“No good Southern fiction is complete without a Dead Mule”
— since 1996.
Online since 1996, the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature represents the best, the finest, the most comprehensive compilation of original contemporary literature on the internet.
Our publication credo? Provide readers with the best writing we can find on a consistent basis, month in, month out. Since 1996, can you believe it?
*see bottom of page for creative commons information
We’ve hosted writing by poets laureate, mule skinners, horse traders and hornswagglers. While currently focusing our attention on the monthly publication of new material, we have little HTML elves working diligently in the background restoring the “hacked” database from the 1996 through 2006 and that writing will be available in the future, once again, with over 1000 entries located on the Mule at http://thedeadmule.wordpress.com
Valerie MacEwan: Editor / Publisher
Valerie MacEwan put the Dead Mule online in 1996 as an adjunct site to a hometown business directory. Remember those hometown directories, back before Google took over the internet? The original Dead Mule Literary Journal, a print magazine, was born from a NC Arts Council grant received in 1996. After paying for a print edition, the magazine went online and has been online — continuously — for 30 years in 2026. MacEwan is an award-winning Assemblage Artist as well as a writer and she’s dedicated to keeping this Mule online for another thirty years. Originally from Fort Smith, Arkansas, she contends there is always an Arkansas connection to everyone she meets. Fort Smith.
Read more on our ABOUT page
From our January 2015 issue:
With gratitude and affection, we give thanks to those friends who have helped and encouraged us through the years:
Helen Losse is the Mule’s amazing Poetry Editor Emeritus as you well should know. Without Helen – quite simply put – there would be no poetry section on the Mule. Her hard work and determination set the Mule apart from other literary journals as her high standards and vast knowledge assure readers the finest poetry available anywhere – online or not.
The Dead Mule is published in The South, USA.
The Mule does not discriminate but good taste and superb quality wordsmithing supersede all other criteria.
We also do not publish our contributor’s bios or previous publication credits.
Google does a very good job of this for us.
*Copyright “Creative Commons but also, we’d like to copy Half Drunk Muse’s copyright statement of long ago (because it’s a good one). Obviously we’ve inserted our name:
Submission to and acceptance by Dead Mule grants us first electronic and indefinite archive rights. All other rights revert to the author upon publication. Please credit Dead Mule as the first publisher.
-Val
