Welcome to Black Moon Magazine. We are an independent, nonprofit, online literary arts journal seeking to find and publish the very best fiction and poetry. We hope to find writing that moves us, inspires us, that makes us feel things we haven’t felt before, and that gives us new perspectives we had never considered until meeting with your words on the page.

Black Moon Magazine is the brainchild and passion project of best friends Sam Campbell and Matthew Gilbert. Sam & Matt met as undergraduate English majors while studying at East Tennessee State University. While both of them write in all genres, Sam’s main focus is fiction while Matt’s soul belongs to the poetry.

Throughout the years, these two comrades found themselves coming together to work towards the progression of creative writing and literature in many different ways. First, it was through organizing and running a Creative Writing Society aptly named The Literati. Later, they found themselves both pursuing their Master of Arts in English degrees and working for various independent publishers. They were manuscript evaluators for Orison Books and the Great Lakes Review. Furthermore, they successively found themselves serving as the Editor-in-Chief of The Mockingbird, ETSU’s student-focused literary arts magazine. Matt served as the editor for the 46th issue, and Sam edited the 47th issue.

Having both been editor-in-chief of a literary arts magazine, and both loving the experiences of working with independent publishers, it became their joint dream to co-found their own literary arts magazine. After they both graduated with their MAs, they set to work to make this dream a reality.

While brainstorming potential names for their new journal, they happened upon a website that detailed the different types of moons. They found that once every 19 years or so there happens to be a month without a full moon. This phenomena is known as a black moon.

Thus, Black Moon Magazine was born.