In ecology, an ecotone is the border between two adjacent communities — a marsh meeting a forest, a meadow dissolving into scrubland — where the characteristic species of each overlap. It is a place of danger and opportunity, a testing ground. In 2005, nature writer David Gessner and graduate students Kimi Faxon Hemingway and Heather Wilson borrowed the term for a new literary magazine at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Ecotone has been exploring those borders ever since.
Published twice yearly by faculty and students in UNCW's MFA program, Ecotone commissions fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art that reimagines place — bridging the literary and the scientific, the personal and the biological, the urban and the rural. The charge is interpreted expansively: contributors have included winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award alongside emerging talents whose first major publication appeared in these pages. Work from the magazine has been selected for The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, Pushcart Prize anthologies, and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories — making it one of only two literary magazines in the country to appear in all six major anthology series.
In 2023, Ecotone received CLMP's Firecracker Award for Magazines/General Excellence, adding to a growing list of honors including the AWP Small Press Publisher Award. Its sister imprint, Lookout Books, extends the mission into book-length work. For readers who want a vibrant rather than docile literature of place, Ecotone remains one of the finest homes in American letters.
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