Editor of Field Notes 2025 – Phases for Consilience Journal

I’m very pleased to announce that, at the end of a year of creative detour, the 2025 issue of Consilience Journal Field Notes – Phases that I was honored to edit is now available for free download. A donation for to our partner charity Arts Emergency is encouraged.

I have been volunteering as a reviewer for Consilience Journal (Substack Consilience Journal), an online journal exploring the spaces where the sciences and the arts meet, since my poem Weight Gain in Midlife Women was published in Issue 12 – Struggle in March of 2023.

In the summer of 2025 I volunteered to edit the 2025 issue of Consilience Field Notes.

Volunteering as a poetry reviewer or editor for Consilience Journal has many perks. You get to read new poems and interesting science statements before everyone else, you get to help make good poems a little bit better and you get to meet interesting people from all over the world who are experts in poetry, science or both, and very generous with their craft and time.

The one big disadvantage is that as a volunteer you cannot submit poems for consideration in Consilience Journal. Once a year Field Notes, a special edition of Consilience Journal, is published. In this journal poetry and art submitted by the volunteers themselves is reviewed and edited by their fellow poets in the same careful and rigorous manner as in the Journal.

My poem United in Liquid Love, honoring the women swimmers in my family, was included in Consilience Field Notes 2024 – Family Trees. Listen here.

This edition of Field Notes has ‘Phases’ as its theme, a subject that inspired scientific poets and poetic scientists to submit poetry with a wide range of themes and styles. The first scientific phases that came to my mind were the phases we can see with our own eyes like the moon or the phases we can experience in our own bodies like becoming an adult. I’m in awe of the variety of phases described in this collection.

Field Notes is our place to shine, thanks to all the contributors, editors and of course Sam Illingworth for bringing Consilience Journal into the world. The peer-review process can sometimes be long and challenging, but after the phases of reviews and edits poems come out so much better, fuller and rounder on the other side.

A huge thank you to Steve Smart for the design and layout, to my fellow editor Kevin D. Vallejo and to the contributors for trusting us with their poetry and art and for their work reviewing and editing the submissions.

You can submit your work for upcoming issues of Consilience Journal here and join us as volunteer for an opportunity to be included in the 2026 edition of Field Notes.