Welcome to Waccamaw, an online literary journal published at Coastal Carolina University.

We take our name from the Waccamaw River, which runs through Conway, South Carolina, home of the university. We publish two issues per year, spring and fall, featuring the best contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction we can find.

We aim to find and publish work that is as beautiful and mysterious as the tannin-dyed black water of the river whose name we invoke. We value mystery in literature, but not obscurity, remembering Robert Frost’s profound observation, “There is nothing as mysterious as something clearly seen.”

In the preparation of our first two issues (spring and fall 2008), we have sought work that is at once clear and mysterious—poems, stories, and essays that speak to any reasonably educated reader with clarity, but which also reveal levels of meaning, complexity, and ambiguity with each reading.

We will begin accepting unsolicited submissions in the spring of 2009. Please do not send work for consideration before we have announced a call for submissions. Keep checking our News and Features section for this call, which will appear in the late fall of 2008.

Thank you for your interest in our journal. We hope you will find the literary work we’re presenting to be as essential and mysterious as the water that has flowed through Conway since long before the place was given that name. Welcome to Waccamaw.