About VQR

The Virginia Quarerly Review, Spring 1925

Founded in 1925 at the University of Virginia, the Virginia Quarterly Review has spent nearly a century at the forefront of the American intellectual scene—first as one of the most esteemed literary journals in the country, and more recently as one of the boldest literary magazines in publishing. Fueled by editorial curiosity, and striving for deep engagement with topics both timely and timeless, VQR has become an indispensable home for thought-provoking literature, poetry, journalism, photography, and graphic arts from every section of the US and abroad.

Each issue has contained work both moving and memorable; each has sought to provide the best that contemporary literature can offer. VQR’s distinguished history has included Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Conrad Aiken, Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, John Berryman, Julian Bond, Robert Olen Butler, Michael Chabon, Victoria Chang, Billy Collins, Lydia Davis, James Dickey, E. L. Doctorow, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Deborah Eisenberg, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Gabriel García Márquez, Nadine Gordimer, Marilyn Hacker, Aldous Huxley, Mitchell Jackson, Leslie Jamison, Randall Jarrell, Josephine W. Johnson, Ward Just, Barbara Kingsolver, Galway Kinnell, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Mead, Marianne Moore, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Pablo Neruda, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Oliver, Carl Phillips, Katherine Anne Porter, Annie Proulx, Adrienne Rich, Diego Rivera, Eleanor Roosevelt, Salman Rushdie, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jeff Sharlet, Charles Simic, Art Spiegelman, Arthur Sze, Henry Taylor, Peter Taylor, Natasha Trethewey, Binyavanga Wainaina, Margaret Walker, Chris Ware, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, C. Vann Woodward, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, Kevin Young, and many more.

It is a magazine distinguished not only by the caliber of the best veteran practitioners, but by the role it has played in launching the careers of many writers and artists of note. VQR hews to one simple standard in its selection of contributors: excellence.

VQR Editors

James Southall Wilson (1925-1931)
Stringfellow Barr (1931-1937)
Lambert Davis (1937-1938)
Lawrence Lee (1938-1942)
Archibald Bolling Shepperson (1942)
Charlotte Kohler (1942-1974)
Staige D. Blackford (1974-2003)
Ted Genoways (2003-2012)
W. Ralph Eubanks (2013-2015)
Paul Reyes (2016-present)