2025 at The Drift
An end-of-year appeal
2025 has been a challenging year to be a nonprofit, left-wing literary magazine. Amid the political instability of Trump 2.0, the loss of public arts funding, AI’s disruptions to reading and writing, and the continued consolidation of the mainstream media, we’ve never felt more certain that the values we aim to uphold are worth protecting.
In 2026 and beyond, we hope to serve as a bulwark against reactionary politics, the diminishment of literary culture, and the erosion of editorial and intellectual independence. In a time when the landscape is shifting dramatically for media organizations and nonprofits of all kinds, we believe that small, independent publications like The Drift are essential.
This year, we marked our five-year anniversary, which felt in many ways like a turning point for our organization. We celebrated by putting together a special issue featuring some of our past contributors, and launching an expanded newsletter on Substack so that we can better keep pace with the news cycle. We’ve also seen the work of our contributors gain recognition outside our pages. In 2025, we had three short stories (the most of any magazine this year) anthologized in the annual Best American collection. A book that started as a Drift essay was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was a novel we excerpted (a poetry collection we excerpted was also longlisted).
Over the past five years, we’ve published 16 issues, worked with hundreds of writers just starting out, and established The Drift as what the New York Times has called “the lit mag of the moment.” We’ve done all this as a small upstart with a tiny budget. We still work out of donated office space, and we don’t have the funds for a full-time managing editor or business manager. Most of our staff is part-time, and vastly underpaid. We pay our writers what we can, but it’s hardly adequate compensation for the months of work that go into any piece that appears in our pages. If The Drift is going to survive the next five years, we’ll need help from our readers. $25 will cover one of our capsule reviews in the Mentions section. $300 will fund a Dispatch, $1,000 will fund a story, and $2,000 will fund an essay. But any amount makes a difference, and we hope you’ll consider supporting The Drift with a donation today.
Yours,
Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka
Founding Editors, The Drift