Established in 2003 at the University of Cincinnati, The Cincinnati Review has a threefold mission:
- to publish the most exciting creative and critical work being written today,
- to make sure our efforts reflect the diversity of the literary community, and
- to educate UC graduate students in the art of literary publishing.
The CR publishes two print issues a year (with fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, drama, reviews, and a portfolio of artwork) and runs a weekly online series, miCRo, which features shorter poems and flash fiction/literary nonfiction/hybrid works.
We provide a venue for writers of any background, at any point in their literary careers, at any age, to showcase their best writing. We are invested in finding both promising new and emerging voices and in sharing the exceptional work of more established writers.
Furthermore, we’re interested in working against past and present inequities by publishing work by individuals from systemically marginalized groups, including writers of color, nonbinary and trans writers, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, neurodivergent writers, disabled writers, working-class and low-income writers, and all others who consider themselves underrepresented in contemporary literature.
As part of that effort, we are committed to free submissions (except for our summer contest), and we only occasionally solicit work—the vast majority of what we publish comes over the transom. Our decision-making process is collaborative, to allow for a range of backgrounds in those contributing to decisions about acceptances.
Our training program provides any interested UC English Department graduate student, no matter their experience or educational track, with the opportunity to learn the elements of editing, including content curation, correspondence and data management, copyediting, proofreading, marketing (including writing for the web and social media), and production. Our goal is to increase students’ skills and their marketability for both academic and alt-ac careers. The managing editor, senior associate editor, and genre editors serve as mentors for the next generation of editors, including the three assistant and associate editors who run the miCRo online series. We value a variety of backgrounds and experiences in those student editors and in our volunteer readers, within a department that emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion in its admissions and programming, and we seek to increase that variety in all hires and contracts.
As a staff, we aim to acknowledge our unconscious biases as they might affect our reading practices, and work toward antiracist goals, and we take great pleasure in doing the daily work of putting new stories, poems, essays, artwork, and reviews in our readers’ hands. We believe that although fear is used to divide and control, art and writing can act as an antidote, expanding the collective imagination.
