Editor Interview: The Allegheny Review

Undergrad creative pieces

We love Hayden's Ferry Review, The Albion Review, Antithesis, The Susquehanna Review, Equinox Literary Magazine, and Quarto. As for publishers, we especially admire Milkweed Editions and Copper Canyon Press.

The Allegheny Review publishes poetry and prose. My personal favorite writers are Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Siken, Gabrielle Zevin, Adrienne Rich, Lauren K. Alleyne, Ocean Vuong, Ottessa Moshfegh, Octavia Butler, Sarah Waters, Nicky Beer, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Anne Sexton.

We publish exemplary undergraduate poetry and prose. Our publication seeks pieces with heart, grit, and command over language. We are willing to work with writers to help their pieces reach their full potential.

Please follow our guidelines and submit your best work. Our staff is unpaid, busy students who do this because they love it, and some common courtesy goes a long way.

The ideal submission follows all formatting and content guidelines. It is fresh, bold, vivid, heartfelt, and honest. I want to see the work you're proud of, that you've worked hard on.

Sending work that does not fit submission guidelines--please do not send us academic articles or pieces including artwork.

We don't require cover letters, but a short third-person bio is needed in the case of acceptance. Previous publication credits don't matter to us--we're an undergraduate journal, so first-time publications are common.

For longer prose pieces, we typically read about 3-5 pages before deciding whether to reject the piece. Poetry, we read all the way through.

Pieces pass through a round of evaluation by our readers, and senior editors decide on pieces that come to a tie.

My duties as an editor include: typesetting the latest issue, communicating with the publisher, finding cover art and communicating with the artist, communicating with our writers, sending out orders of past editions, and holding meetings with readers to vote on submissions. Quite busy!

Since our staff is made up of student volunteers, we have a policy of only accepting pieces that do not need more than basic formatting, grammar, and copy editing. Occasionally, we will make an exception if one of our editors truly loves a piece so much that they will volunteer to work with the writer.

We've nominated work in the past for plain china's "Best of Undergraduate Writing" anthology.