by four contributors to the current issue: Abby Walthausen, Garrett Saleen, Mona Leigh Rose, and Diana Wagman.
The fall 2025 issue — edited by Tonkovich, also host of the weekly show Bibliocracy Radio on KPFK (90.7 FM) — features cover art by writer, poet, and painter Kenji Liu (Monsters I Have Been).
The issue includes eleven original short stories and two essays, most by West Coast writers, but otherwise representative of diverse styles, experiences, and themes.
First-time contributor Brian Ma offers a haunting parable of uneasy insight via a weird sacrifice. Poet, novelist, and short story writer Kareem Tayyar (The Prince of Orange County) delivers another in a series of cinematic tales, reconstructing memory and reality. D.A. Hosek explores motivation and responsibility to community in an only slightly fictionalized Los Angeles Catholic Worker house. Collagist/short story writer Garrett Saleen expands perspective and empathy to nonhuman creatures where love transcends ownership. Acclaimed essayist Albert Goldbarth (Ludd Light) takes apart the mythology of privilege by celebrating unacknowledged real-life historical characters in a meditation humanizing and empowering lives previously only imagined or purposely ignored. Mona Leigh Rose considers the tragi-comic adventures of a hapless young influencer whose quest for stardom is assisted by a natural disaster. Warren Perkins, novelist (Putrefaction Live) and short story writer, finds peace and meaningful loss in the desolation of the desert.
Frequent contributor Michael Cadnum (Earthquake Murder), an acclaimed writer of dozens of books in all forms, delivers two dreamful and poetic meditations on place. Reid Sherline, winner of the Harvard Review Chapbook Prize for the novella Rapture, revisits the story of the Southern California 1970s Jesus Movement from a revisionist and revelatory perspective. Acclaimed Los Angeles novelist Diana Wagman (The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets) considers, wryly and hilariously, our obligations with and responsibilities to the dead. Veteran journalist Barbara Tannenbaum profiles visionary Los Angeles history and culture writer Norman Klein, whose critique of purposeful forgetting is powerfully affirmed. In Matthew Pitt’s (These Are Our Demands) short story, an undertaker confronts a larger than death life in the allegorical medical case study of a cadaver. Smart social satirist Michael Alessi (The Horribles) sends up professional wrestling, MAGA, and kayfabe culture, albeit with empathy and political insight.
“We might call this the death, disappearance, and disaster issue,” says editor Tonkovich. “There are ghosts, dead bodies, and lost people in these stories and essays. I like to think they’re mourned, resuscitated, and celebrated. As usual, our contributors have their fingers on the pulse of the zeitgeist, or in this case, their artistic finger on its corpse.”
Says Tonkovich, “I did not arrive at a body count until I reread the entire issue. Many stories are comic, of course. All are smart and often offer moral instruction. The contributors to this issue insist on an honest accounting of our moment.”
The issue includes a mix of longtime contributors and writers with established literary chops for whom this is the first appearance in the journal. Tonkovich is especially pleased to present Tannenbaum’s laudatory profile of the legendary Norman M. Klein, author of The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. The issue captures our collective sadness and longing, but also communicate a possibility of redemption and insight.
Additional events scheduled to celebrate the new issue are listed on the SMR website and include the Alabaster Anniversary: Celebrating 37 Years of the Santa Monica Review with Readings by Recent Contributors on Nov. 22 at 2 p.m. at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 681 N. Venice Blvd., Venice.
Santa Monica Review was founded by novelist and SMC English instructor Jim Krusoe (The Sleep Garden). Published twice yearly, the Review has presented readers experimental, thoughtful, and funny original writing — including essays and short stories by Michelle Latiolais, Lisa Teasley, Alice Mattison, Keenan Norris, Emily Greenberg, Ismet Prcic, and Gary Soto — in 37 years of publication, and is a celebrated national magazine. Recent stand-out work published in the Review appears in the annual Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and PEN/O. Henry anthologies.
Santa Monica Review is sold online at the SMR website (smc.edu/sm_review), and in print editions at the SMC Campus Store (SMC Main Campus, 1900 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica), at Beyond Baroque and Small World Books in Venice,and at other area booksellers. Copies may also be ordered by mail. Details are available at smc.edu/sm_review.
The publication costs $14 per issue or $25 for the two issues each year.
More information is available at the Santa Monica Review website (smc.edu/sm_review) or by calling 949-235-8193. All events subject to change or cancellation without notice.
Santa Monica Review is a project of Santa Monica College, part of its mission to promote literacy and engagement with the literary arts in Southern California. Santa Monica College is a California Community College accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC).
Author
About The Author
