Ninth Letter
- Mar 13, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 1, 2025
Ninth Letter distinguishes itself through a dual-editorial model that pairs the faculty of the University of Illinois with graduate students in the MFA program, creating an editorial process that merges professional oversight with emerging critical perspectives. This structure produces a magazine known for work that is visually ambitious and formally exploratory, supported by design elements that have earned recognition independent of the writing itself. Its pages often serve as an early site of discovery for writers working at the edges of genre, hybrid forms, and multimedia expression.
Ninth Letter occupies a distinct corner of contemporary publishing because it is built at the intersection of two disciplines—the Creative Writing Program and the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. That structure is not decorative. It informs every editorial choice and every issue the journal releases. The print edition is produced through a design studio in which each cohort builds a new visual system from the ground up. Typography, layout logic, illustration, and page architecture are reinvented with each volume, which has led to repeated recognition from AIGA, Print, and HOW for design excellence. The result is a journal where visual form is inseparable from the literary work it carries.
The digital edition extends this approach rather than replicating it. Ninth Letter Online publishes work that cannot exist in print—interactive essays, animated poems, sound-based narratives, and hybrid pieces that rely on code or nonlinear movement. The journal was among the first university-affiliated publications to build a digital platform capable of supporting multimedia literature, providing writers and artists with a credible home for work that requires a technological framework.
Volume 22, Issue 01 captures a moment shaped by movement and fracture—a collection of poems, stories, and essays that track change at every scale. The pieces speak to one another in ways that only become clear once the issue takes shape: writers tracing shifts in the world around them, questioning what alters and what endures, and pressing readers to pause long enough to register the consequences. Photos courtesy of Ninth Letter.
What Ninth Letter Publishes
The editorial range is wide, but the selections are deliberate. Fiction often tests the limits of structure, whether through tightly engineered micro-pieces, long stories built from modular sections, or narratives that move between realism and the speculative without signaling a shift. Poetry favors precision and experimentation on the line level, including work that treats the page as a field rather than a fixed grid. Its nonfiction leans toward essays in which form and inquiry are tied together—memoir that resists tidy framing, research-driven work shaped by its own complications, and pieces that use structure as an argument.
Ninth Letter is one of the few established journals that actively solicits hybrid and multimedia submissions. These include text paired with illustration or photography, digital poems that rely on movement or sound, and work that uses the screen itself as a compositional tool. Submissions of this kind are evaluated by editors who understand both the literary and technical demands of the form, which gives contributors a level of consideration they would not receive in more conventional venues.
What emerges is a publication that documents the formal shifts happening across contemporary writing with unusual clarity. Ninth Letter has become a destination for writers and artists who want a space willing to meet the work on its own terms, no matter the medium.
Commitment to Emerging Writers
Ninth Letter has earned a reputation as a credible entry point for writers at the earliest stages of their careers, not because it lowers its standards, but because it maintains them. Emerging writers are positioned beside established authors without distinction in format or placement, a signal that the work is evaluated on its merits rather than on the contributor’s résumé. The journal’s archive reflects this approach: many writers who later appeared in major outlets, such as The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, or commercial book contracts, first published in Ninth Letter when they were largely unknown.
The journal’s production model strengthens this commitment. Each issue is shaped by graduate students in the MFA program at the University of Illinois, who serve as editors, designers, and production leads. Emerging writers who publish here benefit from an editorial process that is unusually attentive; work is reviewed by multiple readers, discussed in editorial meetings, and shaped by a team trained to read closely. This structure provides writers with a level of engagement akin to the early stages of a professional publishing workflow.
The collaboration between writing and design students also creates an environment where experimentation is not only permitted but expected. Contributors whose work straddles genres or requires unconventional formatting, visual integration, or digital components find a platform capable of supporting that ambition. For emerging writers, this matters. A journal willing to meet work at the edge of form provides an opportunity that more traditional magazines often cannot.
Ninth Letter’s practices reflect a clear editorial position that affirms that emerging writers deserve access to rigorous review, thoughtful presentation, and a publication environment that recognizes early-career work as part of a long trajectory, not a test or exception.
Awards and Recognition
Ninth Letter has built a record of national recognition that reflects both its editorial judgment and its willingness to publish work that resists predictable forms. Pieces first appearing in the journal have been selected for The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology—a pattern that underscores the magazine’s ability to identify writers whose work carries force beyond the issue in which it appears. Many contributors cite Ninth Letter as the publication that first placed their writing before editors, agents, and prize committees who closely track these annual collections.
Its design achievements have been recognized just as consistently. Multiple issues have received honors from AIGA, Print, and the HOW International Design Awards for innovation in layout, typography, and visual concept. These accolades are not superficial. They speak to a publication that treats design as part of the editorial argument—an approach unusual in literary publishing, where visual presentation is often an afterthought.
Together, these recognitions form a clear record: Ninth Letter produces work that is noticed, cited, and carried forward into the broader literary conversation, and its contributors—especially emerging writers—benefit directly from that visibility.
A Home for Experimental and Diverse Voices
Ninth Letter has long positioned itself as a venue for work that sits outside dominant traditions, giving it serious editorial consideration. This commitment is evident in its contributor lists, special features, and the tenor of the work it selects. The journal routinely publishes writers whose perspectives, formal approaches, or cultural frameworks are underrepresented in mainstream literary outlets. Its issues include substantial work by BIPOC writers, LGBTQ+ authors, and contributors whose artistic practices bridge geography, discipline, and genre. This is not incidental; it reflects deliberate editorial priorities shaped by the journal’s dual roots in creative writing and design.
The publication’s openness to unconventional structure—fragmented prose, cross-genre work, digital-native forms, voice-driven essays that resist traditional narrative scaffolding—creates space for writers whose work would be constrained by journals that adhere to narrower stylistic expectations. Ninth Letter’s editorial staff is trained to evaluate pieces that rely on visual logic, associative movement, or hybrid form, which gives emerging writers working at the edges of genre a rare outlet with the technical and aesthetic capacity to handle their submissions.
The journal’s interdisciplinary model reinforces this. Writers whose work engages with visual culture, sound, performance, or media studies find a publication environment that understands how these elements function on the page and onscreen. This level of fluency is uncommon in traditional literary publishing and is part of what allows Ninth Letter to champion voices that often struggle to find institutional support elsewhere.
The result is a journal that broadens the field. Ninth Letter offers emerging writers a space where experimentation is treated as a serious craft decision, not a novelty, and where diverse perspectives are integral to the publication’s identity rather than set aside as occasional features.
Why Ninth Letter Matters
Ninth Letter occupies a rare position in contemporary publishing because it treats literary work as a full artistic object rather than text dropped into a template. Every issue shows that form, structure, and visual design can shape meaning as directly as the sentences themselves. At a time when many journals narrow their scope to control cost or maintain a predictable format, Ninth Letter continues to invest in a model that makes room for complexity. That commitment allows writers to attempt work that would not survive the constraints of a conventional layout or a rigid editorial framework.
For emerging writers, work that debuts in Ninth Letter is routinely cited, reprinted, and noticed by editors and prize committees who track the magazine for its attention to early talent. For writers working in hybrid or experimental modes, it provides one of the few national platforms capable of presenting the work as it was intended to be seen or read.
What Ninth Letter demonstrates, consistently, is that literary publishing does not have to flatten ambition. It can widen it. Each issue offers evidence that contemporary writing is strongest when form is treated as part of the argument, not an afterthought, and that emerging voices benefit when a journal is built to meet the work rather than the other way around.
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