Our Mission & Staff, Fall 2023-Spring 2024
We're proud of CutBank's fifty-plus years as Montana's foremost literary magazine, founded in 1973 by the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana and helmed initially by favorite literary son William Kittredge.
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We publish two print issues a year of compelling poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction by established writers and new voices alike. We're global in scope, but with a regional bias.
Over the years, we've been privileged to feature work by Wendell Berry, Louise Erdrich, Richard Hugo, Seamus Heaney, James Welch, Patricia Goedicke, James Lee Burke, Chris Offutt, Aimee Bender, Steve Almond, and a number of other writers whose work we're fond of. That's the joy, we think, of both publishing and reading a publication like CutBank: discovering and developing a fondness for new work.
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"Everything about this magazine intrigues: its look, the art,
the poetry, the fiction ... Who could ask for more?"
~ LITERARY MAGAZINE REVIEW ~
The CutBank Team
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Jenny Rowe
Jenny Rowe is originally from Ohio but considers Iowa City to be her true home. When the pandemic started, she was teaching English classes in Beijing. After a decade of teaching ESL in various places, she's thrilled to be pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at The University of Montana and hopes to finish her memoir about her brief expat experience by the time she graduates in the spring of 2024. You can find her recent essay publications online in Touchstone and in the first printed volume of Allegheny: The Allegory Ridge Nonfiction Anthology.
FICTION EDITORS
Robin Bissett
Robin Bissett is writer, editor, and teaching artist from West Texas. She is an alumna of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program Summer Institute and a second-year MFA candidate in fiction.
Reed Phares
POETRY EDITORS
Lauren Tess
Lauren Tess is in her second year as an MFA candidate in poetry and her fourth year as a parent. Her poems can be found in Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Meridian, Cimarron Review, on poets.org, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Missoula.
Lillian Emerick Valentine
Lillian (she/her) is a poet and organic farmer from Oregon. She currently lives in Missoula, Montana where she is an MFA candidate and instructor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ecotone, The Fjords Review, Salamander, and other literary journals. Her favorite bird is a kingfisher.
Caroline Patterson
NONFICTION EDITOR
Erin O’Regan White
Erin is an MFA candidate in poetry who was born and raised in Missoula. An eight-year stint on the West Coast was enough to teach her that nothing beats life under the big sky and she came home in 2007. Her writing has been published in Deep Wild Journal, the Freeflow Podcast, and Mamalode and has received a Best American Essays notable mention and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is raising two boys to follow her footsteps around the woods and rivers, mountains and meadows of Western Montana.
CONTENT EDITOR
Kim Carson
Kim is an MFA candidate in fiction who has worked a lot of odd jobs and lived a lot of odd places. Her recent work has been featured in Unlikely Stories and The Nelligan Review. You can find Kim online at carsonbodie.com. In real life, you can't find her because she is hiking.
ONLINE MANAGING EDITOR
Grace Schwenk
Grace Schwenk is a writer from the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. When not writing, she can be found getting lost in the mountains with her dog Selway.
INTERVIEWS EDITOR
Pamela Huber
Pamela Huber is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Montana. She was raised on the water, on Lenape land in Delaware, and educated on Piscataway land in Washington, DC. Her writing has appeared in Atlanta Review, Furious Gravity, The Journal of Lost Time, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Delaware Bards Poetry Review, CommonLit, and elsewhere. She has received awards from Glimmer Train and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. You can find her on a long weekend traveling in her self-converted camper van, which has taken her 35,000 miles around the continent. She lives online at pamelahuberwrites.com.
CRUISE DIRECTOR (EVENTS COORDINATOR)
Mark Schoenfeld
Mark Schoenfeld is a disgruntled Texan, recovering middle school English teacher, and born-again agnostic. Before spending over a decade as an educator, Mark worked, in descending order, as a public radio host, screen printer, youth pastor, and window washer. He now lives near Missoula, MT, where he writes and teaches but mostly spends as much time as possible with his family on or near moving water.