NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

Colorado Review

Publisher’s Description: Founded in 1956, Colorado Review features short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction (memoir, personal essays) by both emerging and established writers, including numerous Pulitzer Prize, Best American, Pushcart, O. Henry, and Rona Jaffe Award winners. Recent issues include work by Robin Black, Charles Baxter, Floyd Skloot, Leslie Johnson, Bill Capossere, Robert Root, Margaret MacInnis, Lyn Hejinian, Martha Ronk, Rusty Morrison, and Lon Otto. Past special issues have focused on travel, experimental fiction, and writing of the New West. The fall issue features the winner of the annual Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. Published three times a year by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, Colorado Review is edited by Stephanie G’Schwind (fiction & nonfiction editor) and Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, & Matthew Cooperman (poetry editors). Dan Beachy-Quick is the book review editor.

Recent issues:

36.3, Fall/Winter 2009, features poetry by H.L. Hix, John Gallaher, Sally Keith, and Martha Ronk, along with the winner of the 2009 Nelligan Prize, Angela Mitchell with her story “Animal Lovers.”

36.2, Summer 2009: After a long winter and often unpredictable spring, the heat inevitably comes by late July—when the summer issue of Colorado Review appears—the guest whose stay has grown a little long, a little tiresome. Find a shady spot somewhere and enjoy the fresh new writing here. The summer issue’s fiction features a new, beautifully Forsterian story from Robin Black, “The History of the World”; Benjamin Arda Doty’s heartbreaking “Minute of Angle”; and Jill Patterson’s “The Fires We Can’t Control.”  In nonfiction, we have “Stories from the Lost Nation,” by Brendan Wolfe, and Marybeth Holleman’s “Thin Line Between.” Poetry includes work by Peter Gizzi, Wayne Miller, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Cole Swensen, and Rebecca Wolff.

36.1, Spring 2009, in this issue we feature Nick Voges’s “Purity Ball,” the story of a girl who is repelled further from her father despite his efforts to draw her closer as her mother dies. Laura Winther brings us a delightfully depressed road-trip narrative, “No Questions Asked,” taking us from Michigan to California as a recently fired factory worker tries to find some perspective. And James Alan Gill returns to CR with “Redemption,” another installment from his Matin County chronicles, a kind of Winesburg, Ohio series set in contemporary rural Illinois. From Bill Capossere, whose powerful memoir/astronomy essays have appeared here twice before, we have a new piece that explores black holes and Alzheimer’s disease. S. L. Wisenberg shares her wry reflections on dealing with breast cancer in an excerpt from The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, recently published by University of Iowa Press. And rounding out the nonfiction is Thomas White’s personal essay “The Wisdom of Sons,” in which he meditates on coming to understand his father’s harsh but loving discipline and learning to trust himself as a new father. This issue also includes new poetry from Stephen Burt, Paul Hoover, Rusty Morrison, Tomaz Salamun, Alice Jones, Joy Manesiotis, and G. C. Waldrep.