Originally a student-run quarterly, Shenandoah has evolved into a triannual literary journal edited by author R. T. Smith. Shenandoah was founded in 1949 by a group of Washington and Lee University faculty members, including English professor Samuel Ashley Brown, who published the fiction and poetry of undergraduates including Tom Wolfe. In the 1950s Thomas H. Carter became one of the founding student editors. During his tenure the Shenandoah corresponded with EE Cummings, William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound and many other Southern writers and the Shenandoah grew in stature and national prominence. From the 1960s to the 1980s, W&L faculty member James Boatwright expanded the journal and published occasional theme issues, including a 35th anniversary anthology. In 1995, R. T. Smith was selected as the first full-time editor of the journal, which is now published triannually. Shenandoah is funded and supported by Washington and Lee University through the Office of the Dean of the College and is located in Mattingly House on W&L's campus. The magazine maintains a board of university advisors who offer guidance and advice, and the current editor maintains an intern program in which undergraduate students work for the journal and learn the craft of editing as an academic course in the English Department. Recent contributors include Wendell Berry, Joyce Carol Oates, Jacob M. Appel, Speer Morgan, Lee Smith, Claudia Emerson and Rita Dove. This list complements a long history of literary luminaries who have been published in Shenandoah such as W. H. Auden, James Merrill, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, E. E. Cummings, and Flannery O'Connor. Shenandoah's first online version was published in 2011.
Contests and prizes
Shenandoah hosts several prestigious annual contests: the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry, the Goodheart Prize for Fiction, the Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay, The Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Graybeal-Gowan Prize for Virginia Writers. All poems published in Shenandoah in a given year are eligible for consideration for the annual James Boatwright III Prize and stories are eligible for the annual $1,000 Goodheart Prize. The Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay is awarded for the best non-fiction worked published in a calendar year. There is no "submission" process per se for these contests.
