About Center

Founded by Sherod Santos in 2000, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts is published by the University of Missouri 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, creative non-fiction, and, on occasion, translations. We do not accept literary criticism, book reviews, or children's writing. We publish work from a broad range of aesthetic categories and privilege work that is deliberately crafted, engaging, and accessible.

Past volumes have included writers such as Kim Chinquee, Mark Conway, Debra Anne Davis, William Eisner, Kathy Fagan, Kathleen Flenniken, Matthew Hittinger, April Ayers Lawson, R. Narvaez, Anna Ross, Robert Wrigley, and Matt Zambito. We also have featured interviews with critically recognized writers such as Agha Shahid Ali, Amy Bloom, Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, Alan Shapiro, Susan Stewart, and Edmund White.

In 2008, Center initiated a symposium feature in which a variety of early-career and established writers are solicited to write a micro-essay on specific genre-related topic that can be approached through ideas of craft and/or theory. The brevity of the essays is meant to inspire quick takes that are dynamic, suggestive, creative, and informal. Issue 8 (2009), guest edited and introduced by Trudy Lewis, features “Out of Character” with contributions from twenty-nine fiction writers. Issue 7 (2008) contains “A Symposium on the Line: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Poetry” with contributions from twenty-seven poets.

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

To contact us, please email at cla@missouri.edu or write to Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, 202 Tate Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211-1500.