North Dakota Quarterly is a literary and public humanities journal whose roots extend back to the early days of the University of North Dakota. One of the famous “little magazines” that have been the traditional seed beds of talented writers, it puts UND on the map while contributing to the nation’s cultural and artistic life.
An international spectrum of writers and artists joins UND faculty and researchers as contributors to NDQ’s rich mixture of articles, essays, fiction, and poetry.
North Dakota Quarterly, as both a literary and public humanities journal, seeks to publish intriguing, innovative, and distinctive non-fiction essays. These may range from formal scholarly treatments of literature, history, and culture more broadly to reflections, personal essays, and experimental forms designed to explore the limits of generic convention, voice, or ideas. While the audience for this work is the vaguely-defined general public, we encourage submissions that take an ambitious and expansive view of public's interest.
Literary preferences are very subjective. There are no fixed, universal, or objective criteria that we use when we read fiction submissions. Ultimately, we're looking for multiple perspectives, different voices, and a variety of approaches to fiction. These approaches can revolve around uncertainty, ambiguity, fragmentation, polyphony, contradictory information, structural experimentation, and all the other things that teachers of freshman composition tell us we must eliminate or avoid. In other words, we value the willingness to treat fiction as textual art and take literary risks. Naturally, there is no guarantee that innovation will yield good results. But when it comes to art, it might be better to fail with something original than to play it safe with a predictable formula.