Callaloo Literary Journal, founded by Charles H. Rowell in 1976 at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is one of the most influential publications of the African diaspora. Over the years it has published the work of Maryse Condé, Rita Dove, Ernest Gaines, Ben Okri, and other acclaimed Black authors. The Callaloo Foundation was established in 2011 to support the journal and has grown to become a cultural powerhouse of its own, hosting readings, lecture series, and workshops in the U.S., the U.K., and the Caribbean. In recent years, however, activities have slowed due to difficulties stemming in part from the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to these challenges, in January, Kyla Kupferstein Torres was named executive editor of the journal and executive director of the foundation. A prolific essayist, the former director of partnership programs at Hunter College in New York City, and the managing editor of Stranger’s Guide, a travel magazine, Kupferstein Torres recently spoke about Callaloo’s future and furthering the journal’s groundbreaking work.
Kyla Kupferstein Torres, the executive editor and executive director of Callaloo. (Credit: Kike Arnal)
You’re joining the Callaloo family wearing two very large professional hats. Can you expound on what both of your jobs entail?
As executive editor of the journal, I am here to make sure the written pieces are coming in, establish the vision for each issue and volume, and get the word out about Callaloo so that people know we’re here and we’re active. I also want to rebuild our network of readers and guest editors. Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo’s founding editor, relied on his tremendous academic network, and that is an important thing I’m working to develop all over again. I am proud to say that we are very much on track: By the end of 2024 people should have four new issues of Callaloo [Volume 42] in their hands and their first issue of Volume 43 at the beginning of next year. As the foundation’s executive director, I have three priorities, which are fund-raising, preparing our archive [of papers and rare books] for library acquisition, and finding an institutional home for the journal that can help take on some of our budget and support us. The next round of priorities includes the conference and the workshops. We are going to do a small convention at the end of October at Howard University, which won’t be a full-on Callaloo conference but will be a provocative, intellectual conversation. So we are also working to revive those traditions.
I’m particularly interested in your appointment as executive editor of the journal. In what ways might the magazine change with this monumental appointment?
We are incredibly grateful to Johns Hopkins University Press and its journals publisher, Bill Breichner, for continuing to believe in Callaloo and for sticking with us. [Because of them] our work is available online at Project Muse, and that work will stay in that realm. But there are new ways we can share content online. When I look at a magazine like the New Yorker, it’s still the New Yorker, but now there’s the New Yorker Radio Hour and the New Yorker Festival. They’ve found ways to bring this publication more deeply into people’s lives. Callaloo has been very important to writers and academics, but I want to find a way to craft issues that appeal to more than strictly academic audiences. I want your mom to read this. I want your aunt and your coworker to read this. I want Callaloo to be read by people who are Black as well as by people who want to know about us. I also want it to continue to be focused on art. We want to be led by a collective of academics and artists to ensure the long-term survival of this publication and its long-term relevance to our people, diaspora-wide. It’s not about me. It’s about this institution.
The letter announcing your appointment mentions that you see yourself as “a steward of Dr. Rowell’s tremendous legacy.” What does that legacy mean to you?
I see this job as a service to Black history and to the future of Black arts and letters. Callaloo has always been an amazing institution that has served people in different ways. You need a place that is always looking for the work of Black people, a place for seasoned writers to try something new, and a place for academics from all different disciplines. If Callaloo is doing what it does best, the flow of writers, voices, and topics will really be what revitalizes the journal. What I’m here to do is to preserve the best of what we’ve done and to allow new ideas and content to make things fresh.
What advice do you have for writers who’d like to submit to Callaloo? What are you looking for these days?
I would love to publish more personal essays. I am an essayist, and I think the essay is one of the most compelling literary forms. I’m reading Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and we are all living in the wake, where we suffer all of these [racist] microaggressions. You can absolutely turn a microaggression in the grocery store line into a compelling essay, but problematize it, question it in some deeper way. Unpack the moment so that it illuminates something. Here at Callaloo we’re still looking for literature. We’re still looking for sophisticated, complex narratives.
What advice do you have for writers interested in working for publications like you have done? Any tips for striking a work-life-writing balance?
If you are lucky and privileged enough to have a choice of things you can do for a living, and one of those things is something that really turns you on, run with it. I love editing because I like systems and I like making the trains run on time, making things work, and seeing a finished product. At the same time, I have to learn to shut down on Friday nights; otherwise I don’t stop working. So you have to do it for the love, from your gut, and also be able to set boundaries with yourself about how you stay involved with it.
Destiny O. Birdsong is the author of the poetry collection Negotiations (Tin House, 2020) and the triptych novel Nobody’s Magic (Grand Central, 2022). She is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
