Ki, an online journal overseen by the Editorial Board of Qui Parle, seeks to explore the whatness of the critical. We aim to publish work that is critical in the most expansive sense of the word: sharp, brief, politically oriented pieces that fall outside or trouble the bounds of scholarship and its conventions. Meaning what in Punjabi, Ki signals at once a line of inquiry (what is criticality, exactly? what is it capable of?), a playful provocation (what does scholarship look like, anyway?), and a political investment in the enormous breadth of critical thought in all arenas of knowledge production. We are interested in work from the academy and also from everyday conversations, from art practices, classrooms, and activist spaces. Poetry, fiction, autotheory, flash scholarship, fieldnotes, glossaries, myths, visual and sonic arts, forms of expression without easy names: these are all of critical import, and we enthusiastically welcome them here.


Masthead

Editor in Chief
Justin Greene

Justin is a PhD candidate in anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the publication of literary magazines in São Paulo, Brazil, with an emphasis on practices of translation. In addition to his editorial work for Ki and Qui Parle, he is a poetry editorial advisor for Anthropology and Humanism, and previously served as Small Press Editor at Entropy, where he organized the Where to Submit list. His poetry can be found in Zoeglossia, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He is especially excited about interventions in poetics and poetic forms, messes, and things he can’t begin to imagine.


Managing Editor
Naima Karczmar

Naima lives in Berkeley, where she is a PhD student in English and Critical Theory working on racial epistemologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She serves on the editorial board for Qui Parle, and has been a finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award and the Disquiet International Literary Prize in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Gramma Poetry, and other people’s living rooms. She is particularly enthusiastic about publishing formally innovative and theoretically oriented prose.


Editor
Mehak Khan

Mehak is a graduate student in English and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley and an editor at Qui Parle. Her academic work is at the intersections of contemporary Anglophone fiction, queer theory, post- and decolonial theory, and game studies. Her short story, “Jinns | جنس” was nominated for the Salam Award for Pakistani Speculative Fiction, and she has co-edited a Words Without Borders issue on contemporary Urdu feminist literature. She was also an early designer and curator for the iOS game Dear Reader. She is interested in receiving submissions that test the limits of form, are playful, and which fit uneasily in disciplines.


Editor
Yvonne Lin

Yvonne is a PhD student in Chinese literature and media at UC Berkeley and an editor of Qui Parle. Her research explores the mediation of memory in postsocialist vernacular culture, and she loves a good ruin. She co-edited susurrus, a zine of translations, and her writing has appeared in Ghost City Review. She is interested in works that play with medium, form, and language/s.


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