Masthead

2023-2024

Editor-in-Chief
Sheila Squillante

Managing Editor
Kristy Mahoney

Poetry Editor
Heather McNaugher

Fiction Editor
Anjali Sachdeva

Nonfiction Editor
Marc Nieson

Copy Editors, Fall 2024
Maddy Kapisak, Elena Polinsky

Associate Editors, Fall 2024
Madisen Bellon, Halsey Hyer, Tessa Kilby

About US

The Fourth River is the literary journal of Chatham University’s MFA Program. We welcome submissions of creative writing that explore the relationship between humans and their environments, both natural and built, urban, rural or wild. We are looking for writing that is richly situated at the confluence of place, space and identity–or that reflects upon or makes use of landscape and place in new ways.

Assistant Editors, Fall 2024

David Brady, Ashley Christian, Elias Dubus, Teddy Friedline, Maddy Kapisak, Nadine Lehrer, Elena Polinsky, Aliana Schaeffer, Jessica Steward

Editors Emeritus
Sheryl St. Germain
Jeffrey Thompson


the fourth river.jpg
The Fourth River takes its name from a subterranean river beneath Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city famously sited at the confluence of three rivers: Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio. This fourth river, unseen yet indispensable to the city’s riverine ecosystem, is actually an aquifer geologists call the “Wisconsin Glacial Flow”. The Fourth River literary journal grew up from the idea that between and beneath the visible framework of the human world and the built environment, there exist deeper currents of force and meaning supporting the very structure of that world.
— The Fourth River Issue No. 1