Ninth Letter—poetry reading and discussion with the award-winning literary arts journal

Ninth Letter is the award-winning literary arts journal edited and produced by the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The journal's mission is to present original literary writing of exceptional quality, illuminated by cutting-edge graphic design. Join Ninth Letter editor Jodee Stanley, alumna Jessica Tanck, and poet Kathy Fagan for an immersive virtual event featuring a poetry reading and a discussion.


Jodee Stanley is the editor of Ninth Letter, the award-winning literary/arts journal published by UIUC's MFA in Creative Writing Program in the Department of English. She has been awarded an Academic Professional Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC and a Faculty Fellowship from the University of Illinois Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Her writing has appeared in Malefaction Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, Doubletake Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. Her essay on literary publishing, which originally appeared in the Mississippi Review, was reprinted in the anthology Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine (Atticus Books, 2013).

Kathy Fagan’s fifth book, Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. Recent work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and The Nation. Fagan directs the MFA Program at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she also serves as series co-editor for the OSU Press/Wheeler Poetry Prize.

A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s MFA program, Jessica Tanck lives and writes in Salt Lake City, where she is a Vice-Presidential Fellow and doctoral student in poetry at the University of Utah. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Kenyon Review Online, The Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, and others.