Center

Founded by Sherod Santos in 2000, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts is published by the University of Missouri-Columbia and is staffed by Ph.D. and M.A. graduate students in MU’s nationally distinguished Creative Writing Program. The journal appears once a year in the spring.

Center publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction essays, translations, and, on occasion, animations and short plays. We do not accept literary criticism, book reviews, or children’s writing. We aim to publish work representing a broad range of aesthetic approaches, bringing together the ‘traditional’ and ‘experimental’ in a way that we hope interrogates both categories.

In past volumes, we have published writers such as D.H. Tracy, Kathy Fagan, Ryan G. Van Cleave, Matt Zambito, Robert Wrigley, William Eisner, Kim Chinquee, Debra Anne Davis, and Arthur Saltzman. We also have featured interviews with critically recognized writers such as Susan Stewart, Edmund White, Alan Shapiro, Linda Gregerson, Amy Bloom, and Agha Shahid Ali.

We welcome submissions from writers at all stages in their career, but we are especially interested in work from emerging writers.