VOLT was created on an unusually sunny afternoon in San Francisco in 1991. VOLT is published by the Pacific Film and Literary Association, a non-profit organization registered in California. Innovative in design and content, VOLT publishes a range of adventurous writing. The magazine's size (9″ by 12″) offers a larger space than usual for an individual poem or piece of prose. Often, work utilizing white space and typography can be found in VOLT.
Founded and edited by poet Gillian Conoley, VOLT appears every spring. Each issue includes cover art, frequently by such artists as Eve Ascheim, Joan Mitchell, Katherine Bradford, Hawley Hussey, Jo Whaley, Stephen Curry, Tom Burckhardt, Andrea Belag, and Brian Lucas. Contributors have included Yusef Komunyakaa, Norma Cole, Aditi Machado, Will Alexander, Jeffrey Pethybridge, Leslie Scalapino, Kazim Ali, Barbara Guest, Harryette Mullen, Brian Teare, Valzhyna Mort, Jorie Graham, John Yau, Andrea Abi-Karam, Julie Carr, Asiya Wadud, Peter Gizzi, Brenda Hillman, and Carmen Giménez Smith, among many others. Fiction Editor is novelist Stefan Kiesbye.
VOLT has received many awards and honors, including several Pushcart Prize Anthology selections, a Fund for Poetry grant, and several selections for The Best American Poetry (Scribners). VOLT was named one of the top literary magazines in the country by Every Writers Resource and has received praise from the City Lights Booksellers and Publishers Blog. VOLT's continuing design innovations and layout are created by Production Editor Steve Galbreath. Contributions to the magazine are welcome and fully tax-deductible.
GILLIAN CONOLEY is a poet, editor, and translator. Her new collection is Notes from the Passenger with Nightboat Books May 2023. The author of ten collections of poetry, Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. A Little More Red Sun on the Human, also with Nightboat, won the 39th annual Northern California Book Award in 2020. Often comprising narrative, lyric, and fragmented forms, her work takes up an inquiry into spirit and matter, the individual and the state. Conoley has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College, Tulane University, and Sonoma State University. Conoley's translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appearing in English for the first time, is with City Lights. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, founder and editor of VOLT magazine, Conoley has collaborated with installation artist Jenny Holzer, composer Jamie Leigh Sampson, and Butoh dancer Judith Kajuwara.
