The University’s English Department will publish its first undergraduate literary journal to showcase undergraduate work starting in the fall semester.

Nicholas Millman, sophomore in LAS, came up with the idea behind the journal after talking to the English Advising Office.

“They helped us get in touch with other faculty members and that’s where it all began,” Millman said. “There are a handful of undergraduate literary journals around the nation and we began to ask ourselves, ‘what can we do to get into this network?’”

Millman is working with Jonathan Cheng, sophomore in LAS, and they have been spearheading the journal for a couple of months.

The journal has not been named yet but “we want to be creative,” Millman said. The duo is receiving help from several staff members in the English Department, including English professors Lori Newcomb, Dale Bauer and University academic advisor Adrienne Johnson.

“This is going to be a very faculty-collaborative project,” Millman said.

The journal is expected to be up and running by the beginning of the fall semester, but submissions will be limited to the English Department’s students during its initial stages.

“One of the big concerns of the English Department right know is how to get students to care about the work they produce, and unfortunately it just gets filed away most of the time. This is a way of breathing new life into the writing you do,” Cheng said.

The first prototype will be released at the beginning of next semester and is expected to be released annually at first. Eventually they hope to have it published every semester.

“We write a lot of papers, especially if you’re an English major,” Millman said. “We usually just file it away in our computer and we never see it again. It kind of bothered me because I felt that I had put a lot of work into this and started to think of what else I could do with my writing.”

Part of the reasoning behind the journal is to foster a closer relationship between the department’s faculty and its students.

“There is sometimes a huge disconnect between undergraduate students and the faculty,” Cheng said. “We really want to establish a mentorship process and have this collaborative effort with the English Department and various professors, because they are really the experts on how to do research, how to publish a paper and how to go through that process.”

The submission process has not been completely laid out yet but is expected to be up and running sometime during the next couple of months.

“Once we have the submissions, we will connect the students with a specific professor,” Cheng said. “Much of it depends on how many faculty members we will have working with us next year. We are looking to have around five editorial board members, so we imagine we are going to accept around ten submissions.”

Millman added the journal will focus mainly on academic work, but will be “interdisciplinary in a sense, where literary criticism is in dialogue with a lot of other social issues that are happening around campus.”

Bryan can be reached at [email protected].