2. Shenandoah Celebrates 75 Years

Shenandoah Celebrates 75 Years W&L's literary magazine has featured some of the biggest name in literature and jump-started careers of both authors and students.

Emily Innes
July 9, 2025

Shenandoah, Washington and Lee University's literary magazine, has witnessed - and helped shape - an evolving literary landscape for 75 years. Throughout its various eras, the magazine, which is celebrating its diamond anniversary in June 2025 with a redesigned website and special double issue, remains a W&L hallmark that editor Beth Staples describes as "fueled by pluck, initiative and love."

Like many literary magazines, Shenandoah has served as a launching pad not only for emerging writers but also for stu­dent interns who are interested in pursuing careers in literature.

"Part of why literary magazines exist is so peo­ple have a place to get their careers started," says Staples, who took the helm of Shenandoah in 2018.

Authors often turn to magazines like Shenandoah to gain a foothold in the industry before seeking publishing houses for their book-length projects. And magazines housed at universities can gener­ally take risks on lesser-known authors, serving as important milestones for writers on the path to success. In its 75 years, Shenandoah - and the W&L faculty and students at its helm - has been included in the resumes of past greats, such as William Faulkner, W.H. Auden, Eudora Welty and T.S. Eliot, as well as more recent writers, such as Mary Oliver, Joyce Carol Oates and Rita Dove.

Oates, one of the most prolific American fiction writers of the 20th century, appeared in nearly every issue of Shenandoah from 1966 to 1987, as well as 2008 and 2010. She first contributed to the winter 1966 issue with her short story "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which she later developed into her second novel. She won the National Book Award in 1969 for her novel "them." And Oliver, who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry and was America's best-selling poet in 2007, published more than 40 poems and essays in Shenandoah.

Previous Shenandoah student editors and interns have gone on to impressive pursuits, including poet Christian Wiman '88, former editor of Poetry magazine, along with Rebecca Makkai '99, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of 2023's "I Have Some Questions for You." Makkai was initially drawn to W&L for its well-regarded literary magazine and spent three years as a work-study student at Shenandoah, under then-editor R.T. "Rod" Smith. There, she organized his Rolodex filled with contacts, as well as picked up tubs of submissions from the post office and mailed back acceptance and (mostly) rejection letters. Seeing the sheer number of submissions and the corresponding low acceptance rate gave her a clearer picture of the life of a professional writer.

"By the time I started sending my work out into the world as an adult, I had a very realistic sense of the odds and of how it wasn't a personal affront when someone rejects you," she says. "Literary journals are run by poets and fiction writers and people who love what they're doing, and that's a really helpful perspective."

She kept in touch with Smith after graduating, and he encouraged her to submit her own writing. Smith published Makkai's short story, "The Worst You Ever Feel," in Shenandoah's spring 2007 issue. And as guest editor of "The Best American Short Stories" anthology the next year, Salman Rushdie chose Makkai's story for inclusion; the anthology featured her work in four consecutive years. She considers that the kickstart to her career.

"At W&L, I had an experience that really nurtured who I was as a writer through the English Department, Shenandoah and creative writing classes," she says. "I became more and more myself and more and more of a writer while I was there."

Nora Jacobson '26, an English major minoring in environ­mental science and creative writing, and Sloan Criner '25, an English and classics double major, served as student interns for Shenandoah during Winter Term 2025. And through W&L's Summer Research Scholars (SRS) program, they spent the summer of 2024 working with Staples and other SRS students to curate the Shenandoah 75th anniversary exhibit, which is on display August 2024 to August 2025 in the Special Collections Gallery in Leyburn Library and showcases the magazine's history and far-reaching legacy.

Throughout the research process, Jacobson loved immersing herself in the archives of correspondence between the students and contributors - many of the biggest names in literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, including Langston Hughes, J.R.R. Tolkien and Faulkner.

"There's such a familiarity with the way they corresponded with each other that it feels like the way we write emails to each other today when we're talking about putting the magazine together," Jacobson says. "Realizing that these big, historic names were just like us once upon a time and that this influential magazine was started by W&L students - like us - was remarkable."

W&L faculty members Ashley Brown, Marshall Fishwick, Brewster Ford and George Foster founded Shenandoah hoping it would provide an alternative platform for student writing other than the humor publication "The Southern Collegian." They recruited student editors Tom Wolfe '51, J.J. Donovan '50 and Douglas Kerr '50 to join the burgeoning modernist literary movement and ongoing conversations about the state of American literature.

