Welcoming Voiceworks’ new Editor, Joel Keith
Express Media is so thrilled to announce Joel Keith as the new Editor of Voiceworks!
Joel is a writer and experienced editor whose work has appeared in Overland, Island, Cordite, The Suburban Review and, of course, Voiceworks. Additionally, she has been on the Editorial Committee for Voiceworks since 2021, and interned at The Suburban Review in 2023. She also recently placed third in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2024.
Since becoming involved with Voiceworks when she was 18, Joel says that the mag beloved, central part of her writing life.
“I don't remember how I first heard of Voiceworks - it was probably in a Zoom tutorial during one of 2021's many lockdowns. Anyway, I read it, loved it, submitted a story, and thrillingly, it was accepted into Issue #123: Pickle. It was a story written very much in (what I did not know quite yet to call) the Voiceworks style, which I would spend the following years as a fiction editor trying and, of course, failing to resist: an ungendered protagonist kills a beautiful man she meets in art class, then muses philosophically about the smells he gives off as he rots under her bed.”
Coming into the Editor position, Joel hopes to bring friendliness, office chic, eccentric email syntax, and an almost religious devotion to sentences. Having grown up in Darwin, on Larrakia land, they also hope to expand the magazine's reach to new places, and to publish writers to whom the desire to be published had not, until recently, occurred. And to publish freaks!
“There's a John Cheever line I love: "One never puts down a sentence without the feeling that it has never been put down before in such a way, and that perhaps even the substance of the sentence has never been felt. Every sentence is an innovation." Brought forward five decades and put in a context like this, it probably sounds a little bland, and that word, "innovation", maybe even a little corporate; but it really strikes me as true, and I think it gets at what makes Voiceworks, as a magazine dedicated to youth literature - to both those terms, taken together and separately - so special: that we publish writers articulating feelings that have never been felt before, at an age when they (we) are at rigorous work discovering, for the first time, what feeling really is, and what our capacities are for it. So many of the most interesting writers working on this continent today got their start here.”
The upcoming issue, #134 ‘Vice’, will be the last edition of Voiceworks under the Editorship of the brilliant Silas Moir, before the torch is passed to Joel for #135 ‘Bend.’