Milla Ben-Ezra ’26 was always going to study English literature. “It was just the thing,” she said. “Literally what else would I study?”
Clearly, some part of her has always known this, if unconsciously: she completed her first project in the third grade, writing a book about an orphan who loses a necklace from her mom and must embark on a journey to recover it.
“It was so funny, the things I wrote are ridiculous,” Ben-Ezra said. “It’s chapter three: ‘The chubby girl was so mean!’ It’s so fucked up.”
Since third grade, Ben-Ezra has transcended hand-drawn covers and stories sewn together with twine. Now a senior, she is an honors English literature major and anthropology minor. She is also the editor-in-chief of Small Craft Warnings, the oldest literary magazine at Swarthmore, as well as the co-creator and editor of The New Critic, a youth-minded literary journal on Substack with over 1,000 subscribers.
It was a project for a Swarthmore poetry workshop that reminded Ben-Ezra of a certain twine-laced book; she recalls this as the first time she was told she is a good writer. “I think that ever since those early years where this was identified as something I was good at, I just kept doing it,” she said. “And I don’t necessarily know what life would look like without it.”
Her parents were never enthusiastic about reading or writing — one chooses not to read, and the other only reads in another language — so Ben-Ezra discovered her passions herself. In high school, she focused on journalism, acting as the editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper. By the end of her senior year, she began to look for a form with more individual autonomy, swerving toward creative writing.
“I knew that my interests were in the creative realm too, but I also went to a really insane high school where I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything outside of it,” Ben-Ezra explained. She has journaled since she was a kid and wrote confessional creative nonfiction in middle school. “I think for a while I was like, that’s not real writing, and now I can look back and say that’s real writing,” she said. “Maybe reading Maggie Nelson and realizing, oh, people make careers off this in astounding, incredible [ways] . . . maybe this is a valid form of writing.”
Currently, she is particularly interested in interpersonal stories, something she says may originate from her study of modernism within the English literature department. “I’m really interested in the breakdown of the social world. Maybe that’s also an anthropology thing. Trying to get inside a character’s head and then also in another character’s head, understanding the ways they interact with each other, that they can’t necessarily see that they’re behaving this way. Maybe it’s a subconscious, unconscious thing.”
Ben-Ezra cites Nelson as a major influence, as well as Elena Ferrante. “When I read Elena Ferrante for the first time, hearing someone articulate the minutia of social interaction like that … ” She particularly loved “My Brilliant Friend,” insisting I must read all four books (I’ve never read Ferrante).
In her creative writing practice, something changed for Ben-Ezra during a sophomore fall workshop with Associate Professor of English Literature Chinelo Okparanta. “I realized that writing is a craft and that it’s a practice, that a piece is malleable,” she said. “It’s like raw data, and then you have to mold the data into a compelling narrative.”
She remembers the first story she wrote for the workshop, explaining how Professor Okparanta went to the board and drew out the narrative arc of the story, saying, “See, this is why the plot falls flat.” Rather than scaring away Ben-Ezra, the moment was a breakthrough. “I was like, you’re right. The plot does fall flat. I was just not thinking about those story elements.” The experience was illuminating for Ben-Ezra, but she attributes her creative growth to a variety of courses and professors. “I think it was just the first time I’d ever taken a creative writing class,” she said. In the past few years, Ben-Ezra has taken workshops with other Swarthmore professors, including Visiting Assistant Professor Moriel Rothman-Zecher. She has also completed writing programs at other universities with funding from the Morrell-Potter Summer Stipend in Creative Writing.
“A lot of the things I think about in college, it’s hard for me to differentiate whether they’re a result of some specific educational arc that I’m on, or if it’s just growing up and you realize even the journaling is productive, even the talking to your friends about the piece is productive.”
Dialogue is something that The New Critic — the literary journal Ben-Ezra founded with friends — emphasizes as well. In its “About” section on Substack, the publication declares the following: “We believe dialogue to be the greatest education of all.” It focuses on the thoughts and words of young people across the United States, aspiring toward “a republic of letters unmoderated by the old guard,” enlivened by the “gift of energy and clarity” possessed by the youth.
The publication was born in May of 2025 out of another co-founder’s frustration. Ben-Ezra’s friend Tessa Augsberger was lingering on the centrality of youth-based concerns and how writing industries inhibit the publication of these voices. “We all kind of have this collective experience in this generation, especially our generation that has had COVID and AI and all of these things that we’re always grappling through,” Ben-Ezra said. “A lot of the questions being asked today of society are the things that are affecting us the most, but still we are beholden to these hierarchies in the writing industries that prevent us from being published or prevent us from having our voices heard.”
