Prism Review

Prism Review is housed at the University of La Verne, a private university in La Verne, California. They publish: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, flash, and comics.

Save for one internal student contest, Prism is exclusively open to submissions outside their campus community. Their operations are built into their program’s curriculum.

How does your magazine fit into your broader campus or literary community? 

Students hold a public launch party every year (and do all promotion), so we try to engage the campus in that way; issues of the journal are also used in general education creative writing classes to provide critical reading materials. In terms of the literary community, we help by publishing emerging authors. We also pay authors and are sure to nominate works for annual best-of anthologies.

What have you found most exciting about working for or advising your magazine?

Letting the student staffers run with it—art, design, promotion, editing, interviewing authors, on and on.

Where are you right now in the production cycle for your next issue?

We're an annual magazine and are just about to accept a big batch of what we'll publish in the next issue (come May/June). The work-work of putting the issue together begins in earnest in March.

Describe your magazine in three emojis!

🤨🤔🤭

What do you think is the biggest challenge faced by undergraduate literary magazines?

Institutional support.