Anchored by a quarterly arts journal, Image is a lively community that gathers readers, writers, artists and art-appreciators in person and online.
Mission: Image fosters contemporary art and writing that grapple with the mystery of being human by curating, cultivating, convening, and celebrating work that explores religious faith and spiritual questions.
Vision: Image is animated by our vision to be a vibrant thread in the fabric of culture, contributing to mainstream literary and artistic communities by demonstrating the vitality of contemporary art and literature invigorated by religious faith.
The best way to get to know our work is to taste and see. Here are some highlights from recent issues:
FICTION
Sarah Stone, Rising with the Seas
Andrew Krivak, Moth and Rust
Renee Simms, Assembly Line Prayer
Melanie Rae Thon, All Her Beautiful Children
NONFICTION
Lee Isaac Chung, Love Letters
Jamie Smith, The Way of the Critic
Robert Cording, In the Unwalled City
Emily Bernard, From the Stranger in Me...
Nate Klug, My Desert Saints
Chloe Garcia Roberts, Aparture
Parnaz Foroutan, Haji Gershin’s Hamam
Sara Zarr, This Contained Life
Anthony Domestico, The Wolf Hour
POETRY
Linda Gregerson, Not So Much an End as an Entangling
Rae Armantrout, Conversations
Jessica Jacobs, Godwrestling
B.H. Fairchild, My Mother, on Horseback, in a Blizzard
Bruce Bond, Augustine
Kim Garcia, Low Road to a High Place
Christian Detisch, Hospital Theodicy, Overnight Call
INTERVIEW
VISUAL ART
Askia Bilal, In the Studio
VISUAL ART
Duncan Simcoe, Fade to Black
VISUAL ART
Emmanuel Osahor, In the Studio
VISUAL ART
Preston Singletary, Shape-Shifter
Masthead & Bios
Sara Arrigoni | Publisher & Executive Director: Sara Arrigoni has a 25-year association with Image, beginning during her college years. For 12 years, Sara ran a company in the health information industry, then launched two other small businesses before returning to Image in 2017. She lives in the Seattle area.
Molly McCully Brown | Editor in Chief: Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body (Persea Books, 2020) and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, Tin House, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. The recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, she is director of creative writing at the University of Wyoming and the editor in chief of Image.
Mary Kenagy Mitchell | Executive Editor: Mary Kenagy Mitchell began working at Image in 2000 as managing editor. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Image, Good Letters, The Millions, 3 Quarks Daily, Georgia Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, St Katherine Review, and Bearings Online. She lives in Seattle.
Amanda Cordero | Marketing & Communications Associate: Amanda Cordero first joined Image in 2019 as an intern. A voracious reader, Amanda studied literature at Baylor University (B.A., University Scholars, 2019) and the University of Edinburgh (MSc in Literature and Modernity, 2020). Born and raised in Texas, she now lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Judson Bergman | Design Associate: biography to come
Beth Kilpatrick | Program Coordinator: biography to come
Brittney Mihalich | Graduate Assistant: biography to come
Natalie Bergman, Lisa Ann Cockrel, Katherine Fick (chair), Bobby Gross, Mark Jodon, Karen Lentz, Jamie Quatro, Lanecia Rouse, Lauren Winner
members emeritae: Luci Shaw and Carol Windham
Image section editors include culture editor Nick Ripatrazone, visual arts editor Aaron Rosen, poetry editor Shane McCrae, and creative nonfiction editor Mary Margaret Alvarado.
Our editorial advisors include: Jonathan Anderson, Emily Bernard, Belle Boggs, Scott Cairns, Casey Cep, Mia Chung-Yee, André Daughtry, Nausikaä El-Mecky, Carolyn Forché, Katie Ford, Ted Gioia, Joe Hoover, Silas House, Leslie Jamison, Beth Kephart, Phil Klay, Michael Takeo Magruder, Christopher Merrill, Tova Mirvis, Dina Nayeri, Chigozie Obioma, Melissa Pritchard, Meaghan Ritchey, Dua Abbas Rizvi, Joan Silber, Timothy B. Tyson, Crystal Wilkinson, Rowan Williams, Christian Wiman
Full bios of each section's editorial team listed below.