The New Critic poses an alternative to these systems, and it does so on an alternative platform. Substack is an online site that centers long-form content (relative to other social media sites) and has experienced rapid growth in the last few years.
Ben-Ezra said, “A lot of writers use it to supplement their income. But for us, the thing that was nice about Substack is that you can have support from paid subscribers, which we can then turn into commission for our writers.” The cocreators saw this commission as something to distinguish themselves from other undergraduate publications and allow them to be taken more seriously.
“We want to pay young writers for their work, because writing is labor. And just like painting is labor, like anything in this world is labor,” Ben-Ezra said. “To me, it’s honestly probably a more emotional labor, but yeah, it deserves the pay.” She wants to inspire a community of engaged writers and thinkers who are ideologically and geographically diverse. Though she explained it was hard to find writers in the beginning, the publication has been regularly posting since then. Currently, there are over twenty long-form articles published on Substack.
Ben-Ezra said, “My frustration, or my difficulty lately, has been trying to find a Swattie perspective.” She cites her own struggle to prioritize writing for “The New Critic” over all of her academic demands. “So maybe this is also a goal for me to recenter writing again as a practice and a craft in my life and have that be both tied to school but also independent from that,” she said.
There are many ways that short-form content has taken the lead with youth; social media has turned it omnipresent, especially considering the easy virality on today’s internet. And yet, long-form writing is, as Ben-Ezra said, vitally important. “The long-form essay enables you to have a nuanced perspective. It’s been important for centuries, and there’s a craft to it.” She pushes back against the generalization that people in our generation don’t like reading. “It’s just that our lives look different now, and that will continue to happen.”
In addition to acting as an editor for The New Critic, Ben-Ezra also writes original pieces. She published the essay “The Disappearing Act” about her own experience with maladaptive daydreaming, admitting that it was quite personal. She said, “But it also felt good, it felt like, okay, finally, I’ve made something out of this thing, I can put words to it.” The essay is also in conversation with a prior piece from the publication. In this sense, the New Critic allows for ideas to layer and complement one another, creating a shared youth or cultural experience.
Unlike The New Critic, Small Craft Warnings is a Swarthmore-based publication, publishing fiction and poetry in addition to creative nonfiction. It prides itself on being the oldest literary magazine at the school, and it typically releases one print edition per semester.
Ben-Ezra has been a member since her first year, and now is editor-in-chief. Her goal has been to open up the magazine to new members; the publication has already undergone a recruitment process. “It’s always been a small club … but my goal is to not have it be that anymore,” she said.
Among other changes, Small Craft Warnings is also in the process of becoming the English literature department’s official undergraduate journal. Soon, it will open for submissions from the entirety of the college, and potentially from other universities or community members.
Currently, Ben-Ezra is unsure if she will submit her own work. “I have a lot of work and progress, a lot of unfinished stories,” she said. “I just feel like publishing becomes a very final thing.” She attributes some of her pessimism about publishing to her industry internship experiences. “It’s one thing to get published, that’s mildly difficult, and then being successful as a published author is one in a million.” For her, turning to editing — through publications like the New Critic and Small Craft Warnings, and through being a Writing Associate — has relieved her from the pressures of publishing.
Though some may emphasize individual work over the editing of others’ work, Ben-Ezra underlines the idea that editing is an art too. “I think it takes craft and expertise, a critical eye, and also just taste,” she said. “It’s language art — all of it — at the end of the day.” She points to Toni Morrison as an inspiration, through her own written work and, especially, advocacy and effectiveness in tailoring someone else’s vision.
Ben-Ezra said, “There’s the stereotype about writing that it happens in solitude, and yes, much of it does, but the inspiration strikes, at least for me, when I’m with other people. And editing definitely brings in that communal aspect of the process.”
In the future after Swarthmore, Ben-Ezra is interested in graduate programs in English literature or anthropology. For now, she has her last semester and a half to look forward to as a senior, an editor, and a writer. The forthcoming edition of Small Craft Warnings will feature an abundance of work she will have edited or otherwise engaged with. For now, you can sate your appetite for Milla’s work with The New Critic, and you can submit work to either publication to engage with the same literary world that Ben-Ezra has helped foster at Swarthmore and beyond.
