In 2023, NDQ will publish its 90th volume. This milestone is made all more significant because it’ll be my (Bill Caraher’s) fifth volume as editor and also represent all the hard work of the entire editorial board to ensure that NDQ survived when it was on brink around volume 84 and volume 85 (which you can still download for free!). 

It also gives us an excuse to look back at the long history of NDQ and its changes over time. As part of that opportunity for retrospection, we’ve added links to almost all the content from a North Dakota Quarterly Reader prepared by Elizabeth Hampsten and Stephen Dilks in the mid-1990s and circulated as a bound photocopy. It would be going too far to say that this is some kind of definitive anthology of NDQ content, but it does highlight some of the better pieces that have appeared in the Quarterly over its 100+ years of existence. You can check it out here.

As part of the festivities surrounding the 90th volume, we’re also thinking that it would be fun to prepare a new version of a NDQ reader that draws more expansively from our back catalogue of volumes. We’ve started to bandy the idea about that each member of our editorial board take a block of ten volumes and nominate, say, five contributions for a new NDQ reader and prepares a bit of an explanatory note. So far enthusiasm for this idea has been a bit muted, but it’s also the start of the semester and there is a lot going on in the world. we’ll keep poking the fire and see if this catches. 

As I do that, do you have any favorite poems, essays, stories, or reviews from the NDQ archives? Let us know in the comments!

As you likely know, these days are particularly challenging for many cultural institutions, publishers, and little magazines. So even if NDQ doesn’t float your boat, If you can, consider buying a book from a small press, subscribing to a literary journal (like our UNP stablemate, Hotel Amerika), or otherwise supporting the arts.