About Crazyhorse

Crazyhorse

Crazyhorse was the name, from 1960 to 2022, of an American literary magazine that now continues as swamp pink. Founded in Los Angeles in 1960 and named for the Lakota chief Crazy Horse, the journal travelled through Murray State in Kentucky and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock before finding a long-term home at the College of Charleston in South Carolina in 2001. Published twice yearly, it built a reputation as one of the country's respected literary journals, publishing fiction, poetry, essays, translation and visual art, including work by John Updike, Raymond Carver and Jorie Graham, and placing work repeatedly in the Best American and Pushcart anthologies. Its final issue under the Crazyhorse name appeared in spring 2022; from 2023 it has been published as swamp pink, after the editors concluded that the original name was an appropriation they could no longer carry.

This profile covers the full arc under the batch title Crazyhorse, because for sixty-two years that was the magazine readers, writers and libraries knew. The renaming is not an ending but the most consequential editorial act in the magazine's recent history, and it can only be understood against the six decades of publishing that preceded it.

Founded in Los Angeles in 1960

The magazine was founded in Los Angeles in 1960, by the poet Tom McGrath according to College of Charleston accounts of its history. It took its title from Crazy Horse, the Lakota leader — a borrowing made casually, in the manner of its time, by people with no connection to the Lakota people or to the places associated with his life. The journal's own later history statement would return to that founding choice with unusual candour, but in 1960 the title simply signalled a certain rebellious, Western romanticism that many American literary ventures of the period adopted without examination.

What lasted was not the branding gesture but the editorial project: a literary magazine publishing new fiction and poetry outside the commercial publishing centres, surviving on institutional homes and editorial commitment. Literary journals rarely live long. That this one has published continuously since 1960 places it among the senior American literary magazines, older than many of the creative writing programmes that now sustain the form.

A Travelling Magazine: Kentucky and Arkansas

From Los Angeles, the magazine moved east, with a period at Murray State in Kentucky before its long residence at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. At Little Rock it was edited for years by Ralph Burns, who served as sole editor for several years, with David Jauss as fiction editor and Dennis Vannatta as criticism editor. Burns and Jauss gave the Arkansas-era Crazyhorse a stable editorial identity, and Jauss in particular became closely associated with its fiction.

The travelling pattern was typical of university-based literary journals, which live where an editor teaches and a host institution will support them. Each move risked the magazine's continuity — subscribers, archives and reputation all have to be carried across state lines — and each successful move demonstrated that the journal's standing rested on its contents rather than on any single campus. By the time it left Arkansas, Crazyhorse had contributors and readers across the country and a back catalogue that anthologists regularly mined.

Financial Trouble and the Move to Charleston in 2001

By the turn of the century, the journal faced financial troubles at the University of Arkansas. In 2001, Ralph Burns, through their mutual friend David Jauss, contacted Bret Lott at the College of Charleston to ask whether the College would be interested in taking over the journal. The College was, and Crazyhorse moved to Charleston, where it has remained ever since, edited by the College's creative writing faculty.

The Charleston move gave the magazine what it had not reliably had before: a permanent institutional home that treated it as an asset rather than an indulgence. At the College of Charleston it is published twice yearly by the Department of English and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and it became part of a wider literary culture on campus that includes the College's creative writing programme and its graduate students, who assist in the journal's production. Department chair Scott Peeples, describing the College's journals, noted that such publications bring prestige and name recognition and create a culture of literary activity, bringing writers to campus whom students can see and hear. Crazyhorse, by then already four decades old, became the senior presence in that culture.

What Crazyhorse Published

Crazyhorse published fiction, poetry, nonfiction and, in its modern swamp pink form, also translation and visual art. Its contributor list across six decades included John Updike, Raymond Carver, Jorie Graham, Billy Collins, James Tate, Franz Wright and Carolyn Forché, among many others, and College accounts note that submissions from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners were not uncommon. For a biannual journal, that roster signals consistent editorial judgement: established writers sent work because the magazine was read, and emerging writers sought it because appearing alongside such names conferred standing.

Work first published in the magazine was reprinted in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Pushcart Prize anthologies — the standard external validators of American literary-journal quality. The journal was also regularly placed in Every Writer's Resource top-50 literary magazine rankings and was named by Writer's Digest among the literary journals that future agents read. None of these honours is decisive alone; together they describe a journal operating at the upper level of its field for a sustained period, in both its Arkansas and Charleston eras.

