Editors and writers of student publications, old and new, spent the year writing, revising and publishing content.
Across disciplines and styles, from poetry to visual art to essays, these organizations publish on varying schedules, often once a semester or yearly.
Cellar Door, UNC’s oldest undergraduate literary journal, publishes each spring. This year, the organization celebrated its 50th anniversary. It accepts submissions of art, poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction from undergraduate students of any major.
The 2022-23 print edition theme focused on the corporeal, the idea of lived experiences captured through bodies and physical imagery, Editor-in-Chief Abigail Welch said.
“It takes you through almost a meditative thought process of how you conceive your body and space, how you feel breath entering your lungs and exhaling,” she said. “Almost a very meditative, grounding sort of experience, in a way.”
The journal receives approximately 30 to 50 prose and 80 to 120 poetry submissions each year. They also accept online pieces, including reviews and interviews with writers and artists, which are also published in the spring.
Each of the journal’s genres has an editor with a team of readers who help choose pieces based on criteria like artistic quality, length and content.
Once the pieces are narrowed down, the editors discuss how the works relate to each other and create the theme. Judges — typically writers, professors and artists — read them and determine first, second and third place winners from the selected pieces.
In May, Cellar Door celebrated the magazine's release and hung its featured artwork in the Student Union Art Gallery. There was also a gallery walk that displayed many of the magazine’s covers throughout the years, which are kept in the Wilson Library archives.
