Zona Motel is an online literary space for conversation, community, and independent literature.
| Platform |  | Pricing | Freemium | Publishes | Daily |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Issues | 486 | Founded | a year ago | Last Issue | 42 hours ago |
| Active | |||||
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zonamotel.substack.comLatest Issues
MEET ME IN THE MOTEL LOBBY 6/26/26
Welcome to Meet Me in the Motel Lobby, our column of informal posts from Zona Motel’s editors for our paid subscribers.
Welcome to Meet Me in the Motel Lobby, our column of informal posts from Zona Motel’s editors for our paid subscribers.
COLUMN: U Love The Island (Scenic Route #3)
20th- and 21st-century poets—Nobel laureates and indie heads alike—all still toy with the epic poem, one of our most ancient literary forms. In Scenic Route, I take on a journey of my own: to stage encounters with these poems as a living, b...
Conversation: Mariah Stovall with Stephanie Jimenez, On Despair and Desire, Community and Codependency
Book playlists are often hastily created as an afterthought during an author’s publicity tour, but not for Mariah Stovall, whose debut novel was conceived as a 300-page conversation with the songs she loved most. Centering a friendship betw...
Conversation: Sam Richard Kills the Readers, with OF Cieri
The publishing industry has been preparing for its own collapse since the era of home television sets, but in the wake of publicly available machine learning models, the c-suite executives of the publishing world yearn for the end like addi...
ESSAY: How Do Indie Presses Begin? With a Literal (and Literary) Dream
In 2009, I was a bartender at a popular craft beer bar in Brooklyn, getting my MFA at Brooklyn College, and harboring a deep obsession with Virginia Woolf. At that time, I’d talked the head of the English Department, the amazing Ellen Tremp...
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Authors
The writers behind this newsletter.
Zona Motel is a brotherhood and web space that exists to support good literature.
Brittany Ackerman is the author of The Perpetual Motion Machine and The Brittanys. She has a forthcoming novel with CLASH Books called The Style of Your Life. She does not like elevators and prefers to take the stairs.
Playwright. Author. Denizen of archives. https://www.richardbyrneplays.com CONGRESSMAN DAVY - BEAUTY DOESN'T REACH ME - HOTEL MAYFLOWER
I'm the host of Book Stuff podcast, a creative writer, and an award-winning search professional Check out my website!
As a member of an old Nigerian family, I write extensively on African traditional culture and the titled upper classes that preceded our modern government.
Author of the novel Dark Enough, the short story collection Whatever Used to Grow Around Here, and Editorial Director of Under the BQE Press.
Born and raised in San Diego, CA.
hello my name is juliet escoria and I am an Editor-in-Chief at Zona Motel! I also wrote these books: You Are the Snake (Soft Skull, 2024), Witch Hunt & Black Cloud (CLASH, 2023), and Juliet the Maniac (Melville House, 2019).
I'm just some guy—running socials for ZONA MOTEL! \ud83d\udc10 Catch us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zona.motel/
Weird Horror. Queer | Leftist | DIY. These Books Kill Fascists | This Press Runs on Spicy Pickles & High Life. Founded 2014 | Minneapolis.
That Guy Cieri. A big pile of bones. I write books, I tell stories, I know history.
I live in Charleston, West Virginia, and try to maintain a creative life, personally and professionally. I'm also a contributing editor at Zona Motel.
Son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants. Words in HAD, X-RAY — debut book of fictions + novella from Future Tense Books, Spring 2027
Trying to not waste my life, talking to people who aren’t wasting theirs. Wrote a novel: They Could Have Named Her Anything (Little A, 2019).
Ken Baumann is a writer who lives in New Mexico. https://kenbaumann.com
Co-editor-in-chief of Zona Motel and Hub City Shorts. I also write novels and other things
Gossip Columnist at Zona Motel
one day i might even publish something here.
Greetings and salutations. I'm a currently incarcerated writer, poet, and artist. Check out my column at Zona Motel.
Writer, artist, translator living in Atlanta. Journeyman caboose.
A small Brooklyn press. A platform for writer-supported literature. Existing under the actual BQE.
writes
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