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About The Broken Plate

Founded in 2004, The Broken Plate publishes a variety of works by both emerging and established authors. Over the years, we have published writing by Roxane Gay, Mark Halliday, Celeste Ng, Elena Passarello, and many others. Send us work that will make us think, make us smile, or make us snap our fingers and nod knowingly. Along with basking in the immense talent of our submitters, we at The Broken Plate work to support the literary community by publishing reviews of books by small publishers and celebrating the successes of first-time authors through interviews and our partnership with Ball State’s annual In Print Festival of First Books. The entire journal is compiled, edited, and designed by the hardworking and talented Ball State University undergraduate students enrolled in English 489: Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing.

The Broken Plate is a literary magazine produced by undergraduate students at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In an especially fragmented world, we embrace the resilient and restorative power of creativity as a means to uniting singular voices. The Broken Plate values all work, from the realistic to the whimsical, that celebrates both the strangeness and the beauty of our human existence. 

Our Mission Statement

Latest Blog Posts

  • New Sheriff in Town: When Non-Experts Write in a Field of Writing

    New Sheriff in Town: When Non-Experts Write in a Field of Writing

    For new writers, it can be scary to try writing about subjects outside their own fields of expertise. But what if I told you that you don’t have to be an expert in a field in order to write about it at all? In fact, many writers write about subjects…

  • Six of Crows: A Powerful Story 

    Six of Crows: A Powerful Story 

    Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is a beautifully told story about love and finding a family when you don’t have one of your own. I originally found this book while searching for something new to read – I stumbled onto BookTok, a small sub-community on the app TikTok where authors, writers, and book enjoyers all…

  • The Complexities of World Building as a Student Writer 

    The Complexities of World Building as a Student Writer 

    We, as writers, gods of our own creations, scorch details of our stories into the very pages we touch. Societies, classes, species, animals, culture, politics, history, groups and factions, resources and economies are all part of the worlds we create, and as ink soaks into refurbished trees meant to record…