American Chordata is a Brooklyn-based literary and art magazine whose name borrows from biology — Chordata being the phylum that includes all vertebrates, every creature with a backbone. It is a fitting title for a publication interested in the structural essentials of creative life: the spine that holds a story upright, the nervous system that connects image to word, the skeleton beneath the surface of whatever art chooses to show the world.
The magazine publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art with the quiet conviction that literature and image-making are not separate disciplines but two expressions of the same impulse. Based in a borough that has produced more literary magazines per square mile than almost anywhere else on Earth, American Chordata distinguishes itself not through novelty but through care — a refusal to publish anything that does not earn its place on the page.
Brooklyn literary magazines come and go with the seasons, launched on enthusiasm and retired when the founders move to cheaper neighbourhoods. American Chordata endures because it takes its name seriously: it is interested in what gives creative work its backbone, and it is not afraid to look for it in unexpected places. The fiction sits next to photography that could hang in a gallery. The poetry shares pages with visual art that could fill a book. Nothing is filler. Everything is chosen.
In a city where literary magazines are often vehicles for a particular aesthetic or social circle, American Chordata feels genuinely open — interested in the work itself rather than the biography of the person who made it. That openness, combined with the editorial discipline to maintain it issue after issue, is what gives the magazine its vertebral column. The phylum holds.