History

The Hunger Mountain Editorial offices are located at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in historical Montpelier, VT. Vermont College of Fine Arts is the first college devoted entirely to low-residency, graduate fine arts programs, offering an MFA in writing, MFA in writing for Young Adults and Children and MFA in Visual Arts. For pictures of our office and our campus, check out the Hunger Mountain photo gallery.

Hunger Mountain was started in 2002 by founding editor Caroline Mercurio through a generous donation from a Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in writing alumnus. The journal has thrived since then with the assistance of MFA in writing faculty and ongoing support from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, VCFA alums, and friends of Hunger Mountain.

Past contributors to Hunger Mountain include Pinckney Benedict, Ron Carlson, Hayden Carruth, Matthew Dickman, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes, Alice Hoffman, Maxine Kumin, Dorianne Laux, Bret Lott, Michael Martone, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tomaž Šalamun, Charles Simic, James Tate, and Jean Valentine.

Hunger Mountain hosts four annual writing prizes, three of which honor writers from Vermont: the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize (Deadline June 30th), the Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry (Deadline December 10th), and the Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing (Deadline June 30th). We also hold the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize (Deadline September 10th). For guidelines, click here.