Nugent named editor of The Iowa Review

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Lynne Nugent, The Iowa Review
Lynne Nugent, PhD, MFA

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.

See the magazine's website.

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 OnlinePrairie SchoonerThe Rumpus, and The Massachusetts Review, among other magazines. You can find her criticism in American Poetry ReviewWest BranchHarvard ReviewPloughshares, 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.


The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.