VQR wins two National Magazine Awards
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It was big night for UVA’s literary journal The Virginia Quarterly Review last night. In fact, it’s a bit of a David and Goliath story. The small journal with only four staff members won two Ellies — the Oscars of the magazine publishing world — at the 41st annual National Magazine Awards. The VQR took the General Excellence Award for magazines with circulations under 100,000 (the magazine only has a circulation of 6,000), and more surprisingly it took home the Fiction Award, edging out heavyweights like The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harpers. The VQR had been nominated for six awards going into the night. Only the Atlantic Monthly had more with eight. Not bad considering the little lit-mag was up against magazines with dozens of staff members and annual budgets in the millions.
In 2003, VQR editor Ted Genoways took over from long-time editor Staige D. Blackford. Building on the VQR’s strong reputation as one of the county’s finest literary journals, having published the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Eleanor Roosevelt, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Genoways proceeded to transform the stodgy journal with a new design and editorial approach. Nominated last year for two Ellies, a feat in itself, the nominating committee wrote:
“VQR has been catapulted into the twenty-first century with a stunning new design, edgy graphic features, and in-depth reporting from around the world — all of it augmenting, not replacing, its literary core.”
Click for brief audio version (652K).
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That is sorta cool that you have an audio version of this news. But just sorta. If it’s intended for the blind, I doubt that they can see the spot to point-and-click. (Reminds me of Garrett Morris on SNL in the 1970s yelling out Weekend Update stories for the “hearing impaired.”)
[...] Coincidently, it was award-winning VQR editor Ted Genoways who discovered the Frost poems that made Dove croon in 1999. An MFA grad student at the time, Genoways, like Stillings, happened to be sifting through material in the special collections library. “We routinely go through Special Collections looking for unusual pieces,” said Genoways in a press release at the time, talking about his roll as editor of the UVA student literary magazine Meridian,” but I never expected anything of this caliber from the Frost collection.” [...]