Celebrating 60 Years of Denver Quarterly – An Intersection of Creative, Critical, and Artistic Practices
For 60 years, the literary arts journal Denver Quarterly has served as a space for experimentation, artistic exchange, and emerging voices in contemporary literature at the University of Denver.
Denver Quarterly's newest issue cover. Courtesy image.
For 60 years, the literary arts journal Denver Quarterly, part of the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, has served as a space for experimentation, artistic exchange, and emerging voices in contemporary literature at DU. Founded in 1966 by novelist John Edward Williams, the journal remains the oldest continuously publishing literary arts journal west of the Mississippi, with work from its pages regularly featured in The Best American Poetry series, the Pushcart Anthology, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Denver Quarterly’s vital legacy will be celebrated on May 20, 2026, with a special anniversary exhibition and event.
The exhibition will feature textual and visual submissions from the journal’s special collections archive, offering community members a look into the evolution of the publication and its role in shaping avant-garde literary culture across six decades. Attendees will be able to explore correspondence from writers such as Alice Walker, John Ashbery, and Joan Didion, while also learning about the production process behind the journal since its first issue was published in the summer of 1966.
“This is an incredible opportunity to provide more visibility of the journal’s history and shine a light on the authors and artists who have been in the journal since 1966,” said W. Scott Howard, professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts and editor-in-chief of the journal since 2019. “I’m excited for these stories to be made available to the DU community.”
Enhancing Authors’ Voices for Six Decades
Howard noted that the exhibition represents years of archival work completed alongside DU students who began organizing and indexing materials in 2023, as part of an internship program at the journal. The archival collection is now fully indexed and publicly accessible online, making the journal’s history available to wider audiences for the first time.
“This exhibition represents a culmination of the work I started in 2019, with help from everybody,” Howard said. “I’ve been taking a lot of pride and great enjoyment in everything we’ve been doing.”
Since its founding, Denver Quarterly has prioritized creating a space where creative, critical, and artistic practices intersect. The journal has long welcomed poets, prose writers, visual artists, literary scholars, and cultural critics while also championing voices historically excluded from literary publishing. From its earliest years, the journal has made deliberate efforts to include women writers and artists, Black, Latino/Latina, and Indigenous artists and writers, works in translation, and works from emerging or nontraditional writers.
“Denver Quarterly is a publication that embodies the wide-ranging possibilities for the worlds from which writing may come, and the worlds our authors imagine and write into being,” Howard said. “We are very mindful of encouraging and including new voices.”
The celebration will also include readings and presentations from several writers, honoring the journal’s enduring influence and international reach as it enters its seventh decade.
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