Wolfe, 1998 National Book Award winner for "The Right Stuff," author of close to 20 nonfiction and fiction books and champion of the new journalism movement that blends literary techniques and reporting, served as editor of the magazine until he graduated. Wolfe's first published short story, "Shattered," appeared in the inaugural issue of Shenandoah in spring 1950. After Tom Carter '54 became editor of the publication in 1951, Shenandoah moved toward featuring less student work and more notable mid-century writers. Determined to prove that Shenandoah could take risks, he began soliciting writers such as Ezra Pound, Ray Bradbury and E. E. Cummings, dramatically expanding the scope of the magazine's work and introducing its readers to a new international cohort of modernists.

"The reality is that modernism really only happened because of literary magazines like Shenandoah," says Emma Malinak '25, an English and journalism double major.

Malinak wrote her English honors thesis on mid-century literature movements, using the early history of Shenandoah as a case study to explore trends in American literature. During a period when authors were pushing and transgressing boundaries with their writing, she found that university-housed literary magazines like Shenandoah were more willing to publish their work than commercial publishing houses.

"It was hard for commercial publishers to take a chance on something experimental and risk their budgets or not meeting a printing quota, but smaller mag­azines were typically supported by universities and not as concerned about the financial risks," Malinak says. "So, these people that are trying to push the boundaries of what American literature can be are only getting published in these tiny magazines because magazines are willing to take a shot on things that are a little out of the ordinary. They have this space where they can publish what they want and see what happens."

Under Carter's leadership from 1951 to 1953, Shenandoah garnered a reputation of giving experimental authors and ambi­tious students a place to find their footing. However, Malinak points out that Carter also kept the magazine rooted in t he Southern literary tradition.

"You can pick out any Shenandoah volume and find an equal number of Southern writers and international writers, and I think Tom Cart er was particularly good at striking that balance," she says.

After Carter, the magazine rotated editorship among students until the faculty assumed editorial control in 1954. Former edi­tors include professor of English James Boatwright (1962-1988), professor of English and poet W. Dabney Stuart (1988-1995) and poet R.T. "Rod" Smith (1995-2018). Each editor brought his own interests and priorities to the magazine - adding vibrancy to the tradition while not changing its character.

The magazine became quarterly under Boatwright, its first permanent editor. He aimed to bring back Carter's vision of championing new voices and published then-burgeoning writers such as Auden, Welty, Oates and Walker Percy. He instituted color and added artwork to the magazine's covers, also providing an early outlet for well-known Lexington photographer Sally Mann's works in the 1970s.

Smith, who became Shenandoah's first full-time editor in July 1995, renewed an emphasis on Southern literature and made student editors a pillar of the magazine through an internship program (read the story on p. 18). Under his leadership, Shenandoah won the prestigious Governor's Award for Arts in 2008 and transitioned to a digital-only format in 2011.

A literary giant in his own right, Smith earned two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and received a Pushcart Prize, the Emily Dickinson Poetry Prize and the Library of Virginia Poetry Book of the Year Award twice. Smith died in December 2024 (obituary on p. 51).

Remembering Rod

Annie Persons '15, an advising fellow at the University of Virginia who also holds a Ph.D. in English from UVA, belonged to the late Rod Smith's last cohort of Shenandoah interns. She looks back on her four semesters interning under Smith - including one as managing editor.

"It was a different approach to reading than we took in English seminars. When we were reading, you were free to be like, 'I like this,' or 'I don't like this.' And you wanted to have reasons why. I left the Shenandoah internship thinking, 'I've broadened my horizons.'

"He was even-keeled, not super emotive in any way, but he was wry. He would make these deadpan jokes and then have a kind of twinkle in his eye. Some of the most compelling literary moments that I had with him were in an independent study focused on 20th-century Irish women's poetry. He was profoundly moved by the Irish language."

Staples assumed the role in 2018 as the first female editor of Shenandoah, eager to continue and refine the magazine's legacy. For one, she reined in the submission process. When Staples came on board, the magazine received around 6,000 fiction submissions within a semes­ter-long period. Today, the magazine receives between 2,000 and 4,000 submissions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translations, comics and novel excerpts during a shorter intake cycle. It publishes less than 1% of them.

