Sentenced is a collectivist art journal borne out of Matthew Goldin and Nora Wright’s 2025 writing seminars. Without their brilliant patronage, instruction, and guidance, the emergence of our journal would have been very improbable.
By nurturing each others’ and our own creativity and bringing like-minded individuals into our movement, we aim to make the world a better place by pushing the limits of writing, humor, and multimedia into places and spaces never before seen or imagined. We will smush our society with the hammer of creativity and thresh new literary talent with the sickle of publishing. No objective is too difficult, no aspiration too lofty. We will pursue the utter destruction of capitalist cultural signifiers with sincerity and will remain steadfast in our aims for as long as goddamn possible.
Sentenced is currently accepting submissions on a rolling basis. We are looking for writing of all types, as well as visual art and “mixed media.” We do not limit ourselves to a single genre or aesthetic—we’ll pass around your navel-gazing insipidness like a blunt, swing languidly in our hammocks to your waspy marital dramas, drink down your bold revolutionary treatises like cola, shave the aggressively experimental over our pasta like aged cheese, bathe in a warm lather of the passively middlebrow, unmistakably stupid, and wildly boring—so long as we like it. We won’t tell you to read our journal to get a feeling for what we like, because our tastes are eclectic and we want you to stand out, not fit in! But wait, there’s more: we reject playful, eccentric work which genuinely engages with the now and challenges the status quo. We prefer easy stuff that doesn’t make our brains hurt! Only kidding! The complete opposite is true. In short: get our attention somehow and make us laugh and smile and think. Good luck!
In the spirit of collectivism, we retain no rights to your work. You may republish anything of yours that appears on our site, on our social media accounts, or in our pages. Conversely, you may publish with us anything you’ve previously published elsewhere, assuming you have permission and we have agreed to accept your work. Simultaneous submissions are fine; please just notify us if your piece is accepted somewhere else. It will be up to you and the others whether you want your work to appear simultaneously, but we think that could be cool!
Sentenced Forever!
Editorship:
Bill Kemmler (Revisionist) (he/him)
Bill is a writer and filmmaker who splits time between his homes in Connecticut, New York, and Los Angeles. He embraces reality without protection and enjoys the wild ride of being a full time creative. His sequel to My Dinner With Andre, My Dinner With Andre 2, is coming out soon to much acclaim.
Remi Dawns (Liaison) (they/them)
Remi is a writer, multimedia stylist, digital content creator, and funny person based in Salt Lake City. Their favorite number, color, and animal are eleven, purple, and pig respectively. They take 200mg of lamotrigine and 5mg of aripiprazole every night around 11pm.
Sarah Cummins (Typist) (she/her)
Sarah is a writer, humorist, and gang leader based in Bushwick, Brooklyn. When she’s not “barred out” on the couch, she is busy churning out a torrential output of fresh writing. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Sentenced, and her popular Substack. She takes 250mg of lamotrigine around 9am.
Jad Kamal (Thinker) (he/him)
Jad is a writer and author based in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Vessel Virtual, and Sentenced. A collection of his short stories is forthcoming, eventually. He is also a musician and a monthly contributor to the ASPCA ($20.00).
SENTENCED is a Marxist literature collective which seeks to express the exact state of culture as it could be. There is nothing annoying about our publication. We always seek beauty. There is nothing insincere about any of this. The world is funny and beautiful. An exact documentarian reflection of this beauty is vital.
Two things result from this fact:
One: SENTENCED is already acknowledged by all influential literary establishments to be, itself, an influential literary establishment.
Two: It is high time that all supporters of SENTENCED openly espouse our radical, Marxist philosophy of literature.
On the Economics of Literature
Every form of art on the Internet has its own method of meaningful monetization, save for literature. Videos can be sponsored, and ads can be run; movies can be uploaded; video games can be bought and downloaded. By comparison, literature is cheap. It is easily written and typically serves no purpose.
Quite simply, the Internet has removed literature from capitalist exchange. This is, for all intents and purposes, how it should be. The exchange value of a word is nothing, and all information is the same in American society, defined by its flat ontology. But, in an economic structure which requires money, this is an untenable situation; there is no place for non-abstracted labor in the arts. If words themselves have no value, how do we, functioning within a capitalist society as we do, plan on promoting new, radical, Marxist literature actually worth writing and reading? The answer is simple:
Merchandise. Merchandise must be sold for profit to fund the production of more art and more meaning. We will sell t-shirts, we will sell zines, we will exploit the labor of subalterns, and we will beg on our knees for money. There is nothing else to be done.
We will attempt to exploit the least amount of people possible— this is a practical and moral promise of our movement. A return on investment will, in some cases, be impossible, being a syndicalist form of social exchange with circular financial movements, going from artist to artist alike. But the artist must always be a capitalist.
