For sixty-six years and one hundred sixty-six issues, TriQuarterly has been the national literary outlet for Northwestern University. The path to its present home in the English Department has been circuitous, from its beginnings as a student literary journal—which published the early work of a young undergraduate named Saul Bellow—the journal has traveled around various organizations within the university, alighting in the Department of English in 1981. Later, it found a home for a time in the Northwestern University Press, continued on to the School of Professional Studies, all before finally returning to English in 2018. The journal has been housed here ever since, affording graduate students the opportunity to learn the inner workings of contemporary literary journal’s publication. Every summer quarter, students in the Litowitz MFA+MA Program work with the editorial staff at TriQuarterly to vet submissions, generate content, and keep the journal on track as one of the most prestigious in the country.
Within the first three years of its turning into a national literary journal in 1958, TriQuarterly published poems, essays, and stories by Theodore Roethke, Ralph J. Mills Jr., Marge Piercy, W. D. Snodgrass, and Howard Nemerov. The journal would go on to feature a slate of writers that includes many of the major names of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. The table of contents for its seventh issue, published in the Fall of 1964, contains criticism by Leslie Fiedler and Lionel Trilling, fiction by Richard Brautigan, and poetry by William Stafford, for instance. Future issues would include original work by dozens of internationally-renowned writers, poets, and thinkers, including Joseph Brodsky, Roland Barthes, Anne Sexton, Czeslaw Milosz, Vasko Popa, Susan Sontag, John Berryman, Gabriel García Márquez, Joyce Carol Oates, Fredric Jameson, Jorge Luis Borges, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, John Updike, Alfred Kazin, Ken Kesey, Anthony Burgess, Jack Kerouac, William Gass, Edward W. Said, Noam Chomsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Annie Dillard, Hélène Cixous, Yehuda Amichai, Jane Smiley, Paul Theroux, J. G. Ballard, Leslie Marmon Silko, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Derek Walcott, Carolyn Forché, Grace Paley, Rita Dove, Wole Soyinka, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Li-Young Lee, Chaim Potok, Alice Fulton, Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Sue Monk Kidd, Ha Jin, Adam Zagajewski, Claudia Rankine, Louise Glück, Percival Everett, and David Foster Wallace.
This fall, TriQuarterly also has the great fortune of welcoming a new managing editor into a focused and refined staff role within the English Department. This position combines a number of smaller roles within the journal into a single, half-time position with a much greater presence on campus. Please join the Litowitz Program in welcoming Jess Masi! She comes to us with a wealth of experience, from her time as fiction editor and then managing editor at Indiana Review to her work with Chicago Review Press and Indiana University Press. She received her MFA from Indiana University and currently teaches at Wright College. We are excited to include Jess in the roster of the journal’s incredible managing editors, which also includes our dear Reg Gibbons. With her help, TriQuarterly will seek to grow its name even further as an important local, national, and international literary outlet.