The York Review Celebrates 30 Years

Written by: Nate Leakway '24

The newest issue of The York Review, named the “Pearl Edition” after the traditional 30th wedding anniversary gift, was released this spring. The milestone issue serves as a reflection on the publication’s history at York College and features artwork and writing from York College undergraduates.

For the staff at The York Review and their faculty advisor, Dr. Travis Kurowski, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, putting together the issue meant diving into the past while simultaneously embracing—and fighting for—a bolder new direction for the magazine, one informed by the sense of community that a student-run literary magazine can foster. “I think that art and community are the most important things,” says Dr. Kurowski, who began teaching The York Review as a class in 2016. “I want to help create a space for community, and I think literary magazines provide that sort of space for a lot of people. The York Review is that space here at York College.”

Kurowski discovered literary magazines as an undergraduate student at Southern Oregon University in the early 2000s, where he fought for and eventually landed a position on the editorial staff of SOU’s The West Wind Review. Through that work, he discovered a connection between art, place, and time that he found lacking in more commercial artistic pursuits. His undergrad experience in Oregon and his graduate experience at The Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi set Kurowski on a path that would eventually lead to him being considered one of the more prominent authorities on literary magazines in the United States.

In his classroom, Dr. Kurowski functions more like a coach than a faculty advisor, relying on his students to take the reins and collectively arrive at an approach for each issue. “Every few years, students are engaging with art completely differently,” he says. “Hopefully, they share that with me. I just try to help them organize themselves and keep it going. I find that a lot of students really thrive in that kind of space.”

This approach means that The York Review is a product of its undergraduate staff, which, for the 30th-anniversary issue, was led by Lee Krauss ‘24 (Lineboro, MD), who is a double major in Literary and Textual Studies and Professional Writing. Lee first joined the magazine in 2019. At the time, editorial positions were not offered to first-year students, but after a few emails with Kurowski, Lee was invited to join the staff as an assistant online editor. For three semesters, they held various assistant editorial roles at the magazine, and in Fall 2023, they were asked to assume the role of lead editor for the print edition. In that role, Lee directed their staff in tracking down and digitizing all previous iterations of The York Review.

Professional Writing majors Bradyn Yerges ‘25 (Dover, PA), Jesenia Zavala ‘23 (Rockville, MD), and Amari Thompson ‘27 (York, PA), as well as Literary and Textual Studies major Emily Carpenter ‘24 (Leonardtown, MD) made up the team that dug up old issues of The York Review in the Schmidt Library Archive. In doing so, they discovered a tradition of literary magazine publication at York College that went back to the early 1960s, when the magazine was called The Undergraduate Literary Publication of York Junior College. This first issue, according to a piece published by Yerges on The York Review website, featured “eight original pieces with a mix of poetry, fiction, and a review of William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies.” That issue, along with every other issue of The York Review, is now available online.

There was, of course, also the work of deciding what submissions to accept for the new issue, the “real work” of publishing a literary magazine, according to Dr. Kurowski. “Students choose things that they like, but they also develop, as a class, reasons why they like a certain piece of art,” he says. “It’s a process by which students can say, ‘This matters to me, this is important.’ ”The anniversary issue is a collection of photography, fine art, digital art, fiction, and poetry. “It’s the stuff we were passionate about,” says Lee. “I am so passionate about helping peoples’ voices be heard, and I feel it is so important to have a space where students can have their art seen and appreciated.”

Though the direction of the 30th-anniversary issue came largely from a desire to understand the magazine’s historical place at York College, it is also a decidedly progressive object that represents a bold new direction for the magazine. The cover of the “Pearl Issue” will feature a nude female portrait, a creative decision that required Krauss and their staff to petition the College. “Dr. Kurowski told us that he couldn’t think of a single undergraduate literary magazine that had used nudity on the cover,” says Krauss. “But the piece touched everyone who looked at it, and we decided that we wanted to be leaders in this space. We wanted to set a new precedent.”

It is with this unique consideration of the past, the present, and the future that the “Pearl Edition” of The York Review has been assembled. The team and Kurowski are unabashedly proud of their work and view it as a continuation of an act of community that has been a part of artistic life at York College for over 60 years. “This kind of curation, this giving attention to something that is important to you, is an act of love,” says Dr. Kurowski. “I think that’s what these students are doing. They are saying together, ‘This is the stuff that affected us; this is what we love.’”