Prairie Schooner :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

Prairie Schooner

About Prairie Schooner: A national literary quarterly published since 1926. Home to the best fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews by beginning, mid-career, and established writers.

Publisher’s Description: Prairie Schooner, a national literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska Press, is home to the best fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews being published today by beginning, mid-career, and established writers.

To celebrate Prairie Schooner’s tenth birthday, associate editor Maurice Johnson wrote in 1937: "Like other little magazines, the Schooner was not published for money's sake, paid nothing for contributions, and sought to print the work of new writers not yet accepted by the wealthy, policy-bound periodicals. Unlike most little magazines, the Schooner has been long-lived. . . and it has published the early work of more than twenty writers whose subsequent appearances in print have brought them general recognition."

Johnson’s vision has been upheld in Prairie Schooner’s more than eighty years of publication, and the modest figure of twenty writers has swelled to hundreds of authors who got their start at Prairie Schooner. The magazine has presented work by Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel laureates, National Endowment for the Arts recipients, and Guggenheim Fellows. Work first published in Prairie Schooner has been reprinted or cited in the Pushcart Prize anthologies and many volumes of the Best American series.

Recent issues:

Kicking off our Summer 2013 issue is a two-page, pack-a-punch story by Lee Martin exploring the consequences of assuming we know who’s on the other end of our phone calls. Also concise and explosive are poems by Martín Espada, Agnes Lam, Kevin Simmonds, Robert Gibb, and more, plus stories by Pilar Quintana, Bryan Castille, and others. A dynamic addition to the issue is Sarah Valentine’s essay about the day she realized “I am no longer white.” With reviews of work by Jose Saramago, Remica L. Bingham, and Tony Medina, these pages are so exciting you’ll never leave your beach chair.

Opening with the winning selection of the inaugural Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest by Natalie Vestin, the Spring 2013 issue begins among the towering skyscrapers of New York and soars from there. Showcasing a wide range of prose and poetic talent, the collection features resounding work from such fiction writers as Roxane Gay and Mi Ditmar and such poets as Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Jill Osier, David Wagoner, and G. C. Waldrep. Five reviews—including examinations of work by Robert Gibb and the late Adrienne Rich—cap a collection of the highest quality, writing that entertains and instructs, stirs and resonates.

The Winter 2012 issue is an exceptional one, featuring a portfolio edited by Sherman Alexie. This collection consists of poetry and fiction from a diverse group of Native American writers: Adrian C. Louis, who reflects on aging; dg okpik, who challenges traditional form; Erin Bad Hand, with her direct perspective on death and the soul; Sara Marie Ortiz, who explores human legacy; and various others. The issue includes many other poems and stories by writers such as Sudeep Sun, Rebecca Foust, and Randall Kenan, and features reviews of work by Toni Morrison and Sheila Maldonado.

 

last updated 6/17/13