Issue 2 is now available on Amazon and SDSU Press!

West Coast Review #2 (Spring 2026) from San Diego State University Press Journals Division arrives like a raucous king tide that doesn’t ask permission—restless, sunlit, and a little dangerous.

This emerging literary journal captures the West Coast not just as geography, but as condition: migratory, hybrid, and shaped by memory, media, and desire. If Granta offers global polish and The Believer leans edge-city cerebral, West Coast Review is the scrappy coastal bibliophiliac upstart—equal parts seminar room, shoreline, and late-night scroll.

Inside this issue: fiction that moves from moonlit beaches and diasporic memory to viral exposure, academic precarity, queer intimacy, and surreal collapse. A character eats sardines on a darkened coast while thinking through migration and class; a professor spirals after becoming the subject of a student’s viral video; desire flickers through apps, bodies, and unstable identities; secrets bind and fracture across families and continents.

Featuring work by contributors including Trin Encarnacion, Fredo Gillis, Michael Chin, Reem Faruqi, Willy Conley, Murdoc Kang, Oz Anarchy, Richard Martin, M.E. Macuaga, Sheila Hamilton, Bill Smoot, Lesley Hart Gunn, and others, this issue showcases a wide range of emerging and established voices.

Editorial guidance and vision come from a distinguished board including Matt de la Peña, Frederick Luis Aldama, Susan Daitch, Eugene Lim, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Stephen-Paul Martin, Quentin Bailey, William “Memo” Nericcio, Meagan Marshall, Jessica Pressman, and Lance Olsen—helping shape a journal committed to risk, range, and discovery.

With striking cover art (Girls in Ibiza by Fredo Gillis), West Coast Review #2 signals a journal finding its voice—raw, ambitious, and unafraid. It’s where the West Coast speaks in its own unruly register, moving between archive and algorithm, desert and data stream, insisting that literature still has a pulse where the Pacific breaks the frame, and where new voices refuse containment.

Check out our past issues on Amazon as well!

Issue #1 (Spring 2025)