Bennington Review Receives Grant from The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses
The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) has awarded a $10,000 capacity-building grant to Bennington Review.
Literature faculty member Michael Dumanis, who serves as editor, says that the award “is a tremendous honor and a recognition of the tremendous investment the Bennington community has made in resurrecting and supporting this one-of-a-kind literary print journal. At a time of skyrocketing production costs for all publications, these added resources are especially invaluable, and will help us increase our visibility and expand our audience.”
Bennington Review will use the funds to improve fundraising and outreach, as well as to strengthen its current editorial and production processes.
When it was founded in 1966, the Bennington Review focused on publishing work by distinguished faculty and alumni. From 1978 to 1985, the magazine transformed into a highly visible national journal and published work by such established figures as John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Dillard, and John Ashbery. Bennington Review resumed publication in 2016 with Bennington faculty member and poet Dumanis as Editor.
In its most recent iteration, Bennington Review is critically acclaimed for its choice of pieces and policy of inclusivity. In 2022, it won the Whiting Foundation’s Literary Magazine Prize for “an editorial vision that is razor-sharp and whimsical all at once.” For its relaunch in 2016, it received the Firecracker Award for best debut from CLMP.
“Mission-driven independent literary publishers are the bedrock of the publishing ecosystem,” said CLMP Executive Director Mary Gannon. “We’re honored to help ensure the sustainability of these essential publishers.”
The CLMP program is made possible through a grant from the Hawthornden Foundation, originally founded in 1983 by the late Drue Heinz. Bennington Review was one of forty-three independent nonprofit literary magazines and presses to receive two-year grants totaling $5,000–$50,000.
Issue eleven, “Money Makes the World,” includes work by such acclaimed poets and prose writers as Timothy Donnelly, Harmony Holliday, Nick Flynn, David Kirby, Shane McCrae, and Ed Park, and by Bennington alumni authors Chelsea Harlan, Michael Metivier, and Albert Abonado.
About Bennington Review
Bennington Review is a national biannual print journal of innovative, intelligent, and moving poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and film writing, housed at Bennington College. The publication intends to reinforce the value of the bound print journal as an intimate, curated cultural space in which a reader can encounter and experience new work with a degree of immersion not wholly possible through other media. We hope to bring together writing that is as playful as it is probing, that simultaneously makes lasting intellectual and emotional connections with a reader. Bennington Review aims to contribute distinctive style and substance to the national literary conversation through publishing sharp, unexpected, original poetry and prose from a geographically broad and culturally rich spectrum of prominent, up-and-coming, and new voices.