Apogee is a 501c3 literary organization and collective that encourages thoughtful exploration of identity at its intersections: race, gender, sexuality, class, caste, and disability status.

The word “apogee” denotes the point in an object’s orbit farthest from a center. In turn, we celebrate artistic expression far from the political center, created by artists and writers of oppressed identities, particularly incarcerated writers, who interrogate aesthetic and political status quos in their work. As we do so, we pay tribute to the Black feminist Combahee River Collective in recognition that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” To that end, we combat the domination of white, cis-heteronormative, patriarchal, settler-colonial voices that pervade our literary landscape.

We feature fiction, nonfiction, poetry, flash fiction, reviews, interviews, and visual art. We celebrate and hope to model practices of equity, linguistic diversity, abolition, and decoloniality. Our staff is composed of writers, teachers, students, activists, and organizers. We identify as Black, women of color, and LGBTQ. We seek to move beyond representation for its own sake. We understand that the personal and the political are inseparable. We denounce the ongoing genocidal exploits of Western and imperial regimes against indigenous peoples in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and around the world. We aim to platform writing that is liberatory, defies conventions, and operates against the normative values enforced by the publishing industry.