Welcome to Prime Number Magazine!

ISSUE 139, October — decEMBER 2018

(a Press 53 publication)

2017 PNM Sq Blue Silver.jpg

Prime Number Magazine is home to distinctive poetry and short fiction from writers around the world. Browse our selections by clicking on the author's photo or title of the poem or story. 

Winners of the 2018 Prime Number Magazine Awards for Poetry and Short Fiction


Winners of our monthly Flash Fiction Contest

Low $7 entry fee (a prime number) and a nice prize of $251 (also a prime number)


Winners of our FREE 53-Word Story Contest

Winner receives a free book by that month's judge

Editors' Selections

Each issue, we ask our guest editors to select their favorite poems or stories from those submitted during our open submission period. Submissions are free and only accepted through Submittable. Here are the guest editors for Issue 139, October-December 2018.

Guest Editor for Poetry

richard garcia

Richard Garcia.JPG

Richard Garcia won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Poetry for Porridge. He is the author of six books of poetry, including The Other Odyssey from Dream Horse Press, and The Chair from BOA Editions, both published in 2014. His poems appear in many journals, including The Georgia Review and Spillway, and in anthologies such as The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife Katherine Williams and their dog Max. He is on the faculty of the Antioch University MFA in Creative Writing program.


Guest Editor for Short Fiction

Jodi paloni

Jodi Paloni Press 53.jpg

Jodi Paloni is the author of They Could Live with Themselves, runner-up for the 2015 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in a number of literary journals including upstreet, Carve Magazine, Whitefish Review, Green Mountains Review, Connotation Press. Her work has won the Short Story America Prize and placed second in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Raised in rural Pennsylvania, she lived in Vermont for twenty-five years, and recently settled on the coast of Maine.

Meet Our Guest Editors for Issue 151, Apr-Jun 2019

(Submissions are open now through December at Submittable)

Holly Iglesias is the author of Sleeping Things and two other collections, Souvenirs of a Sunken World and Angles of Approach, and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry. She has taught at University of North Carolina-Asheville and University of Miami, focusing on documentary and archival poetry, and she translated the work of Cuban poet Caridad Atencio. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Cultural Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Kevin C. Jones is the author of Collateral Damage: Stories.  His work has been featured in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including The New York TimesRed, White, and True: The American Military Story from World War II to Present, and  the Press 53 anthologies Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform and Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand. A former Marine, he holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and a PhD from the University of Florida. He lives and works in Florida’s Tampa Bay area.  


prime number

any integer other than 0 or ± 1 that is not divisible without remainder by any other integers except ± 1 and ± the integer itself (Merriam-Webster's Dictionary)

In literature: poetry and prose that is distinctive and unique (Prime Number Magazine)

Prime Number Magazine is a Press 53 publication, founded by Clifford Garstang and Kevin Morgan Watson on July 1, 2010, beginning with Issue 2 and continuing in prime numbers.