Our 2025 Summer Contest Winners!

We are thrilled to announce Susan Muth and Mohammadsaleh Sahragard as our winners!

Susan Muth’s “Main Post Chapel” was selected by MICHAEL CHANG as the winner for our 2025 Summer Poetry contest!

and

Mohammadsaleh Sahragard’s “Morphine and the Knight” was selected by Deesha Philyaw as the winner for our 2025 Fiction Poetry Contest!

Thank you also to our runner’s up: Ngozi Ekeldo’s “Soliloquoy on the Water” in Fiction and Taylor franson Thiel’s “Bermuda Petrel” in poetry.

cream city review turns 50: a reflection

There is a lot to be said about fifty years. In the scheme of a literary landscape, it is many, many generations, but cream city review’s ethos remains young, vibrant, and contemporary. In these pages is witnessed the tides of many passing eras, trends come and gone, narratives both emerging and seasoned.

Since its founding by Mary Zane Allan in 1975, cream city review has sought to be a reflection of literary culture. The works published, like our namesake bricks, wear their time. Cream City bricks were once prized for their bright, porous clay fired to a pale gold. Over time, those bricks darkened. They absorbed smoke, soot, and the city’s breath, holding on their surface the record of everything the city has lived through. We bare our discolorations as evidence of witness. We exist and thrive in spite of—and perhaps because of—the external environments we absorb.

We have remained as porous as our eponymous bricks. Every cohort of graduate editors leaves its mark, ideas, tastes, experiments, failures, reinventions, all baked into the journal’s evolving surface. We are not a fixed monument; we are a building always mid-renovation, held together by tenacious students who believe in the power of literature enough to give their unpaid hours to it. What you hold now is the patina of that persistence.

In dedication to the voices that came before us, this seminal anniversary issue provides a literary time capsule of our history. You will see pieces from 1975 up to our present time. It is an exhibition of what felt timely, what facets of craft were popular, and what topics felt pressing across different decades. We seek to honor what was relevant then next to what is relevant now. These pieces speak to one another in ways no single generation of editors could have planned: lyric meditations lie next to formal experiments, political urgencies next to quiet devastations. They chart shifting aesthetics, shifting worlds, and a continuity of care running through every issue.

As we put together this anthology, we had the opportunity to reach out to dozens of authors previously printed in cream city review, and so many were proud to claim this journal as their very first publication before taking flight into the literary ether. For others, cream city review was a second, third, or twentieth publication. We remain devoted to all of our incredible authors, despite the events of our current political sphere. As many arts communities have also experienced this year, cream city review editors, readers, interns, and supporters have fought against spending freezes and attacks on the humanities.

In these more difficult moments, we are reminded of our incredible writers and of our namesake; how it demands we uphold our grit, our rigor, our perseverance. We continue because former editors, in whose footsteps we stand, kept the journal alive through crises of their own. Most of all, we exist because of the readers who return to meet us in these pages.

We are proud to be the home to so many fabulous voices in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation. We hope that you find as much joy in these archival pages as we have in putting them together.

Sass Denny editor-in-chief

Sophie Nunberg managing editor

Rebecca Baumann associate editor