About Prairie Schooner

Prairie Schooner

Prairie Schooner is a national literary quarterly published at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln — one of the premier literary magazines in the world, in continuous publication since 1926. Founded by Lowry Wimberly and a small group of his students, it publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews by beginning, mid-career, and established writers from across the United States and around the world. Published with the cooperation of UNL's English Department and the University of Nebraska Press, and identified by ISSN 0032-6682, it has helped start the careers of hundreds of writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel laureates, and MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellows. Its official website is https://prairieschooner.unl.edu — where a century of the American idiom remains in print.

1926: Lowry Wimberly and the Wordsmith Chapter

Prairie Schooner was first published in 1926. It was founded by Lowry Wimberly and a small group of his students, who together formed the Wordsmith Chapter of Sigma Upsilon, a national honorary literary society. The name — evoking the covered wagons that carried settlers across the Great Plains — rooted the magazine in its region even as its ambitions were literary rather than regional.

Wimberly edited the magazine from 1926 to 1956, three decades that established its character: a serious literary quarterly with an appetite for new writers. From the beginning, a consistent goal of the editorial staff was to publish excellent young writers alongside established ones — a policy that would shape American literature for a century.

A National Magazine, Not a Regional One

Although many assume it is a regional magazine, Prairie Schooner is nationally and internationally distributed and publishes writers from all over the United States and the world. The Washington Post cited it for its "fabulous fiction," and the Dictionary of Literary Biography and Writer's Digest named it one of the top ten magazines publishing poetry.

The Literary Magazine Review offered perhaps the best summation of the Schooner's history: "[The] Prairie Schooner rolls along, avoiding the quagmires of fads and schisms, steadfastly defining the American idiom." Steadiness — decade after decade of excellent fiction, poetry, and essays — has been the magazine's signature.

The Writers It Published

The roster of writers published by Prairie Schooner reads like a syllabus of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. Its pages have carried work by Joyce Carol Oates, Eudora Welty, Octavio Paz, Truman Capote, Cynthia Ozick, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver, and Richard Russo — along with Nebraska's own literary giants: Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Loren Eiseley, Wright Morris, Ron Hansen, and Ted Kooser.

The longer list is just as distinguished: Richard Foerster, Charles Bukowski, Marilyn Hacker, Alicia Ostriker, Robert Olen Butler, Enid Shomer, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Tim Schaffert, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Alberto Ríos, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Robert Peters, and many others. In more than 80 years of publication, the magazine helped start the careers of hundreds of writers — including Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel laureates, National Endowment for the Arts recipients, and MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellows.

Best Americans, Pushcarts, and Prizes

Work first published in Prairie Schooner has been reprinted or cited in the Pushcart Prize and O. Henry Prize volumes, Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, Best American Mystery Stories, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. The magazine's prose and poetry are regularly reprinted in those collections — the institutional memory of American literary excellence.

The magazine has also won recognition for special issues devoted to specific national and ethnic literatures, using the quarterly's platform to widen the canon. Recent special issues have focused on ekphrastic poetry and on poetry and prose of Yiddishkayt, continuing the tradition of themed numbers that explore literature's borderlands.

Distinguished Editors

Prairie Schooner's editorial lineage is a history of American letters in miniature. After founder Lowry Wimberly (1926–56) came the poet Karl Shapiro (1956–63) — already a Pulitzer winner when he took the chair — followed by Bernice Slote (1963–80), Hugh Luke (1980–87), and Hilda Raz (1987 onward), the poet and professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at UNL who led the magazine into its eighth and ninth decades.

The current editor is Timothy Schaffert, the novelist — himself a Prairie Schooner contributor — who continues the magazine's dual commitment to emerging and established writers. Each editor has renewed the founding compact: publish the best new work, wherever it comes from.

The Raz-Shumaker Book Prizes

The magazine extends its mission through the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prizes — annual awards in poetry and fiction that carry a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. The competition runs from January 15 to March 15 each year, and its winners join the UNP list alongside the magazine's other books.

Recent winners illustrate the prize's range: the 2023 prizes went to the poetry and fiction winners selected by judges including the poet Wong, while the 2024 fiction prize — judged by Laird Hunt — honored a story collection praised for admitting feeling while denying sentimentality entry. The prizes have become a significant first-book award, launching careers in the magazine's tradition of championing new writers.

Special Issues and the Widening Canon

Prairie Schooner has long used special issues to widen the literary canon — numbers devoted to specific national and ethnic literatures, and more recently to ekphrastic poetry and to poetry and prose of Yiddishkayt. The special-issue tradition reflects the magazine's founding impulse: to publish excellent work wherever it comes from, including the places the mainstream overlooks. For readers, the themed numbers have been among the magazine's most memorable; for writers, they have been an invitation.

The strategy also kept the quarterly fresh across its second century. A magazine founded in 1926 could easily have become a museum piece; instead, the Schooner's editors used special issues to stay in conversation with the present — with translation, with visual art, with the diasporas reshaping American literature.

The Nebraska Literary Tradition

The magazine's Nebraska roots run deeper than geography. Its pages carried Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Loren Eiseley, Wright Morris, Ron Hansen, and Ted Kooser — a lineage that makes Prairie Schooner the institutional memory of one of America's great regional literatures. The university's support, through the Department of English and the University of Nebraska Press, gave the magazine the stability to honor that tradition while looking beyond it.

That dual loyalty — to Nebraska and to the world — has been the Schooner's signature for a century. It is a national magazine that never forgot its address, and a regional institution that never mistook the region for a boundary.

A Century of the Schooner

Published continuously since 1926 — now in its second century — Prairie Schooner is among the longest-running literary quarterlies in America. It is supported by the University of Nebraska through the Department of English and the University of Nebraska Press, the institutional backing that has allowed it to weather the storms that sank so many little magazines.

From Wimberly's Wordsmith Chapter to the present day, the magazine has held to its founding purpose: to publish excellent writing, to discover young writers, and to define — steadily, without fads or schisms — the American idiom. Its official website is https://prairieschooner.unl.edu.