Ben Yarling founded American Chordata in 2015 because he wanted a literary magazine that could celebrate sophisticated design and earnest expression on the same 5.5-by-8.5-inch page. The name borrows from biology — Chordata being the phylum that includes all vertebrates, every creature with a backbone — and it signals a publication interested in what gives creative work its spine. By day, Yarling worked as a book editor, commuting from the Jefferson L stop in Brooklyn to Grand Central. By night, he and a team of ten editors built a magazine that would become one of the most respected independent literary journals in the United States.
American Chordata is entirely submissions-based — a high-wire act that sees the editors surrendering the relative safety of commissioning writers and photographers. Instead, they begin each issue by sifting through hundreds of short stories, poems, and images, making their selections and shaping the results into a collection of otherwise unrelated works that somehow cohere. Art director Bobby Doherty, whose photography work includes commissions for New York Magazine and beyond, gave the journal its distinctive visual identity: careful pairings of written and visual art designed to create resonances between the two. The result is something between a traditional literary journal and an art magazine.
The magazine is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and every issue is published simultaneously in print and as a free PDF — a decision born of necessity when the first print run was only 200 copies, but maintained as a principle: ensuring the work of contributors gets read even by those who cannot afford to buy independent literary magazines. The magazine has since been shortlisted for multiple Stack Awards, including Best Use of Photography and Best Cover, and is distributed by Small Changes in the Pacific Northwest and Antenne in Europe. Now managed by editors Natasha Rao and Hannah Hirsh, American Chordata continues to publish annually from Brooklyn, its contributors drawn from India, Russia, the Philippines, the UK, and across the United States.
Yarling once joked that he might change the name if he could — it is a bit long, does not fit in a Twitter handle, and the hard-C pronunciation is not self-evident. But he stands behind it. A magazine about what gives creative work its vertebral column deserves a name with backbone.
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