Oak Grove Review

Oak Grove Review (OGR) is a literary and arts magazine run by students of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. OGR is published yearly and features the prose, poetry, art, and photography of our university’s creative community.

Our first issue dates all the way back to the Fall of 1976.  Back then we were originally known as The New Growth Arts Revue, but we made the change sometime around 1993 to New Growth Arts Review, and our final evolution, Oak Grove Review, came about in 2024. Our issues have taken many forms as well, once a folded yellow newspaper, our magazine has evolved into brilliant perfect bound copies thanks to the funds provided by the Student Cooperative Association and readers like you.

Below is a quote by the editors of the very first Oak Grove Review publication, excavated from the silent halls of the archive section in Stabley:

“That a university of this size has existed without any sort of outlet for creative work in the literary and graphic arts says a great deal about this campus in particular and, perhaps, about our society in general. Where else would one expect to find such a thing, if not at an institution of higher education, the scene of a process which has for centuries before us automatically involved a study of the Arts? Still the fact remains: there has been no such outlet for quite some time, and there had to be some question as to whether or not there were people willing and able to produce such a thing.

Therefore, the major purpose of this, our first issue, is to answer that question in the affirmative. To prove that there are, indeed, thinking, artistic, creative beings still to be found, even here at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. The very fact that you read this now is proof of the above, and quite an accomplishment in itself.

But we would like to feel that an even higher end has been reached, believing as we do that the work in this magazine moves beyond a mere exhibition of creativity. We deem much of it to be good, at the very least good enough, as art, to be worth the time required of you to appreciate it.

Hopefully, this copy has already found its way into the hands of someone willing to give it the necessary attention. If not, then please pass it on: art only becomes such as a communal experience, these being personal attempts to render this often chaotic world into an enduring value that is to be shared and learned from by all. Enjoy it as such, and look for us in the future.”

—The Editors

We have committed these past decades to providing aspiring artists and writers of the IUP community an outlet in which to see their work published and celebrated—and we hope to do so for decades to come.

As long as there are writers to fill our pages and artists to paint and mold and carve between the lines, we will be here, waiting.