About Us
Strange Hymnal is a literary magazine of mystery, ritual, and obsession. A biome of writing and art that worships the strange and unusual. An investigation of liminal spaces, the ineffable, the profane, the god that lives inside the car wash. A made religion, consumed by possibility, the duality of self, the tension between fear and curiosity, the seen and unseen.
Things that are important to us:
the anglerfish; the confession scene in Fleabag; decorator crabs; The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley; eyeballs; The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch; Gladis the orca; gossip; gulper eels; liminal spaces; "litany with blood all over" by Danez Smith; "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" by James Tiptree, Jr.; Mulholland Drive; My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres; mysterious and important work; Nox by Anne Carson; priests blessing computers; Twin Peaks
Masthead
Morissa Young
editor
Morissa Young is a writer, a Midwesterner, and an editor at Milkweed Editions. She holds an MFA in poetry and publishing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she worked as an instructor and a publishing staff member at Lookout Books and Ecotone. Her works appears or is forthcoming in A Velvet Giant, Nelle, Frozen Sea, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and cats, Bamboo and Fig.
Maggie Boyd Hare
editor
Maggie Boyd Hare is a writer from Kentucky whose work appears in publications such as the Oxford American, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Arkansas International. Her essay “Self Portrait in Essays I Don’t Want to Write” was named a notable essay in Best American Essays 2023. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she also worked as an instructor, publishing assistant, and as both the design and poetry editors for Ecotone magazine.
Submissions
Email us at editor (at) strangehymnal (dot) com. Submit up to 5 pieces as a Word doc or PDF. 5,000-word limit. We accept art, poetry, essays, short stories, translations of the dead.
We like:
- Unreliable narrators
- Irreverence
- Gray ideas of reality
- Nonhuman entanglements
- Subversive formal poetry
- Narrative poetry
- Mystery + the inaccessible
- The awareness of people as characters
- Essays that ask more than they answer
- Things made for the joy of making
- The place where language falls away
Contact Us
© Strange Hymnal 2025