About Talon

Who We Are

The Talon Review is a literary magazine housed at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. Founded in 2012 by Mark Ari (Executive Faculty Advisor, 2012-2024) with students from his creative writing workshop, we’re run entirely by current and former students. We began as HashtagOctothorpe, a journal dedicated to student voices at UNF. In 2014, the journal was re-envisioned and rededicated as the Talon Review, and in 2018 the journal moved from student voices to global. We are now home to emerging and established writers worldwide.

We publish twice yearly, in the spring and fall, and are exclusively digital.

To honor its student-led roots, The Catch is a blog-style monthly newsletter dedicated to publishing UNF student writers. It features creative writing, Talon updates, author interviews, and book reviews.

What We Seek and Our Mission

We are dedicated to curating work that speaks to the complexities of being human. We seek
submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art. We also welcome work that extends
beyond the page—audio performances of poetry, flash, or song, and video essays or cine poems
for our website.

Here at Talon, we desire to discover and explore vulnerability, imagination, and emotional truth.
We seek writing that lingers in the heart and mind long after the page has turned. We are
compelled by the strange and beautiful, drawn to the uncanny, fascinated by the fantastical, and
relish risky realism that rattles our senses. We welcome both traditional and experimental
approaches that provoke thought and feeling.

The Talon Review seeks to reveal what binds human experiences together, regardless of race,
religion, class, gender, and culture. Our core values—creativity, inclusivity, integrity, and
emotional resonance—guide every editorial decision we make. We operate under a “do no harm”
philosophy, actively working to reject any work that desires to romanticize hate speech of any
kind and strive to keep our platform accessible and inclusive. We publish new works by both
emerging and established voices. To come alongside those in all walks of life and highlight their
voices is what we consider to be true diversity.

We want every issue we publish to inspire our readers, challenge our writers, and create a table
where everyone has a seat. To ensure all voices can be heard, submissions and online reading
issues are available at no cost.

Talon is not just a publication—it is a conversation, a community of writers and readers
searching for truth and transcendence through art.

Our mission is to honor the transformative power of storytelling and to celebrate the diversity of
voices that make literature endlessly alive.