About Us

Sobriquet Magazine
was born in 1995, as a punk rock fanzine. Over the years, the magazine has evolved from your average photocopy-and-staples rag to the webzine you see today. The focus of the publication, too, has expanded. Whereas Sobriquet was initially all punk rock, we are now, as our front page proudly proclaims, "an independent journal of literature, film, music, and ideas," though our devotion to punk rock and independent music has never wavered. 

In 2000, after ten paper issues, Sobriquet moved entirely online, in large part to keep maintenance costs down while maximizing the publication's readership. This move was not an easy one, as the primitive nature of some of our older pages shows:


Still, we stuck it out, pulled Sobriquet along with us through graduate school (or, maybe, it pulled us through graduate school) and somehow ended up with a website that was featured on MSNBC's Connected Coast to Coast and which has had several essays selected for syndication in newspapers nationwide. Pretty good for a zine that sold 22 copies of its first issue. 

In 2006, the Library of Congress of the United States officially recognized Sobriquet and awarded us the following ISSN number: 1930-1820. Now--for those of you academically-inclined folks, at least--you can find Sobriquet listed in WorldCat, though its just as likely you'll end up here via a Google or Yahoo! search. 

Today, Sobriquet publishes high-quality writing on a variety of subjects ranging from contemporary literature and theory to punk rock to film and academia. We have had Oxford and Harvard-educated professors write for us and we have had essays written by kids educated on the streets of London and New York The key, as always, is to be a good writer and have something worthwhile to say. 

Our current areas of interest are, among others, contemporary fiction, existentialism, punk rock and D.I.Y. subcultures, academia, and cinema. As always, we appreciate writing that is thoughtfully critical of the world around us. Healthy skepticism is fundamental to the Sobriquet mentality. However, we are not--and have never been--interested in conspiracy theories or unsubstantiated claims about government cover-ups. We welcome academic writing, but not writing that is excessively abstruse. In other words, if you sound like Derrida or Spivak, you may want to find another place to publish your work. 

Now, speaking of publishing your work, Sobriquet cannot pay contributors for their writing. Contributors keep the copyright for their work and we give full credit for all submissions we decide to publish. You may reprint articles written for Sobriquet if A) you wrote it and B) you credit us as the first place you published the work in question. Click here to read what people have said about us. 

© by Sobriquet Magazine

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