About Blue Mesa Review

Undergraduate Readers

History

Blue Mesa Review was founded by Rudolfo Anaya in 1989. Anaya, a Creative Writing instructor at the University of New Mexico at the time, wanted a space for New Mexican and Southwestern writers to publish their work. As a landscape of intersectionality and diversity, the Southwest is the perfect place for beautiful intersectional art to grow, and Anaya charged Blue Mesa Review with tending those roots in our community. Today, we strive to continue to support and publish voices of the Southwest and the world at large, and to foster connections between our academic circle and the rich literary traditions of Albuquerque and New Mexico.

Blue Mesa Review is run by graduate students at University of New Mexico’s MFA program and assisted in our work by a faculty advisor and a team of graduate and undergraduate readers. In our thirty-four years and 40+ issues, our contributors have included Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Sherwin Bitsui, and countless other exceptional writers. We are grateful to the diverse voices who have brought their identities, cultures, and creativity to an international arena.

We are proud to be approaching our 50th anniversary issue in Fall 2024. Since our founding, we’ve been committed to the craft of storytelling and the uplifting of unique voices and traditions through language and art. We invite you to join us. See our Submission Guidelines to learn how.

Thanks

Genre graphics were created by Amy Dotson, with inspiration from the Friends of the Orphan Signs project. Banner photograph by Gwyneth Henke; graphic by Amy Dotson.

The thumbnail images used throughout our site that are not credited artist works are taken from publications curated by the Public Domain Review, including Adam Ludwig Marsing’s 1776 Marmora et adfines aliquos lapides coloribus suis exprimi (Illustrations of marble types and some related stones), Orra White Hitchcock’s Scientific Illustrations for the Classroom (1828-1840), and Eugène Grasset’s 1896 Plants and Their Application to Ornament. They are accessible under public domain.

Our website was designed by University Communications & Marketing’s Vincent Narducci.