Earlier this year I attended the AWP Conference in Chicago and served on a panel for “A Year in the Life of Electronic Publishing.” It was a fantastic experience, and I got to meet the good folks behind a number of other online lit mags: Escape Into Life, Cortland Review, and Cellpoems. We’re all online journals and we face unique challenges and opportunities using the electronic platform as our medium of distribution.

Eric Smith is the brainchild behind Cellpoems, a publication that sends a new poem straight to your cell phone via text message once a week. Their unique approach began just a couple years ago and they have been growing strong since.

Guy Shahar founded the Cortland Review, one of the first online poetry publications way back in 1997, and it has since transformed into a multimedia journal that publishes audio and video of poetry readings, interviews and a candid look into the daily lives of select poets.

Escape Into Life, the project of editors Matt Dye and Jason Reynolds, is a unique journal that blends the lines between visual arts and literature until it becomes a work of “Visual Poetry.” They’ve recently updated their site and are adding more work to their collection.

The Cortland Review, being the videophiles that they are, filmed our panel session and have just published it on their site. It’s embedded here in its entirety or you can jump direct to my portion of the presentation which starts at the 3:26 mark. (Thanks to Guy Shahar for his efforts in producing and intercutting the video with our respective presentations.)

Since the conference we’ve updated the Carvezine.com website, so the clips of the site are now outdated. Still, you can gain some insight as I give a brief overview of the history of Carve, explain my vision for the magazine and its future, and detail an outline of the successess and struggles we had in 2011.

(Sorry that I talk a little fast - it was exciting but a little nerve-wracking to speak to such a large audience.)

Thanks to everyone who attended. Did you attend the panel session at AWP? If so, let us know in the comments!