Missouri Review, Spring 2024 - WHA Winner 2025

Featuring "After Birth" by Kathryn Wilder, Western Heritage Wrangler Award Winner, Magazine Article, 2025.

Inside you’ll find the 2023 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Winners, plus new fiction from Louise Marburg and Jessie Lee Brooks, new poetry by Fleda Brown and John Okrent, and new essays from Debra Dean, Maureen Stanton, and Kathryn Wilder. Also: an arts feature on anti-portraiture in contemporary art, a review of three biographies of three artistic power couples, and an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips.

The Missouri Review, founded in 1978, is one of the most highly regarded literary magazines in the United States. For the past four decades they’ve upheld a reputation for finding and publishing the very best writers first. They are based at the University of Missouri and publish four issues each year. Each issue contains approximately five new stories, three new poetry features, and two essays, all selected from unsolicited submissions sent by writers throughout the world. 

The Missouri Review maintains an “open submission” policy; reading year-round, sifting through approximately 12,000 submissions each year.  New, emerging, and midcareer writers whose work has been published in the Missouri Review have been anthologized over 100 times in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize, among others. They are also pleased to be the first to have published the fiction of many emerging writers, including Tim Loc, Jennie Lin, Susan Ford, and Amanda Baldeneaux.

Writers whose work first appeared in the Missouri Review continue to win major prizes, including the National Book Award, the Yale Younger Poets Award, MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. Additionally, they publish special features and interviews with a diverse body of writers. In their “History as Literature” series, they have published historical documents of literary significance or effect. The “Found Text” series features previously unpublished work by literary giants of the past, including Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Marianne Moore, Charlotte Bronte, Jack Kerouac, and William Faulkner.