About New Letters
"New Letters is one of the very few indispensable literary magazines. Reading it is like reading the face of literary America."-- Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
New Letters magazine has published new writing and art by the likes of Annie Dillard, John Updike, Rita Dove, and Maxine Kumin; and earlier, as its predecessor, The University Review, it published J.D. Salinger, William Carlos Williams, May Swenson, and e.e. cummings. New Letters publishes the finest new work from Asians (Frank Chin, Pok Chi Lau), Hispanics (Benjamin Alire Saenz, Luisa Valenzuela, Ray Gonzalez), Native Americans (Joy Harjo, Adrian C. Louis, Leslie Marmon Silko) and African Americans (Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks), and many international writers (Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris, Breyten Breytenbach, and those many post-apartheid writers of our recent South Africa issue).
New Letters works on three fronts in the literary world: the quarterly, New Letters, established in 1971 from the venerable University Review (est. 1934); our radio series, New Letters on the Air (est. 1977), broadcasting one half-hour weekly over more than 50 public radio stations; the New Letters Literary Awards series (est. 1977), which has discovered many writers who are now prominent in the literary world such as Lucie Brock-Broido and Debra Marquart.
Our radio series comprises one of the oldest and largest audio archives of modern and contemporary writers in the country -- certainly the largest currently being broadcast -- and includes interviews and readings with Nobel Laureates and many Pulitzer Prize winners. The radio series, the Awards series, and the magazine are operationally linked and in many ways dependent on one another for promotional services and income. These operations represent our continued dedication to reaching the widest possible audience. Stated simply, our editorial mission is to advance and deepen language as a transcendent medium, through excellence in writing, across all boundaries.
Miller Williams adds, "New Letters gave a platform to patterned poetry before the new formalism, and knew that regionalism was an honorific term when most everyone used it as a pejorative." This is to say that New Letters editors respect language as an art, and all types of practitioners have found a place here, including Etheridge Knight, Melvin B. Tolson, Countee Cullen, and others.
The editors invite your subscription. Contact us at 816-235-1168 or visit www.newletters.org for information.
