HISTORY
In 2004, at the urging of a group of ambitious graduate students, the UT Austin English Department created Bat City Review as a corollary to the M.A. program in Creative Writing. A first-class Master’s program, the Department reasoned, deserved to have a first-class literary journal. Published in spring 2005, the inaugural issue featured a diverse range of short fiction and poetry. Since then, Bat City Review has aroused attention and excitement on the small-press literary magazine scene and has earned a reputation as one of the most consistently rich literary magazines published today. So far the journal has featured the likes of Aimee Bender, George Saunders, Helena Maria Viramontes, Paul Muldoon, C. K. Williams, Billy Collins, Mary Jo Bang, Colm Toibin, Gina Ochsner, and Mahmoud Darwish (in both Arabic and an English translation by the future winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize). Our writers’ achievements include a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a L.A. Times Novel of the Year, a Lenin Peace Prize, and a Poet Laureateship of the United States.
Bat City Review has established itself as a quality publication of literary merit and national appeal, and it has accomplished this in a way that is unusual among peer literary magazines, for the journal is entirely student-run.
