About Arid

Arid is a magazine of poetry, prose, and photography rooted in the American desert Southwest — the basin and range, the Mojave, the Colorado Plateau, the high Chihuahuan, and the country between. Our compass swings from the Wasatch to the Rio Grande, from the Owens Valley to the Llano Estacado. Most of our work comes from somewhere out past the last paved road.

We publish writing and pictures that take the desert on its own terms — as place, as discipline, as a kind of attention. We are not interested in the desert as backdrop, or as metaphor borrowed from the coast. We are interested in what happens to a sentence after a long, dry afternoon.

"What is faith but the practice of standing where you were told water would be?"

We read submissions year-round. We pay our contributors. We are based out of the basin and run by people who have lived in this country a long time.