Elizaveta Kluchareva, Staff Writer

Since 1953, Denison University’s student-run literary magazine Exile has been giving students a place to share their creative work with the campus. On April 22, the magazine traditionally marked the release of its latest issue with a Release Party. Hosted at the Bandersnatch cafe, it featured Chipotle, music and live readings of published poems and prose.

“Objectively, it’s a literary magazine,” said Sofia Monteleone ‘26, who has served as chief editor since the second semester of her sophomore year. “But what it means for me is the best example to show off Denison students’ art and writing.”

Over the past two years, during Monteleone’s leadership, Exile has doubled in size from 40 pages a year to 80 pages a semester and increased submissions by over 92%. “We’ve done more marketing, more funding. It’s great,” Monteleone said.

This semester’s issue carries no official theme, but one emerged organically from the submissions. “This issue is a lot about family and origins,” Monteleone said, noting that her co-editors specifically called out the thread running between both writing and art pieces. “Normally these things don’t have a theme, but we like finding these threads that kind of share themselves across pieces,” she explained.

The issue also made history in a quieter way: it features the first non-English piece ever published in ‘Exile,’ a poem by Andrea Morales ‘27 titled “Tan solo el Mar.” 

“Andrea Morales’ piece was in Spanish originally, and we wanted to have a translation as well, so people could approach it in either language,” Monteleone explained. 

Finding a way to format a bilingual piece was one of the more logistically tricky moments of putting this issue together, but one that the team is clearly proud of. 

“Translation is a big passion of mine,” Monteleone said.

The mission of Exile is to give authors of all backgrounds and experiences a fair chance at publication, and Monteleone was candid that the selection process is far from formulaic. 

“It’s very subjective. We generally just say things that are quality, but that can mean so many things to so many different people,” she said. “We’re mainly looking for people with a strong authorial voice – strong imagery, strong language.” Genre, she added, is beside the point: “What looks like a prose poem could be a piece of flash fiction. That’s just what the literary world looks like right now. We’re just a small example of that.”

Among those whose work appeared in this issue is Leah Cashin ‘26, who had six poems published and read one titled “Triple Sonnet for Tinder, Carpal Tunnel, and Chinese Knots” aloud at the event. The piece is a triple sonnet, a form she discovered through poet Dorothy Chan, whom she met at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference earlier this year. “She writes a lot of triple sonnets, and I just wanted to emulate her style,” Cashin said, describing how the form takes three seemingly unrelated items and weaves them into something coherent.

For Cashin, being in Exile is as much about community as it is about the work itself. 

“It puts me in conversation with all of the people that I’ve learned about writing with and from,” she said. “It’s nice to see your work alongside people you actually know.” 

She also pushed back on any notion that the magazine is only for students in the English department. “I would say they’re capable of writing just as much as anyone,” she said of regular Denison students. “Exile is a way to get past that.”

That accessibility is something Exile works deliberately to cultivate, both in who submits and in how the release event is run. 

“We want it to be fun, casual, approachable,” Monteleone said. “This is not a competition. This is being able to just feel comfortable to share something that you’re proud of and that other people like.”

For Monteleone, who joined Exile as a first-year and will graduate this spring, this release party carries extra value. “This is my last one,” she said. “I feel like I poured my heart into Exile. I’m sad that I’m leaving, but so, so proud for the future.”

Copies of the latest Exile issue are available throughout Barney Davis Hall.