Knockout.vol. 2 no. 1

Luna Park asked the editors of Knockout why they decided to start a new literary magazine. Here’s what they said.

From Brett Ortler, co-editor/founder of Knockout

I started Knockout along with my co-founder Jeremy Halinen. We started KO because we wanted to try something that was different than we’d seen in other literary magazines, both in terms of thematic slant and in terms of a “mission,” if you could call it that. That is, we wanted to run a magazine that was as open to as many varying styles as possible, but we also wanted to dedicate the magazine to social action. For this reason, we try to balance each issue with a fairly equal mix of straight/GLBT writers, as this is a combination one doesn’t see elsewhere. In addition, we didn’t want just to do art for art’s sake; we wanted to help others along the way, if we could. That’s why we do our best to give to charitable causes with each issue. In this way, we’re trying to achieve three social goods: helping popularize poetry by printing fine work, featuring GLBT and straight writers side by side, and helping others through charitable causes.

So far, it’s been fun, if difficult. But it’s certainly been worth the effort.