The New River, founded by Edward Falco with assistance from Len Hatfield in 1996, was the first journal devoted exclusively to the publication of digital art and literature.

Housed in Virginia Tech’s MFA Program in Creative Writing for nearly three decades, we have published a variety of works in genres such as computational poetry, interactive fiction, augmented reality, video art, playable media, literary Twitter bots, web-based sound art, and innovations in between. We have published leading digital artists and writers from around the globe, including Stephanie Strickland, Tina Escaja, Nick Montfort, J.R. Carpenter, Kristen Gallerneaux, Winnie Soon, John Cayley, Mez Breeze, and Steve Tomasula.

With the publication of the 50th issue, we have decided to broaden our scope to include fiction and poetry alongside electronic literature. Since in Virginia Tech’s Creative Writing MFA program, our editors study fiction and poetry, it feels right to open our doors to these two genres.

To learn more about the history of The New River Journal, listen to Sylvester Johnston, founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for the Humanities, interview Ed Falco, our founding editor, and Amanda Hodes, our former managing editor and electronic literature editor, and current editor-at-large in the Vox Humanities Podcast. To learn about the current and future iterations of The New River Journal please visit our new podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.