About This Journal
This site serves as the archival home for Gandy Dancer. For current issues and submission information, visit www.gandydancer.org.
We are a literary magazine, available online and in print, that publishes fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and visual art. We invite student writers and artists from all SUNY campuses to submit. Edited by a rotating staff of students at SUNY Geneseo, Gandy Dancer is published twice yearly. We’ve titled our journal Gandy Dancer after the slang term for the railroad workers who laid and maintained the railroad tracks before the advent of machines to do this work. Most theories suggest that this term arose from the dance-like movements of the workers, as they pounded and lifted to keep tracks aligned. This was grueling work, which required the gandy dancers to endure heat and cold, rain and snow. Like the gandy dancers, writers and artists arrange and rearrange, adjust and polish to create something that allows others passage. The editors invite submissions that forge connections between people and places and, like the railroad itself, bring news of the world. We hope you’ll join us on the journey.