Creative Nonfiction Editor Mary Margaret Alvarado earned her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and a Provost’s Post-Graduate Writing Fellow. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been published widely, most recently in The Atavist, The Baffler, Image, The Georgia Review, Post Road and The Rumpus. Mia is the author of Hey Folly, Chrome of Iris, and American Weather. She is the founding director of a nonprofit, Brave Irene’s, and teaches in prison as part of that work. She lives with her family in Colorado.
Emily Bernard is a professor of critical race and ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. A contributing editor at The American Scholar, she has received fellowships and grants from Harvard, Yale, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem, was a New York Times notable book of the year. Her most recent work is Black is the Body, a testimony to racial experience across generations.
Belle Boggs is the author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood. Mattaponi Queen, her collection of stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Library of Virginia Literary Award. The Gulf, her first novel, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. Boggs has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts among others. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, and New Republic, among others. Her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, will be published by Knopf this May. A proud graduate of the Talbot County Public Schools, she has an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
Lisa Ann Cockrel curates conversations between writers and readers—in print, in person, online, and via multimedia. She is currently an acquisitions editor for Eerdmans with a focus on literary nonfiction. Prior to that she served as director of programs for Image Journal and director of the Festival of Faith & Writing. Cockrel holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has been awarded fellowships by both Bennington College and the Kenyon Writing Workshops.
Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and Oxford American, among others. A columnist for the New York Times Book Review, she teaches at Columbia University.
Beth Kephart is a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, a widely published essayist, and an award-winning instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two dozen books in multiple genres, including Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir and the novel Wild Blues. She has been named a National Book Award finalist and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, among other honors.
Tova Mirvis is the author of three novels, including The Ladies Auxiliary, a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers including the Boston Globe Magazine. She has been a scholar in residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. Her most recent work is a memoir, The Book of Separation, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.
Timothy B. Tyson, writer and historian, is a senior research scholar at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, among other posts. He serves on the executive board of the North Carolina NAACP and the UNC Center for Civil Rights. His works include the New York Times bestseller The Blood of Emmett Till and Radio Free Dixie, winner of the James Rawley Prize for the best book on race and the basis for the documentary Negroes with Guns.
Nick Ripatrazone (culture editor) writes about poetry, religion, film, books, culture, and sports for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, Sewanee Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, America, Image, and other publications, and is a contributing editor at The Millions. He is working on a book about faith and doubt in fiction for Fortress Press.
Pianist Mia Chung-Yee has appeared with the Alabama, Baltimore, Harrisburg, National, and New Haven symphonies; the Boston Pops; and the Seoul Philharmonic, and has performed in the Kennedy Center, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall, Seoul’s Sejong Art Center, and Lincoln Center. Her recordings of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Lee Hyla have earned high praise and awards. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received a master's from Yale and a doctorate from Juilliard. She taught at Gordon College for twenty years before joining the faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music in 2012.
Ted Gioia is a leading music historian and the author of eleven books, including The History of Jazz, Delta Blues, and the forthcoming Music: A Subversive History. His books have been translated into eight languages and two have been honored on the New York Times annual list of notable books. A professional pianist, recording artist, record producer, and music educator, he previously served on the faculty of Stanford University.
Joe Hoover is a playwright and actor and founder of Xavier Theatre and Film. He also works as poetry editor of America Media and as a drama teacher at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep. His essays have been published in The Cresset, The Sun, and Best Spiritual Writing 2012. He is a Jesuit brother.
Phil Klay, a Dartmouth grad and veteran of the US Marine Corps, has written and spoken extensively on military life, social issues, and Catholic faith. After serving in Iraq from 2007 to 2008, he received his MFA from Hunter College. His collection of short stories, Redeployment, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014, among other honors.