Under Staples' direction, the twice-yearly Shenandoah soon became a part of W&L's Department of English and is supported by a class of undergraduate interns in the Fall and Winter Terms. Chris Gavaler, professor of English, serves as the magazine's comics editor; professor of English Lesley Wheeler is the magazine's poetry editor; and associate professor of Spanish Seth Michelson serves as the translations editor. The internship course, which is open to any student who has taken a creative writing class, is capped at 12 students each semester who help read, edit and select submissions.

"I get a lot of energy from the students," Staples says. "They bring a lot of interesting perspectives and fun ideas, which only enhances the editorial process. I also want to make sure they feel empowered, and that's been a hallmark of Shenandoah's new era, how involved the students are."

Staples emphasizes that W&L provides singular opportunities for editorial experience. University-housed literary magazines are generally attached to MFA programs, and opportunities to work on the magazines are limited to graduate students. Shenandoah is one of only a handful of renowned literary magazines that undergrads help produce, just one example of the university's emphasis on a student-focused liberal arts curriculum.

"It speaks to how many unique opportunities W&L offers, and I feel like I wouldn't have had this chance at any other university," says Jacobson. "Having this extra facet of a practical experience is invaluable in going into the professional sphere, and feeling like you have a voice in the process was also really special.

As editor, Staples continues to steward Shenandoah as a major player in the literary field. While poetry has been a focus of the magazine from the beginning, Staples has helped expand its scope by introducing works in translation as a regular feature. She says that including translated poems, and occasionally short stories, helps bolster the magazine's national - and inter­national - renown, while encouraging readers to adopt a more global understanding of literature.

"If you don't translate from other countries, you don't know what people in other countries are thinking," she says, connect­ing this expanded view of Shenandoah to Carter's original vision.

Perhaps one of Staples' more notable contri­butions to Shenandoah's legacy is the creation of the Shenandoah Fellowship for Editors in 2020. Editorial fellows rotate with each issue of the magazine and are tasked with curating a selection of published work in a genre of their choosing, working with the Shenandoah staff to guide the work to publication.

Shenandoah's first editorial fellow was DW McKinney, who is currently the magazine's nonfiction editor.

The fellowship embodies Shenandoah's mission of showcasing a variety of voices and perspectives, facilitating emerging literary careers and expanding the accessibility of literature. Specifically, it provides an entry point into the publishing industry for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds who might otherwise not have the chance to break into the field. Fellows are given the chance to learn about all aspects of a small literary publisher and create connections with peers and potential future employers in the industry and in academia - an opportunity that Shenandoah's staff and interns believe is revolutionary for the industry.

"To have so many perspectives included in one space and coming from a small town like Lexington - I imagine that anyone who opens an issue of Shenandoah has had their world expanded so much," Malinak says. "And that's the power of good literature and good editing - to be able to open people's minds."

Editorial Roots: A 75-year timeline at Shenandoah

1950 - 1951: Shenandoah was founded by a group of W&L faculty and student editors: Tom Wolfe '51, J.J. Donovan '50 and Douglas Kerr '50.

1951 - 1953: Thomas Carter '54 became editor-in-chief of Shenandoah in 1951, establishing the precedent of having a single editor for the magazine. He formed connections with major poets, especially Ezra Pound.

1953 - 1954: In the winter of 1953, Raymond D. Smith Jr., professor of English, became editor while Carter transitioned to the role of editorial adviser.

1954 - 1956: Edward M. Hood, professor of English, became the magazine's editor.

1956 - 1958: Maxwell Casie III, professor of English, was named editor.

1958 - 1962: The magazine editorship rotated among single-issue editors including Marshall Fishwick, professor of communication studies and humanities, and James Leyburn, professor of sociology and former dean.

1962 - 1988: James "Jim" Boatwright, professor of English, became editor two years after he joined the W&L faculty.

1988 - 1995: Dabney Stuart, English professor and poet, became editor with Shenandoah's third issue in 1988. He was nominated for six Pulitzer Prizes and won the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize.

1995 - 2018: R.T. Smith, two-time Pulitzer nominee and Pushcart Prize winner, transitioned the magazine from print to online. He also launched the magazine's internship during his first year.

2018 - present: Beth Staples, assistant professor of English, became Shenandoah's first female editor.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of W&L: The Washington and Lee Magazine. Contact us at magazine@wlu.edu.