South Dakota Review’s 50th Anniversary

The most recent issue of South Dakota Review is volume 50, honoring their 50th year anniversary. Editor-in-chief Lori Ann Roripaugh contributes an opening essay reflecting on the 50 years. In section eight of her essay, she writes, “For the past 50 years, poems, stories, and essays have migrated into the South Dakota Review office by land and by air, and—more recently—along the glittering veins of electronic networks. For the past 50 years, the magazine has come out on a quarterly basis . . . publishing a commemorative sampling of the last half-century’s literary culture.

“This shared exchange of textual aesthetic currency, of textual cultural memory, is truly a gift exchange, functioning within a gift economy, and the exchange of trust implicit in this 50-year legacy of shared gifting is both profoundly humbling, as well as a source of immense pride for all of us who have had the pleasure of working on the magazine.

“I think of this exchange of gifts as a body of work in constant motion and flux, traveling along highways and streets and flyways and networks like an elaborate circulatory system. A breathing organism. This perpetual inhale and exhale of language, art, and memory.”