There is no currently existing art which seeks to undermine the capitalist production process; there is no currently existing art that can undermine the capitalist production process. Art must be commodity, and embracing that is the first step towards the avant-garde.
Our ideals are capitalist in the strictest sense; the accumulation of capital and the accumulation of ideas are the two things that matter to us.
Archiving artistic achievement is not as important as the monetization of these achievements and the use of these achievements to create more achievements. When an idea is actualized, we must quickly kill it, salvage from it what we can, and create something new from its corpse. Items are integral to our philosophy. Items should be replaced as soon as they can be replaced. We can do nothing but hope that the old items are biodegradable. Ideas create the work, the work creates the item, and the item creates ideas.
On “Contemporary American Literature”
The term “autoficton” was popularized by the bourgeois publishing industry during an immense upheaval in the political and economic conditions of America. The Bush era, waning, inspired a generally negative zeitgeist which promoted an attitude of complete powerlessness in the face of injustice. The reactionary culture industry was underway in replacing anger with complacent smugness.
There was no better timing, then, for the emergence of blogs— shortform writing, often humorous and bland. Blogs were a new form of art, only possible at the time they emerged, which allowed people to make and publish literature with no financial backing. This was surely an unsettling development for the powers that be, a threat to an establishment which thrives on gatekeeping and commodification.
When watching the emergence of the blog— just the same as they watch the emergence of any new form— the industry sought a way to make it ineffectual and reactionary. Blogs forced the question: what is the difference between “writing” and “literature”? The bourgeois scum answered back: “literature is what makes us money.”
The focus of autofiction— and by extension all contemporary American literature, as the landscape of American letters has been thoroughly irradiated by its unstable isotope— is a focus on the mundane. What makes it different from blogs, or vlogs, or texting someone, is that the genre has been fine-tuned, through conscious choices made by agents and publishers about what is and isn’t worthwhile, to make meaning of and flatter the middle-class American way of life that the readers of literary fiction value.
Real social and economic consciousness went unrewarded, replaced by the most base and useless observations about everyday life. The message was clear: the style of your writing does not need to be good, and the content can be reprehensible and pedophilic, just so long as you reinforce the belief that there is no material reality worth imagining outside of your own experiences, and aggressively promote a brand of increasingly debasing gestures of isolationist, anti-social regression— attempting to convince all people that the most wicked ways of life are worth living. They are not.
To win the contemporary arts scene, the lingering ghost of autofiction must be dismantled, as to cleanse and exorcise it. No collectivist movement will succeed without this radical change, and The New Form will never be achieved without a rapid, violent expulsion.
On Accusations of Being Satirists
SENTENCED is not “satire” or “parody.” SENTENCED never “parodies” or “satirizes” anything. All manifestos are pale imitations of the only real one— The Communist Manifesto— but this does not mean we are “satirizing” the Communist Manifesto by using its language.
Satire, as we understand it now, is entirely contingent on legalistic frameworks. The idea that it is revolutionary or important to dissent is bourgeois. The concept of parody is protected by Fair Use, and this is the only reason people champion it. If parody laws didn’t allow the use of copyrighted material for profit, the amount of parody produced would be a fraction of what it is today.
Parody is not revolutionary. Plagiarism is revolutionary. Slander, libel, and impersonation are revolutionary. Any movement unserious enough to shy away from committing crimes, unwilling to stare down a cease and desist letter, should be dismissed outright as cowardly. We use the shield of satire to protect ourselves, but please understand, nothing we do here is parodical in nature, and nothing we do is satire. It is plagiarism.
The attempt to reduce mediocre or outsider artists to “memes” is a sign of a fascist mentality which reduces art only to what is commercially viable. It sees the unsanded edges of art as instantaneously comedic, to be laughed at and mocked without relent. The “meme” is too inflexible to be social, and its insistence on satire too demanding. This is not a minority opinion, though most are unaware that they agree.
The “shitpost” as a form of personal art demands the artist to ridicule what is abject in themselves, create images mocking their own feelings— criticizing what, in their experience of life— is abject, unmarketable, and unappealing to the algorithm. The “shitpost” is an aesthetic of insincere despair, a narcissistic, self-serving violence against society.
Finally
Art is serious. Art is the reason we all live. The widespread hope to take control of the state apparatus is always, at its core, a hope for better art.
The bourgeois publishing industry is surely afraid, hearing our radical political ideology as they do now. Their fear is anathema to their power, and the same tools which built them will swiftly dismantle them.
You must always remember: the future of American literature is yours to define.
Refresh the world. Make a difference.
Yes we can.
Just do it.
Steal.
To be determined at the upcoming party meeting.