Lynne Nugent has been named editor of The Iowa Review, effective August 1, 2021. She is the seventh editor in the half-century history of The Iowa Review and the first nonwhite person (she is Asian American) to serve in that role.
Nugent has been acting editor for the past year and previously was managing editor, a position she held beginning in 2003. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing (2004) and a PhD in English (2010) from the University of Iowa. Her nonfiction chapbook, Nest, won the 2019 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award and was published by the University of Central Florida/The Florida Review. In 2020, the Council on the Status of Women named her co-winner of the University of Iowa’s Jean Y. Jew Women’s Rights Award.
The flagship literary magazine of the University of Iowa, The Iowa Review has been in continuous publication since 1970.
Taking over as managing editor is Katie Berta, who comes to The Iowa Review from Hayden’s Ferry Review at Arizona State University, where she was supervising editor. Berta earned her PhD in poetry from Ohio University and an MFA from Arizona State. Berta’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and The Massachusetts Review, among other magazines. You can find her criticism in American Poetry Review, West Branch, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from Millay Arts, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and a Global Travel Fellowship from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.
The Iowa Review's mission is to publish the best short stories, poems, essays, and work in emerging genres being written today, whether by established or emerging writers. Once published in TIR, work has recently been selected for Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Pushcart Prize, and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. The Iowa Review publishes three issues a year; single issues and subscriptions can be purchased via its webstore.