RABBLE REVIEW Five Year Anniversary
September 17th, 2026 marks 5 years of RABBLE REVIEW! We reflect on the last five years...and we have a surprise announcement as well...
Hello RABBLE REVIEW readers. We hope you’re doing well and staying safe out there. Today is a very special day. RABBLE REVIEW turns five years old. Happy birthday to us! We did it. Five whole years of RABBLE and REVIEW. If you have been with us from the beginning, or are just now joining us, thank you. We genuinely love doing this work and are excited to keep bringing more exciting work to you all.
RABBLE REVIEW actually started a year earlier. Today’s anniversary marks the release of our first issue, which I think is a more appropriate date to mark. Also, I don’t know what the actual assembly date of RABBLE REVIEW is. I’m sure if I check our old Slack messages——wait, I can’t do that because we didn’t pay for Slack and they paywall message history. So, it’ll remain a mystery. Anyways, RABBLE REVIEW officially became a “thing” in the middle of 2020. We opened for submissions in February of 2021, and months later we launched the first issue. There were so many road blocks on the road to the issue release. I honestly kept waiting to hear that the project was dead at many points. But once Issue No.1 was out in the world I wanted more. I wanted to do more, share more, create more.
And so we did. For the next few years we kept at it. Issue No. 2 released a few months later. It’s our smallest issue, tiny but mighty. Our submission pool was smaller than Issue One, as was our readership, but we were excited to bring work, and we were able to see just how excited our contributors were. One of those contributors is a current staff member, shout out to RutheniumArt, go give them money. Issue No.1 helped establish us, but Issue No.2 is where we honed in on our voice and audience. Issue 3 followed in May of 2022. It was a natural evolution of the work we did in Issue No.2, no real surprises there. But the launch was marked by our first in person event. Riverside City College’s literary journal, MUSE literary journal, invited us to host an open mic. For context, Angel Neri and I met because of RCC, and the work we did for MUSE. The open mic was the first time we got to stand in front of strangers and talk to them about RABBLE REVIEW. It was exhilarating and the fire we needed to keep going.
Year one was exciting. It was proof that we were capable, and that we would find an audience, even if it is relatively small. But size isn’t everything. We believe that this is a project worth fostering, and we also believe that we punch above our weight with each issue. I love what I do here at RABBLE REVIEW and I’m in it for as long as possible. I hope you continue to read and engage with all the things we are working on. We already have so many things in the planning stage that we can’t wait to share. We also have a new issue out that we hope you have read. If you haven’t, please do! It’s gorgeous and we’re very proud of it.
With that said, we do have a very cool announcement. To commemorate our anniversary we are holding our first contest! This is definitely something we are stepping into cautiously, so please pardon our dust. But we figured it was a great way to celebrate where we started and where we have arrived. And it’s a good way for us to raise some funds so we can continue to do cool stuff and grow our audience. We are reader supported, fyi.
Contest applications open on Friday, September 18th, 2026. The contest will run until October 16th, 2026. Full guidelines and the submission form can be found at: rabblereview.com/contest
There is no set theme for this contest. We spent a lot of time trying to think of something but we figured that our first contest should just reflect the type of work we love to read and publish in any issue of RABBLE REVIEW. And if it works out we can have a contest on each anniversary for years to come. So just submit anything you think we would like. Easy! We are accepting submissions in flash or poetry and the submission fee is $5. If you want to submit works in both categories you can, but you’ll have to pay again since the flash and poetry contests are being judged separately. That means we will have two winners. What’s the prize you ask? The winners will each receive $50, and both flash and poetry winners will have their work featured in RABBLE REVIEW No.11.
We are also proud to announce that we will have two judges for this contest. Our judge for the flash submissions is JJ Peña, and our judge for the poetry submissions is Misael Osorio-Conde. We’re thrilled that both have agreed to lend their talents and expertise to our very first contest.
If you don’t want to participate but still want to give us money, well, thank you. And you can visit: rabblereview.com/donate.There you will find our tip jar and other ways to donate if you choose.
We are thankful that you are here, reader. Without you this entire project would not be possible. Actually, that’s not true. We definitely need to thank our contributors. Submitting work is no easy task, and submitting to a literary journal that is unproven is an even bigger risk. You want to make sure that your work has a proper home. You want it to look good, and you definitely want to make sure it isn’t flanked by utter nonsense. So we owe a big thank you to all the contributors who took a chance on us. Especially to those contributors who were submitting during year one. We actually have a few folks who submit every time we open our submissions. We’re lucky that you are here, and we love fostering relationships with the artists in our community. Again, thank you for five wonderful years. I hope our next anniversary is even bigger. We continue to grow every day. I’m excited to go even further and see what else we can do together. From all of us at RABBLE REVIEW, thank you, and happy reading! We’ll see you all in the next issue. And don’t forget about the contest!
Solidarity forever.
Andrew Adjei
Managing Editor
Andrew Adjei is a 34 year old writer and editor living in California. Andrew helped create RABBLE REVIEW in early 2020 alongside fellow editor, Angel Neri, and has been the Fiction Editor for the magazine ever since. Prior to RABBLE REVIEW, Andrew, was a student editor for Riverside City College's literary journal, MUSE, and also a contributor of their Spring 2017 issue.
Andrew primarily writes fiction, and has a B.A in English-Creative Writing from Cal-State, Long Beach. In addition to writing and editing Andrew is an avid gamer, angry bisexual, and occasional Twitch streamer. He has brought his livestreaming skills to RABBLE REVIEW's own livestreams.
