About High Desert Journal
“Kestrel with Horizon” by Rick Bartow (Wiyot), featured in Issue 17
Since 2004, High Desert Journal (HDJ) has stood as a monument to place-based literature, publishing the finest fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from both established and new voices. We celebrate artists who make innovative contributions to our views of the contemporary West.
HDJ is a witness to the High Desert of the North American West—a region most often thought of as barren: a wasteland of sagebrush and sun, dirt and rock, empty of everything but sky. Not a place so much, but a place between places, something to endure as you drive through. For those of us who live, love, and know this area of the West, the reality is much different. HDJ was created to help dispel popular media-influenced myths, combat erasure, and explore the many voices, landscapes, languages, cultures, and demographics abundant here. We also strive to illuminate the landscape as it truly is—diverse, beautiful, complicated, and as wondrous as the lives upon it.
We seek to illuminate our region as it really is: diverse and divergent; urban, suburban, and rural; wild and ruined; and imbued with a deep Native, immigrant, and migrant history and culture.
High Desert Journal has published hundreds of writers living in or writing about the High Desert of the American West. Past contributors include Gary Snyder, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Daniel, Rick Bass, Gretel Ehrlich, Aaron Abeyta, David James Duncan, William Kittredge, Craig Lesley, Kim Stafford, Kim Barnes, Charles Goodrich, Joe Wilkins, and others, and yet we are equally proud of the emerging writers we have published, many for the first time. HDJ seeks to launch and further the careers of up-and-coming talent.
Since 2004, High Desert Journal’s ongoing mission has been:
to support the writers and artists of the High Desert of the North American West, an area often under-recognized for its cultural and artistic contributions.
to shine a light on the issues and challenges being faced in the interior West by eliciting a sense of place.
to break down and challenge the tired tropes and incomplete notions of the West and help chart a course for the emerging West in all its complexity.
to celebrate the rich and diverse history, culture, and landscape of the High Desert.
to combat erasure.
Visit our contact page to get in touch, and our submissions page to send us your work.
High Desert Journal is a 501(c)(3) non-profit bi-annual literary journal.