About the Idaho Review

The Idaho Review seeks to share evocative, beautifully strange work. We publish an annual print issue of exceptional fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from established and emerging writers alike. Work from the Idaho Review has received the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award, and has been included in the Best American Short Stories anthology.

Staff

Editor-in-chief: Anna Caritj

Anna Caritj is the author of Leda and the Swan (Riverhead, 2021). She holds a BA from the University of Virginia, where she studied English and Spanish literature, and an MFA from Hollins University. She was raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where much of her work takes place, though she has lived, most recently, in Florida, California, New Mexico, and Texas. She is currently at work on a second novel.

Associate Editor: Kira Compton

Kira Compton is bad at writing bios, as well as several more important things. She is third-year MFA Fiction candidate at Boise State. Her work can be found in The Florida Review, Saranac Review, hex literary, and others. She’s working on a horror novel about trees.

Staff readers: Christofer Arbudzinski, Brodan Cunningham, Joshua Lenz, Caleb Merritt, Lewis Millholland, Megan Slusarewic, Cassandra Kiyoko Woodard

History

In 1997, English Professor Mitch Wieland approached then-Provost Daryl Jones with the idea to start a new literary journal at Boise State University. The journal was envisioned as a precursor to Boise State's upcoming MFA Program in Creative Writing. While a graduate student in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama, Wieland had served as fiction editor of The Black Warrior Review. Provost Jones funded the new journal and chose its name. Over the next fifteen months, the entire first issue was edited and produced by Professor Wieland and Quinn Pritchard, a Master’s student in the English Department. The inaugural issue was published in late 1998. Of this first issue, NPR’s book commentator Alan Cheuse wrote:

“The first issue is so splendid an inaugural, I don’t know that I’ve seen, in fact, a first issue of a magazine or journal with such a high-quality list of contributors, and such good work by them, since the old early days of some of the best magazines we know, Partisan Review, Paris Review, and such. Congratulations.”

Esquire editor Rust Hills wrote a personal letter to Wieland that said, in part:

 “ . . . a nice lot of fiction to read. Congratulations on the magazine.”

From the six short stories in the first issue, three of them made the top 100 stories of the year list in The Best American Short Stories 1998. These stories were “In Irons” (Ann Beattie), “Voices from the Other Room (Richard Bausch), and “The Air Above the Ground (Robert Olmstead). As a result of these Best American citations, the journal received a flood of submissions for its second issue.

Past Editors

After Boise State’s MFA Program started in 2000, Wieland began producing the issue with the help of an annual MFA Graduate Assistant. Past Graduate Assistants (Associate Editors) to the Idaho Review are:

  • Hannah Phillips

  • Desmond Everest Fuller

  • Natanya Biskar

  • EJ Pettinger

  • Jacqui Reiko Teruya

  • Mary Pauline Lowry

  • Natalie Disney

  • Tim Griffith

  • Sean Frede

  • Lacey Daley

  • Torii Grabowski

  • Reggie Townley

  • Matt Crosby

  • Brad Cook

  • Patti Knox

  • Malia Collins

  • Alex Kiesig

  • Tamara Shores

Accomplishments

Over the years, the journal has published emerging writers alongside of established writers. The Idaho Review featured some of the early stories from Jennifer Haigh (2001) and Ben Percy (2004). In 2002, two Boise State MFA students (Bill Pettitt and Wil Miller) championed a manuscript from an unpublished writer in the Idaho Review slush pile. The story, “Bleed Blue in Indonesia” by Adam Desnoyers, appeared in that year's issue and was reprinted in the 2003 edition of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In that edition, two of the twenty stories reprinted in the O. Henry Awards were from the Idaho Review.

Past fiction contributors include: Anthony Doerr, Joy Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Richard Bausch, Rick Bass, Gina Chung, Morgan Talty, Madison Smartt Bell, Ron Carlson, Lee K. Abbott, Edith Pearlman, Stuart Dybek, Frederick Busch, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Stephen Dixon, Melanie Rae Thon, Doris Betts, David Huddle, William Kittredge, Carol Bly, Alan Cheuse, Carolyn Cooke, Padgett Powell, Alyson Hagy, Percival Everett, Pam Durban, Bret Lott, Kelly Cherry, Cary Holladay, Deirdre McNamer, Stephen Minot, John McNally, Gordon Weaver, Allen Wier, and George Garrett.

Past poetry contributors include: Robert Wrigley, John Kinsella, Debora Greger, Larissa Szporluk, Brendan Galvin, James Harms, David Citino, Kelly Cherry, and Michael Blumenthal.

The journal is frequently selected for reprint or shortlisted in the following national prize anthologies: The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Award, The Pushcart Prize, New Stories from the South, and Best of the West.. 

Check out a Boise Weekly article on the Idaho Review.