In 2024, Julia Mathas, then an Editorial Assistant at the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), was conducting research on the literary magazine’s history in anticipation of its centennial anniversary the following year. While looking for a file on Ezra Pound in the correspondence archives of VQR’s longest-serving editor, Charlotte Kohler, Mathas stumbled upon a folder labelled “Sylvia Plath.” Within it she found a signed 1958 letter from Plath asking the editors to consider three of her poems for publication.
“I was shocked,” Mathas said about finding the Plath note among Kohler’s alphabetized correspondence files, as none of the current editors had any idea Plath had once submitted to the magazine. “As it turned out, Kohler rejected Plath’s poems, which is why no one knew she ever wrote to us. Unless the author appeared in VQR, there’s no official record of them engaging with VQR.”
Plath’s letter is one of many items featured in a new UVA Library exhibition, “Touring the Vault: A Centennial Retrospective of the Virginia Quarterly Review,” on display in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library’s First Floor Gallery until January 2026. The exhibition highlights the literary, societal, and technological changes VQR has encountered over the past hundred years, as well as the ambition of the early editors and their successors’ consistent vision over a century.
A deep dive into the VQR vault
First published in April 1925 at the University of Virginia, VQR was the brainchild of Edwin Alderman, UVA’s first president, who envisioned a magazine “of general interest to people ... in the fields of literature, history, political and economic, educational and social, ... art and music,” as he wrote in a 1924 letter on display in the exhibition. For 100 years, VQR has published journalism, literature, photography, and poetry under the leadership of 10 different editors, starting with UVA English professor James Southall Wilson. It has won numerous National Magazine Awards (including two for General Excellence) and featured luminaries such as William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, and many more.
To prepare for VQR’s centennial issue (published this past spring), Mathas and Executive Editor Allison Wright spent approximately 250 hours researching the magazine’s archives — correspondence, manuscripts, proofs, and galleys — housed in the Special Collections Library. “I didn’t know much about Special Collections when I first started doing research,” Mathas said. “I just showed up almost every Friday for months and requested anywhere between 12 and 24 boxes over the course of the day. Everyone was incredibly nice and helpful.”
It was there that Mathas met Holly Robertson, Curator of University Library Exhibitions, who assisted Mathas with a filing question, and the idea for the “Touring the Vault” exhibition was born. “Holly and I started talking about my research. She asked if VQR would be interested in curating an exhibition with our [archives] and the rest is history,” Mathas said. “We spent months whittling down all the research in order to fit it in the exhibit.”
Wright emphasized the ease of working with Special Collections staff to create the exhibition. “Holly Robertson and [Exhibitions Coordinator] Jacquelyn Kim are dream collaborators!” she said. “The entire staff of the Special Collections Library worked tirelessly to pull so many boxes and folders and scrapbooks for us over many months.”
Editors turned curators
Mathas and Wright co-curated “Touring the Vault,” spending roughly 50 hours designing the exhibition. When it came to organizing the archives into a kind of narrative for viewers, they decided to give a behind-the-scenes look at the work that goes into creating each issue of the magazine.
“We considered organizing things chronologically, but in the end, we thought it made more sense to group artifacts by categories of production: acquisition, editing … proofs, publication,” Wright said. “What we came to understand through our research is that while there has been an evolution at VQR in terms of process — technologies have changed, for instance — there has been remarkable consistency over time. And so, we wanted to pair, for example, early examples of fact-checking (how did the editors confirm whether D.H. Lawrence’s plays had been published?) with the current process.”
“It was quite exciting to work with a duo so closely attuned to writing and editing,” Robertson said about teaming up with Wright and Mathas to create “Touring the Vault.” “This is the most succinct exhibition we’ve perhaps ever produced.”
The exhibition begins with an overview of VQR’s founding and then walks the viewer through the magazine’s production process, starting with content acquisition, highlighting some notable author solicitations (Eleanor Roosevelt), acceptances (Robert Frost), and rejections (the aforementioned Plath). The exhibition then features notable examples of copy editing, fact-checking, editing, proofs, printing, mock-up, design, and publication.
Michael Newell-Dimoff, a third-year student and Senior Editorial Intern at VQR, mentioned his favorite item on display at the exhibition’s opening reception in September: a manuscript of a 2016 interview with poet Rita Dove by Claire Schwartz covered with edits by the poet and interviewer. “I think that any lover of poetry will appreciate seeing physically, on the page, how Rita and Claire marked up the interview,” he said. “The manuscript also represents the continuing, rich ties between VQR and the University of Virginia.” Dove, the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993–95, is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at UVA.
Mathas, now in her first year at UVA School of Law, said she hopes visitors enjoy “seeing behind the curtain” to get a sense of the work that goes into creating each issue of VQR. “I also hope viewers will delight, as I did, in seeing the drafts and letters of such well-known and respected authors,” she said. “There’s something very special about getting to see the imperfect, human side of these authors: all the spelling errors, quirks, corrections, and other marginalia.”
“Touring the Vault: A Centennial Retrospective of the Virginia Quarterly Review” is on display in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library’s First Floor Gallery through Jan. 12, 2026.