Editors in Charleston

In Charleston, the magazine has been edited by the College of Charleston's creative writing faculty, with responsibilities divided by genre. The current editorial team, carried over into the swamp pink era, comprises Bret Lott as nonfiction editor, Emily Rosko as poetry editor and Anthony Varallo as fiction editor, with Jonathan Bohr Heinen as managing editor. Lott, a novelist and memoirist on the College's faculty, was the person who brought the journal to Charleston in 2001 and remains its senior figure.

The genre-divided editorship reflects how literary journals actually work: poetry, fiction and nonfiction each require editors reading deeply in that form, supported by a managing editor who keeps a twice-yearly production schedule, prize cycles and contributor correspondence moving. Graduate students in the College's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programme — a selective two-year programme admitting twelve students a year — assist in production, making the journal also a teaching instrument through which new writers learn editing and publishing from inside a working magazine.

The Prizes: Lynda Hull and the Fiction Prize

The magazine sponsors two major annual prizes: the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, named for the poet Lynda Hull, and a fiction prize, now styled the swamp pink Fiction Prize. Each awards 2,000 dollars and publication for a single winning piece of writing. The College also runs prize cycles in nonfiction and an annual short-short fiction contest within the journal's wider programme. Prize competitions serve a literary journal twice over: they attract large numbers of submissions from writers seeking the award and the venue, and they associate the magazine with the distinguished writers who judge them.

Crazyhorse's past judges supply some of the clearest evidence of its standing. Past fiction prize judges have included Joyce Carol Oates, Jaimy Gordon, Ann Patchett, Ha Jin and Charles Baxter; past poetry prize judges have included Carl Phillips, Billy Collins, Marvin Bell and Mary Ruefle. Writers of that stature do not lend their names to journals they do not respect, and for entrants, the combination of a substantial cash prize, publication in a journal with a sixty-year history and judgement by a major writer made the Crazyhorse prizes fixtures of the American literary contest calendar.

The Name Question

For sixty-two years the magazine published under a name taken from a Lakota chief, while having no affiliation with the Lakota people. None of its institutional homes — Los Angeles, Murray State, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock or the College of Charleston — is geographically significant to Crazy Horse or the Lakota, and, by the editors' own account, none of the individuals who shepherded the magazine through its phases was culturally or racially entitled to the use of the Indigenous name. What an earlier era treated as homage, the magazine's editors came to judge as exploitation.

In a public history and renaming statement, the editors wrote that the magazine's name, by its very presence, carried the weight of an oppressive history, and that their long silence and inaction formed part of the problem. They described the name plainly as an act of exploitation, and announced that after a final issue in the fall of that year, the magazine would begin anew under a new title. It is rare for any publication, literary or otherwise, to renounce its own founding brand in such terms, and rarer still to do so after six decades, when the name carried real accumulated goodwill in its field.

Becoming swamp pink in 2023

The final issue of Crazyhorse was published in spring 2022. From 2023, the magazine has been titled swamp pink, stylised in lower case. The new name was chosen from the magazine's adopted home ground rather than borrowed from another culture: swamp pink is a perennial member of the lily family indigenous to the Carolinas, federally listed as a threatened species in 1988 because of environmental encroachment, development and invasive species. The editors presented the choice as a step toward a more equitable and inclusive literary landscape, while acknowledging it was at most a repudiation of a wrong and at least a gesture — not, in their words, their moment to have, just as it had never been their name to assume.

Practically, the journal continued without interruption in everything but title. It kept its Charleston home, its twice-yearly frequency, its editors, its prizes and its ISSN, and it continues to publish fiction, poetry, essays, translation and visual art. Libraries and readers following the run from 1960 will find a single continuous publication whose masthead changed in its seventh decade — an outcome the editors plainly preferred to defending a famous name they had concluded was never theirs.

Legacy of the Crazyhorse Years

The Crazyhorse legacy is therefore twofold, and both halves are now permanently part of the record. As a literary achievement, sixty-two years under one title produced a journal that published Updike, Carver and Graham, fed the Best American and Pushcart anthologies, sustained respected prizes and survived three institutional moves before settling in Charleston in 2001 — a record few American literary magazines can match.

As a cultural record, the magazine's ending act under that name is equally instructive: a candid institutional acknowledgement, published in its own history, that a celebrated literary brand rested on appropriation, followed by a deliberate, unhurried renaming rooted in the place the magazine actually lives. Readers who encounter the journal today as swamp pink are meeting the same magazine that Los Angeles founded in 1960 and Charleston adopted in 2001. The name Crazyhorse now belongs to its past — preserved in back issues, anthology credits and literary history — while the work itself continues, twice a year, under a name drawn from a threatened Carolina lily.