Silas House is an American writer best known for his novels. He is also a music journalist, environmental activist, and columnist. His fiction is known for its attention to the natural world, working-class characters, and the plight of the rural place and rural people. His new novel, Southernmost, is winner of the 2019 Judy Gaines Young Award, and is long-listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Christopher Merrill is an American poet, essayist, journalist, and translator. He serves as director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In April 2012 President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities. For Watch Fire, he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award. His nonfiction work includes Things of the Hidden God. His most recent publication is a memoir, Self Portrait with Dogwood.
Dina Nayeri fled the Iranian Revolution at age eight and lived as a refugee for two years before being granted asylum in the United States. She writes fiction and nonfiction on displacement, the refugee crisis, and Iranian diaspora. Her acclaimed Guardian Long Read “The Ungrateful Refugee” was one of the most widely read essays of 2017 and is now taught in schools across Germany. Her work appears in the New York Times, Guardian, LA Times, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Granta, and many others. Her first book of narrative nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee, is published in 2019.
Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His debut novel, The Fishermen, was a finalist for the Man Booker prize and Guardian First Book Award and won the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Awards for Debut Literary Work, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and a Nebraska Book Award. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Transition, The Guardian, New Statesman, New York Times, among others. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was published in spring 2019 and will be translated into eleven languages.
Melissa Pritchard: Winner of numerous literary prizes including the Flannery O'Connor, Carl Sandburg, and Janet Heidinger Kafka Awards, Melissa Pritchard has won three Pushcart Prizes, appeared twice in O.Henry Prize Stories, and been the recent recipient of a Carson McCullers Fellowship. The author of ten books of fiction, she has published work in journals such as the Paris Review, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Ecotone, The Nation and O. As a journalist, she has traveled to Afghanistan, Ethiopia, India, and Ecuador, receiving a Best Journalism Award from The Atlantic. Her books The Odditorium, Palmerino, and a best-selling volume of essays, A Solemn Pleasure, were recently published by Bellevue Literary Press. In 2009, working with the Afghan Women's Writing Project, she established the Ashton Goodman Fund to support the literacy of Afghan women and girls.
Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction, including Fools and The Size of the World, and the recipient of the 2018 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her latest novel, Improvement, is the winner of the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.
Crystal Wilkinson’s works include The Birds of Opulence, winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She is a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared most recently in Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She teaches in the University of Kentucky’s MFA program.
(poetry editor) Shane McCrae’s most recent books are The Gilded Auction Block and In the Language of My Captor. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a fellowship from the NEA. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Scott Cairns is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Theology of Doubt, Idiot Psalms, and Slow Pilgrim. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best American Spiritual Writing. His has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and is director of the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.
Carolyn Forché, teacher, human rights activist, and poet of witness, has put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. Her many works include Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Younger Poets award, and the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. She is director of Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.
Katie Ford is the author of the poetry collections Deposition, Colosseum, Blood Lyrics, and If You Have to Go, all from Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Levis Reading Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Rowan Williams is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, after serving as Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. He has written on David Jones, Flannery O’Connor, Dostoevsky, and other writers, and has recently published Christ the Heart of Creation, a study in classical theological language. He has also published several collections of poetry and a couple of plays.
Christian Wiman is a poet, translator, editor, and essayist. A former Guggenheim fellow, he was editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013. His latest poetry collection, Once in the West was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. His essay collections include He Held Radical Light. He teaches literature and religion at Yale University and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Dr. Aaron Rosen (visual arts editor) is a curator, critic, and academic who has taught at Columbia, Yale, Oxford, and King’s College London. He is the author and editor of many books, including Art and Religion in the 21st Century and the children’s book Journey through Art, translated into seven languages.
Jonathan Anderson is an artist and scholar whose research focuses on modern and contemporary art. His publications include Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (with William Dyrness). He is an associate professor of art at Biola University and is completing a PhD at King’s College London.
André Daughtry is an interdisciplinary photography and media artist, filmmaker, writer, social activist, and theologian of materials based in Brooklyn. He is community minister of the arts at Judson Memorial Church and regularly collaborates with dance and performance artists on various projects, from film to site-specific installations. He has his MFA in photography and media from Cal Arts and an MA in theology and the arts from Union Theological Seminary.
