We need to keep our love through it all.
This is where we ended last year’s editor’s note. And despite the dreariness and despondence of the world this past year, or perhaps because of it, every single piece selected for this year’s anthology talks about love. Explicit love, implied love, joyous love, quiet love, painted love, poetic love. Love for the family, community, nature, self. Love and beauty. Love and belonging. Love and blood. Love. Somehow you all found it, the spin and music and drive of your pieces woke us up with the inciting incident of love. Thank you to everyone who reached for it, held on to it, sprinkled it, shared it, willed it, lived it.
The Best of the Net Anthology wouldn’t exist without the incredible talent of thousands of writers and editors working on pieces, submitting them, publishing them, selecting and nominating them for inclusion in this anthology. Thank you to everyone that positively and generatively contributed to this community this year.
This anthology is a large undertaking with dozens of people processing submissions, communicating with editors and writers, reading and selecting pieces to be sent to this year’s judges, promoting the work, and communicating through all of it for a full year. Thank you to our Founding and Consulting Editor Erin for always being there throughout the process. Thank you to our Managing Editor, Clayton, for their incredibly steady hands. Thank you to our Assistant Editors, Ariadne, Chekwube, and Muhammed. Thank you to our Social Media Manager, Caroline. Thank you to our Genre Coordinators Laura, Ching-In, H, and Sarah. Thank you to our Assistant Genre Coordinators Lee, Noor, Sierra, and Robin. Thank you to our many, many readers. Sincerely, we know it’s a gift to get to read this brilliant work, but there is so much of it that it can be overwhelming at times. Thank you for your time and discerning eye.
A special thank you to this year’s judges—Cyrus Cassells for poetry, Lily Hoang for nonfiction, Andrew Porter for fiction, and Octavio Quintanilla for Art—for their time, generosity and thoughtful attention.
Any time a year’s worth of work can be celebrated like the work included in this anthology, it’s difficult to stop the momentum you feel from carrying you into the year that follows. We’re here, there’s no arguing that, but thankfully we’re here a little more together than we were last year. This community continues to find and feed each other. There is absolute terror surrounding us, but in the year that comes please return to this work when you feel overwhelmed. Occasionally, we need to feel all the love. Occasionally, we need to be limitless. Repeat the words until they become an incantation. Repeat the words until you accidentally start to sing.
-Shipra and Darren