Issues 1-90
Hawaiʻi Review is a literary print journal published by the Student Media Board at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Its first issue was released in 1973. Among its founding spirits and long-time advisors was Ian MacMillan, who joined the English Department's Creative Writing Program in 1966. The author of eight novels and six story collections, he was an acclaimed writer whose contributions to HR and the university’s literary community were honored upon his retirement in our special 2008 tribute issue. We began running the posthumous Ian MacMillan Writing Awards annually in 2010.
Hawaiʻi Review began with a mission to spotlight writers from Hawai‘i and the Pacific Islands, as well as to discover other writers of excellence from around the world. This journal has been honored to provide malumalu for such indigenous voices as Joe Balaz, Mahealani Dudoit, ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, John Dominis Holt, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Haunani-Kay Trask, Craig Santos Perez, Wayne Westlake, among many other emerging and established writers of these archipelagos.
As early as the seventies, our pages featured translations of Vicente Aleixandre and Tomas Tranströmer long before either was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; indeed, before his laurels were announced, Aleixandre's work was accessible to American audiences only in our pages. We have since published writers who went on to win such grants and prizes as the Elliot Cades, the NEA, the Guggenheim, the Whiting Writers Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Booker Prize, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, as well as awards from the Pushcart, AWP, O. Henry, and the Best American series.
We have published writers of such local, national, and international renown as Robert Bly, Robert Olen Butler, Maxine Hong Kingston, R. Zamora Linmark, W.S. Merwin, Cathy Song, Michael Ondaatje, Carl Phillips, Naomi Shihab Nye, William Stafford, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka, among others.
The Hawaiʻi Review is a member of CLMP and indexed by the Humanities International Index, the Index of American Periodical Verse, Writer's Market, and Poet's Market. It has been managed and staffed by students since its inception more than four decades ago—an exceptional tenure for a university-housed journal.
We are now in the process of digitizing all back issues of the Hawaiʻi Review on ScholarSpace, a searchable database.