The Participation Prize

by Abigail Kerstetter, Colorado Review Associate Editor It’s always a strange thing, spending a weekend in devotion to writing, in the company of thousands of other writers, publishers, and general lovers of words at various stages of their careers, some well-seasoned in navigating what can quickly become a hall of mirrors, others just entering this […]

A Constraint to Free Me

by Andrew Mangan, Associate Editor, Colorado Review A year ago, I was deluded. I’d persuaded myself to believe that I was a diverse reader, since my ten favorite authors then were a demographic scattershot: Lorrie Moore, Junot Díaz, ZZ Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Marcus, Ottessa Moshfegh, Yiyun Li, Donald Antrim, Nam Le, Tobias Wolff (in […]

The Undergraduate Literary Journal: A Bridge to Becoming a Writer

by Emily Harnden, Colorado Review Editorial Assistant The first short story I ever fell in love with, the kind of love that happens only once or twice when you are young and hopeful and vulnerable to getting your heart punctured, was, predictably, “How to Become a Writer,” by Lorrie Moore. That whip-smart opening—“First, try to […]

Learning to Read

by John McDonough, Colorado Review, Associate Editor A confession: Despite being in the third year of my MFA program, an editor at two literary journals, and a teacher of creative writing, I’m not a good reader. That’s not to say I can’t do it—I can, of course (and probably know a slightly above-average number of words, in […]

Bad Things, Cattle Dogs, and the Nelligan Prize: An Interview with Luke Dani Blue

by Meghan Pipe, Colorado Review Editorial Assistant Here at Colorado Review, we’re in that mid-winter liminal space between Nelligan Prizes, celebrating our 2015 winner while eagerly accepting submissions for 2016. 2015’s winner is Luke Dani Blue, whose “Bad Things That Happen to Girls” was selected by final judge Lauren Groff. Blue will visit Colorado State […]

In the News: Free Stories, Vending Machines, and Literary Archives

by Shoaib Alam, Colorado Review Associate Editor Literature is coming to the streets (again), and it’s disguised as coffee sleeves, fast food, and tanks. The Atlantic explores the guerilla-marketing techniques being deployed to promote reading worldwide in this article. The city of Grenoble, France, leads the pack with machines that vend stories according to reading time—one-minute, three-minutes […]