After a year-long hiatus, the Xavier Athenaeum is being published this spring.
The Athenaeum is Xavier’s literary magazine, a publication that allows students—and occasionally faculty—to showcase their creative writing, in both poetry and short prose form, as well as black and white artwork and photography. Students edit the magazine and publish it themselves, with the help of a faculty advisor.
The Anthenaeum began 94 years ago, and was initially published once each semester. Eventually, it was only published once a year in the spring. No issue of the Athenaeum was published last year, making 2011 the first year since 1918 that the magazine was not published. Submissions were taken and edited, but the students editing the magazine ran into trouble with the publishers and the issue was never completed or distributed.
Xavier’s English department asked Kevin Tighe, editor-in-chief and co-president of the Athenaeum Board along with Conor Gallagher, to revive the magazine this year because they saw it as “a benchmark for XU writing talent.” This past semester Tighe and Gallagher formed a new board of students with professor Anne McCarty as faculty advisor, and began working to revive the publication. The Board has created a new logo for the magazine inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary classic The Scarlet Letter, set up an OrgSync page where students can join and submit their entries and is working on organizing events such as readings on campus and a trip to see some local creative work read in Cincinnati. Students interested in submitting their work can go to OrgSync. com, log in with their Xavier username and password, search the Athenaeum and submit their work on the website. The Athenaeum began taking submissions on Jan. 13 and will continue to take them until March 16. Students can submit several works if they wish, but not all of them are guaranteed publication, in the interest of publishing the work of as many students as possible. Students are also encouraged to submit several weeks ahead of the deadline because editing begins on Feb. 16. “As a fan of creative work myself, I am very excited to see the Athenaeum be revived because Xavier is home to so much creative talent,” Tighe said. His sentiment is shared by several other students, who are anxious not only to see their work published, but also to attend events with other students who are passionate about creative writing and art. The Athenaeum provides students with an excellent opportunity to publish their creative work so it can be seen and appreciated by friends and faculty. It gets more difficult to publish for larger audiences, so if you are interested in seeing your creative work on a page, the Athenaeum is the perfect place to get that first publishing credit.