Northwest Review

Our new editors can’t wait to read your work!

We’re open for submissions for our Winter 2027 issue. Send us your best writing by November 1st! You can find submission details at our website via the link in bio.

J. M. C. Kane reviews Olufunke Grace Bankole’s debut novel The Edge of Water. Kane praises Bankole’s expansion of the epistolary form to explore the complex relationship of a mother in Nigeria and her immigrant daughter in New Orleans in the years before Katrina, and celebrates her ability to write “with the precision of someone who has studied institutions and the warmth of someone who has learned to distrust them.”

You can read the full review at our website via the link in bio.

Submissions are open for our Winter 2027 issue! Send us your best poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations by November 1st.

Full guidelines can be found at our website via the link in bio.

It’s the last day to submit to our summer contests!!!

Winners from our poetry and prose categories will each receive a $1,000 prize – send us your best! Full submission guidelines can be found at our website via the link in bio.

Our summer contests close in three days!

Winners from our poetry and prose categories will each receive a $1,000 prize – send us your best! Full submission guidelines can be found at our website via the link in bio.

NWR Editor Brian Trapp was excited to find NWR 52.1 Contributor Lisa Bubert at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences conference. Lisa published “ ” back in Fall 2022.

Our summer contests close in one week! Winners from our poetry and prose categories will each receive a $1,000 prize – send us your best! Full submission guidelines can be found at our website via the link in bio.

In our latest interview, author Mat Johnson speaks to Vincent Bottaro about his career as a writer across numerous mediums – including literary fiction, graphic novels, television, and more – and the unique perspectives that have come from this eclectic and singular practice.

You can read the full interview here at our website via the link in bio.

Mat is also the judge for the prose category of our Summer 2026 contest – there’s still time to get those submissions in!

Kieron Walquist’s “I Want to Make a S*x Tape with My Ex” threads humor and heartbreak, moving from absurdist desire to a reckoning with family and shame to radical acceptance. You can read the full poem in the current issue of Northwest Review.

Stay tuned for a brief interview with the poet in which he shares creative insight on the poem’s real-life creative genesis, coming soon!