Lit Mags Gone Gorgeous :: South Dakota Review

Part of what makes the newest issue of South Dakota Review so stunning, in addition to the cover art by Oscar Howe (and design by Holly Baker) is the fact that the magazine changed its format to a luxurious 9×9, which allows two columns to ease the prose and wide margins to frame poetry.

Professor of English, Director of Creative Writing at The University of South Dakota, and now the new Editor-in-Chief of SDR, Lee Ann Roripaugh says the format change is permanent: “Our former editor, Brian Bedard, retired from USD this past spring, and I subsequently inherited the editorship of SDR. While I definitely wanted to retain the unique flavor of South Dakota Review, particularly with respect to its longstanding commitment to explorations of place/space/landscape and support of place-based and indigenous writers, I also wanted to both complicate these explorations, as well as contextualize them within larger national and even global literary contexts. Our goal is to broaden the aesthetic and cultural scope of the magazine in eclectically exciting ways, and broadening this conversation, to my mind, also included broadening the design. In particular, I wanted a larger page to allow for more possibilities in terms of framing and accommodating a wider variety of poems. Also, with the proliferation of so many excellent electronic magazines, it seems that if one is going to do a print magazine, the magazine should take delight in the sensuous and aesthetic pleasures of its own ‘printishness.'”

Mission accomplished SDR.