Scribendi, a national arts and literary magazine, is pleased to announce its 35th anniversary of publication with the upcoming release of the 2021 edition. For more than three decades, The University of New Mexico-based magazine has been publishing the finest work from honors students around the United States.
The 2021 edition will be digitally released on April 10, 2021, in conjunction with the Western Regional Honors Council conference. Print copies will also be available for purchase at scribendi.unm.edu . The magazine is fully created and distributed by undergraduate students at The University of New Mexico.
Scribendi has served as a publishing opportunity for undergraduate honors students around the nation for 35 years and is looking forward to another successful, if not slightly more digitized, release in April. It is a nonprofit, annual print publication that publishes creative work from undergraduate Honors students from more than 200 institutions in the Western Regional Honors Council (WRHC). In 2016, it joined forces with the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) to publish works from Honors students all across the nation, which brought the total number of institutions eligible to publish in Scribendi to 900.
Scribendi is primarily produced by Honors students at The University of New Mexico (UNM) Honors College—however, in 2016-2017 the magazine introduced its first exchange student, and two more for the 2017-2018 school year. Scribendi solicits work in a number of different categories such as poetry, creative nonfiction, short fiction, foreign language, visual art, photography and open media.
Originally entitled UNM Honors Review, the magazine changed its name to Scribendi in 1995 to reflect the fact that it had grown from a UNM publication into a regional publication for Honors students. The students who came up with the new title for the magazine wanted something that would reflect both a focus on the written word and the traditions associated with Honors education and excellence. They settled on the Latin term scribendi.
The term appears in a letter by J. R. R. Tolkien, who was a noted philologist of his time and a scholar intimately familiar with classical languages. In the letter, he writes, “I have been possessed on occasions (few, happily) with a sort of furor scribendi, in which the pen finds the words rather than head or heart” (Humphrey Carpenter, Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 113).
This sense gets at what the 1995 editors of Scribendi were intending when they retitled the magazine.