Nausikaä El-Mecky (PhD, cantab) is tenure-track professor in history of art and visual culture at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She specializes in attacks on art, from the Stone Age to the digital era.
Michael Takeo Magruder is a visual artist and researcher whose work uses information-age technologies and systems to examine our networked, media-rich world. His art has been shown in over 280 exhibitions in thirty-five countries and has received extensive support within the UK, US, and EU.
Meaghan Ritchey was director of marketing at Image from 2019-2021. Prior to that she was the associate publisher of Commonweal, a magazine of religion, politics, and culture. She was the director of global community and public programs at International Arts Movement, based in midtown Manhattan with affiliate organizations around the world. There she helped to found The Curator. She adjuncts with Baylor University’s Film and Digital Media Studies Program in New York. Originally from West Texas, she moved to New York in 2005, living in the South Bronx for eight years before settling in Long Island City, Queens.
Dua Abbas Rizvi is a visual artist and art journalist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Since 2008, she has written regularly on art and culture for leading Pakistani newspapers, journals, and magazines. She also teaches studio and theory courses at her alma mater, the National College of Arts in Lahore.
Gregory Wolfe founded Image in 1989 and edited it for thirty years. He was also the founding director of the Seattle Pacific University MFA program in creative writing. He is currently the publisher and editorial director of Slant Books, an indie literary press. Wolfe’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, and America. In 2005 he was a judge for the National Book Awards. His books include Beauty Will Save the World, Intruding Upon the Timeless, and The Operation of Grace. www.gregorywolfe.com
History
Appearing in Image’s pages are: Chimamanda Adichie, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Christopher Beha, Molly McCully Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Scott Cairns, Victoria Chang, Bruce Cockburn, Annie Dillard, Shusaku Endo, Louise Erdrich, Carolyn Forche, Katie Ford, Dana Gioia, Lorna Goodison, Mary Gordon, Ron Hansen, Linda Hogan, Oscar Hijuelos, John Irving, Leslie Jamison, Phil Klay, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Amit Majmudar, Shane McCrae, Marilyn Nelson, Kathleen Norris, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Flannery O'Connor, Mary Oliver, Carl Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Jaime Quatro, Marilynne Robinson, George Saunders, Sufjan Stevens, Barbara Brown Taylor, John Updike, Wim Wenders, Elie Wiesel, Joy Williams, Rowan Williams, Christian Wiman, Lauren F. Winner, and more.
Material first published in Image has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Best American Spiritual Writing, O. Henry Prize Stories, The Art of the Essay, New Stories from the South, Best Christian Short Stories, Best Christian Writing, and Best American Movie Writing. Image has also been nominated by Utne Reader for an Alternative Press Award for Spiritual Coverage, and has been excerpted by Harper's, the Wilson Quarterly, and Utne Reader, and featured on-line at LitHub and Poetry Daily and on the air at Reader's Almanac.
The pilot issue of Image was published from a basement in Front Royal, Virginia, in 1989 by editors Gregory Wolfe and Harold Fickett. Its founding editorial board consisted of Larry Woiwode, Andrew Hudgins, Paul Mariani, John Dillenberger, Steve Hawley, and Thomas Gordon Smith; the founding publication committee included Eugene V. Clark, Richard Foster, and Luci Shaw.
After appearing irregularly for its first five years, Image began publishing on a quarterly basis in 1994 and has done so continuously ever since. James K.A. Smith became editor in 2018, when longtime managing editor Mary Kenagy Mitchell became executive editor. Mitchell and Smith appointed a team of section editors including Shane McCrae (poetry), Melissa Pritchard (fiction), Nick Ripatrazone (culture), Aaron Rosen (visual art), and Lauren Winner (creative nonfiction). Longtime staffer Sara Arrigoni began serving as Image’s publisher in 2022.
Out of the journal have grown a number of lively programs over the years, including workshops, conferences, seminars, fellowships, online classes, readings, and concerts. Our flagship event is the Glen Workshop, an annual week-long summer workshop for artists and writers, which we began hosting in 2000.


