What a long and incredible year it’s been.
At the start of 2025, we doubled down on our commitment to champion art in the space of social issues, promising to continue creating more spaces for writers, artists, and activists to come together and grow in their art. Now, as I reflect back upon this big year of change, I can see just how the seeds we’ve sown over the past 10 years have really begun to take root.
Over the past 12 months, we’ve published 41 writers and artists through The Magazine and our Community Anthologies, elevating the words of an additional 17 finalists from our editors-in-chief program via our Insights column. We’ve gathered 75 amazing individuals through our Narrative Shifts digital residency and launched two new digital residencies to round out our offerings: The Workshop, which welcomed in 14 residents for the inaugural summer intake, and The Cohort, which will kick off its first round in the new year. We won our largest grant to date — $25,000! — and have continued building community with kindred arts organizations who truly want to see writers thrive.
But the heartbeat of what we do is hardly a numbers game, and growth is never linear.
It’s taken us a decade to get to this nexus point, with plenty of detours and experiments and learnings along the way. What’s heartening, though, is to realize that our north star has never really wavered. Everything we have done and continue to do is in the service of our community: the people who dare to show up and create and share and commiserate even when — and especially when — it is difficult to do so.
We are a community made up of builders, dreamers, creators, organizers, artists, and believers. Because to be a writer, I think, is to be something of a seer. Someone who understands that the small actions we take today will reverberate beyond ourselves onward and outward. Someone who trusts that what they commit to the page may stir up emotions in a reader generations and oceans away. Someone who, ultimately, knows that their work fits into a bigger picture that they might never be fully privy to.
When we first began the Seventh Wave in 2015, we talked a lot about conversation and community as the two cornerstones of our organization.
Back then, we saw publishing as the most familiar avenue for our work; we’ve since continued to expand our publications and our programming to meet the needs of our growing community. It seems to me, then, that conversation and community are actually not stones so much as they are seeds — kernels that have produced roots that are now helping us hold steady amid tumultuous times. Which is why this year, we’ve really taken the necessary steps to take root for the next ten.
We’ve always been community-built and community-run; thank you for being an integral part of our continued growth. We keep beginning because we believe so deeply in the power of what we’re endeavoring to do and build — together. May our collective words continue to ripple forth. May we continue to make space for each other’s art, and for our own.
