Hellbender Magazine—formerly Cheat River Review—is a home for fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art that isn’t afraid to share its unique perspective and tone of resilience with the world. We are a hardworking team of volunteer grad students in the MFA, MA, and MA-PWE programs at West Virginia University. We publish online issues biannually—in the Spring and Fall.
Keep an eye on our call to submissions page as well as our Submittable for more information about upcoming issues and submission guidelines.
Our Metamorphosis
In the summer of 2023, West Virginia University abruptly unveiled its phase 2 plans for “Academic Transformation” at the state’s R1, flagship university, with dozens of academic programs on the chopping block for consideration of discontinuation—including the MFA in creative writing program.
Students and faculty from all disciplines came together in the fall 2023 semester to protest the “Academic Transformation,” and our voices received widespread, national recognition across multiple, reputable news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among others. As MFA students, we came to one simple, yet unanimous conclusion: “Writers don’t forget.” So we made our stories and voices known to the world.
After weeks of protesting and publishing op-eds about the university’s perilous ideas for WVU’s academic future, Dr. Brian Ballentine, Chair of WVU’s English department, and Mark Brazaitis, Director of WVU’s Creative Writing program, successfully appealed the university’s decision to discontinue the MFA program.
The MFA in creative writing was saved by the skin of its teeth, whereas other programs in the university weren’t as fortunate. In the following weeks, the coals of the MFA program continued to burn, and we realized, as writers and graduate students in the MFA program, a deep “transformation” of our own making was underfoot.
As MFA students, we came to one simple, yet unanimous conclusion: “Writers don’t forget.”
— Kelly Ward, Editor-in-Chief
With all the chaos at WVU, our graduate literary journal—formerly Cheat River Review—had fallen to the wayside, lost to the ether of expired web addresses and unpublished issues, forgotten by the overworked and underpaid grad students who ran it.
This year, the graduate students in the saved MFA program wanted to create a new literary journal to honor the muddy water our program crawled out of and to be representative of the metamorphosis taking place in our identities as WVU students and writers. We wanted a fresh start and a new face for our graduate literary journal, to coincide with everything our program experienced in the year 2023.
After several brainstorming sessions, we fell in love with a little Appalachian salamander known for its resilience: the Hellbender Salamander, also known as cryptobranchus alleganiensis.
- “Though some populations remain healthy, the hellbender is listed as Near Threatened by the IUCN and is close to qualifying for Vulnerable status, mainly due to habitat loss and degradation.”
- “The hellbender is generally nocturnal, spending most of the day under rocks on the riverbed, emerging at night to hunt… Only occasionally leaving the water, the hellbender makes little use of its lungs. Indeed, one individual survived after having its lungs surgically removed.”
- “Hellbenders are opportunistic cannibals—adults will eat smaller adults as well as the eggs and larvae from their own nests and those of others.”
With WVU’s academic future on the line, we wanted to provide a space where writers could fearlessly share their stories and we could amplify others’ voices the way ours have been. Thus, Hellbender Magazine was born.
Written by: Kelly Ward, Editor-in-Chief
Edited by: Elise Zukowski, Website Manager
For any and all questions, please feel free to shoot us an email at hellbendermag@gmail.com.
Hellbender Magazine 