The Forge, VCSU’s Student Magazine, Wins Highest Honor

Photo: The Forge student editors are pictured, from left, LilyBeth Townsend, Gabrielle Erickson, Landen Eback, Abigail Dreher, Grace Mueller, Beth Mehus.

VALLEY CITY (VCSU) – The Forge, Valley City State University’s student literary magazine, has been recognized as a 2025 REALM First Class magazine by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

It is the second consecutive year The Forge has received the highest honor for the Recognizing Excellence in Art and Literary Magazines (REALM) contest. The Forge annually compiles and publishes works from VCSU students and employees that highlight their creativity, including poems, short stories, essays and visual art. This edition also featured several works by VCSU dual credit high school students.

The 2024-25 edition of The Forge was produced by students in the Literary Publications course offered by VCSU’s Language and Literature Department. Faculty member J. Gregory Brister advised a team of six student editors including Landen Eback, Gabrielle Erickson, Beth Mehus, LilyBeth Townsend, Abigail Dreher and Grace Mueller.

“This award recognizes the dedication of our student editors and the vibrancy and vitality of the literary, artistic and scholarly work of the VCSU community,” said Brister. “Thank you to our faculty and staff judges for their expertise, and all our students and employees who submitted pieces for The Forge.”

The Forge is now accepting submissions from VCSU students, faculty and staff for its 2026 magazine. View submission guidelines.

The NCTE REALM program publicly recognizes excellent literary magazines produced by students with the support of their teachers. REALM is designed to encourage all schools to develop literary magazines that celebrate the art and craft of writing.  Schools in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, US territories, Canada, and American schools abroad are eligible to nominate magazines.

This year, schools in 44 states, Washington, D.C., and six countries nominated 456 student magazines. Magazines from middle school, high school, and higher education were welcomed for the 2025 contest. The Forge was among 135 magazines awarded the contest’s highest distinction, REALM First Class. For more information about the REALM Program, please visit: https://ncte.org/awards/program-to-recognize-in-student-literary-magazines/.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. As the nation’s oldest organization of pre-K through graduate school literacy educators, NCTE has a rich history of deriving expertise and advocacy from its members’ professional research, practice, and knowledge. NCTE is the home of the Intellectual Freedom Center, the National Day on Writing®, ReadWriteThink.org, the Build Your Stack® initiative, and NCTE Verse. NCTE supports nearly 20,000 teachers across the preK–college spectrum, with a mailing list of over 500,000, more than 100,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter, and regularly sees more than 100,000 visitors in web traffic monthly.

For more information, please visit www.ncte.org.