ABOUT
What Are We?
The Great Plains Review is the official journal of Sterling College, located in the heart of Kansas. This journal is student-led and contains poetry, song lyrics, photography, fiction, non-fiction and more collected from students and other writers across the great plains.
What is our Selection Process?
Each spring, the staff of the Great Plains Review designs posters, uses social media, and hosts events to inform students of the journal as well as gain submissions.
Once writers, artists, and all other producers of quality works submit their offerings to us and the deadline passes, they begin to sort through your submissions.
Once each composition is filed into its specific folder, editors carefully read through it and look over it to see if it meets our standards or adds a different perspective to our journal.
If a work has been accepted and approved, we will notify the submitter via email and ask for a short biography, as well as information such as the title of each accepted piece. If an editor saw merit in your work but thought a minor edit or change could improve its quality or better it for our standards, he or she may email you asking for a minor adjustment.
From there, editors will send final drafts of each work to the layout editor, who will assure each piece is sorted into genre and that the journal itself will maintain a professional look while hosting your works.
After the layout editor has finished making the journal look it’s best, it will be looked over by the entire staff to ensure quality before it is sent in to be printed.
Once the copies arrive, the Great Plains Review staff host a release party, and they take the time to relax before returning to work on the next year's edition.
From the moment your work is sent in to the day it is in print, our editors make sure to carefully examine each piece and assure it is up to Sterling College standards.
Our History
The Great Plains Review was first published in 1978 by the Sigma Theta Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the Sterling College chapter of a national English honor society. Further publications followed in 1979 and 1980, but after that, publication apparently ceased.
Recognizing the untapped potential in the Sterling College community of students, alumni, faculty, and staff, a group of students advised by Dr. Craig Gannon revived the journal in the fall of 1996. This second charter of the GPR went strong and published ten issues of the GPR from 1997-2007, with 2006 being the only year to not publish a GPR.
Sadly, after 2007, the majority of the Editors of the GPR graduated and three years went by where the GPR was a faint memory, remembered by only a few, and a whole new generation of Sterling students ignorant of its existence.
In the late spring of 2010 three students, Joeseph Ewert, Andrew Gray, and Joshua Matthews, with the help of Dr. William Best acting as an unofficial advisor, began the work to expand the GPR's oringinal vision, and create an actual English club on Sterling's Campus.
In Fall of 2010 the English Blend officially became the English club organization for Sterling College under the advisement of Dr. Mark Watney. The vision of the English Blend was to bring back the legacy of the GPR and establish a new legacy as the voice that promotes, encourages, and inspires the arts and writers in the Sterling Community.