VOLT: America's innovative, long-standing, award-winning literary magazine of poetry & prose, international in scope.

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, 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. Often comprising narrative, lyric, and fragmented forms, her work takes up an inquiry into spirit and matter, the individual and the state. The author of ten collections of poetry, including Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat Books, 2023) Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College, Tulane, and many other universities and conferences. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is editor of VOLT magazine. Her translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appearing in English for the first time, is with City Lights. Conoley has collaborated with installation artist Jenny Holzer, composer Jamie Leigh Sampson, and Butoh dancer Judith Kajuwara. 

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest books are Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books, 2024) and AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. With Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, they co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. In 2022 Augusto Cascales made a film of their play The Obituary Show. They recently had their first solo exhibition at Fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled 13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. 

Born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julie Carr lives in Denver. She is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals such as The Nation, Boston Review, APR, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Volt, A Public Space, 1913, The Baffler and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including: The Best American Poetry (Sribner); Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books); Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press); Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (W.W. Norton); Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books; and &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing 2013, The Force of What's Possible: Writers on Accessibility & the Avant-Garde (Nightboat Books), Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press), The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books) among others. Honors and awards include The Sawtooth Poetry Award, A National Poetry Series selection, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2010-2011).

A former dancer, she now collaborates regularly with dance-artist K.J. Holmes, and has created collaborative works with many other artists, dancers, and filmmakers. With Tim Roberts she helps run Counterpath, an independent literary press and a bookstore/gallery/performance space/community garden in Denver. She is a Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the Department of English where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics from the eighteenth century to the present

erica lewis was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her books include the recently released Mahogany, (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), a collection that addresses the female African-American experience while focusing on the cross-section between public and private grief. Other books include the precipice of jupiter (2009, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), camera obscura (2010, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), murmur in the inventory (2013); and the first two books of the box set trilogy: daryl hall is my boyfriend (2015) and mary wants to be a superwoman (2017). Her chapbooks have been published by Belladonna, Lame House Press, and After Hours/The Song Cave. lewis lives in San Francisco, where she is a fine arts publicist.

Poet and novelist Susan Wheeler was born on July 16, 1955, and grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, and New England. She earned her bachelor of arts degree in literature from Bennington College and did graduate work in art history at the University of Chicago.
Wheeler is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and the novel Record Palace (Graywolf, 2005). Her books of poetry include Assorted Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), which collects work from her first four books and her later work, Meme (University of Iowa Press, 2012); Source Codes (Salt Publishing, 2001); Ledger (University of Iowa Press, 2005); and Smokes (Four Way Books, 1998). Her first poetry collection, Bag 'o' Diamonds (University of Georgia Press, 1993), was chosen by James Tate to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.
About her work, John Ashbery writes:

"Susan Wheeler's narrative glamour finds occasions in unlikely places: hardware stores, Herodotus, Hollywood Squares, Flemish paintings, green stamps, and echoes of archaic and cyber speech. What at first seems cacophonous comes in the end to seem invested with a mournful dignity."

Wheeler's awards include the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Wheeler has taught at the University of Iowa, New York University, Rutgers University, and Columbia University. She is currently a professor emerita at Princeton University.