Nathan Warner
The staff and faculty advisers for Amaranth, AACC’s student journal for the arts, pose with the magazine’s 1984 edition.
The 50th edition of AACC’s student journal for the arts, Amaranth, will come out on May 6.
Amaranth staff will host a release party—including an open mic event—in Humanities 112 that day to celebrate the milestone.
“Any student, alumni or community member may attend,” Editor-in-Chief Zoë Sharp said. “It’s so that way, we can give people copies of the journal. It’s kind of a day to, like, celebrate the release of the journal itself. … We’ve got, like, a little reception that goes on. People get their copies of [the] journal, they look through it, and then we kind of pivot, and we have time for people to share their work that’s made it into the journal.”
Amaranth, which usually publishes once a year, is celebrating its 41st anniversary. During the journal’s tenure, staff has occasionally published more frequently.
Included in the 50th issue will be an editor’s note dedicating the journal to the first editor-in-chief of Amaranth, Margo Thiele, who died in 2020.
Amaranth’s first issue in 1984 featured a dedication to AACC’s former coordinator of student activities, Diane Phelps, who died in 1980, and was a mentor to Thiele.
“The very first edition of Amaranth was dedicated to a [mentor] who had passed away,” Sharp, a third-year psychology and creative writing student, said. “I thought it would be a really beautiful callback to dedicate this edition to … Margo.”
Amaranth has earned numerous awards over the years from the College Media Association, the Associated Collegiate Press, The Columbia Scholastic Press Association and others.
Simon Ward, Amaranth’s faculty adviser, said the 2024 edition did especially well, “which is pretty awesome.”
Readers will see up to 61 poems, illustrations and short stories. Amaranth staff members and faculty adviser considered more than 150 pieces submitted to Amaranth for this issue.
“We only accept student, alumni and prospective students’ submissions,” Tomi Brunton, Amaranth’s associate editor and a dual-enrollment student, said. Brunton called the quantity of submissions “pretty big.”
Students can submit their work—up to five visual artworks, five poems and three short stories—to Amaranth during the spring and fall semesters through a website. The staff, throughout the school year, votes on which pieces to accept for publication.
“I think getting the chance to see your work in print is exciting for a lot of students,” Garrett Brown, coordinator of creative writing, said.