To commemorate the release of the newest issue of "Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review," City Lights Bookstore is hosting a celebration in honor of the journal on Tuesday, March 16.

As the graduate literary journal of the creative writing department at SF State, "Fourteen Hills" publishes works of poetry, fiction, interviews, and art. Since its debut in mid-December 1994, the journal comes out twice a year, once in the winter and spring, and another edition in the summer and fall, with a circulation of between 600 and 700 each issue. Unlike "Transfer," the undergraduate literary journal of the creative writing department, "Fourteen Hills" solicits work from both SF State students and published writers from around the country.

"Fourteen Hills" was originally started as a way to allow graduate students a chance to work on their own journal, according to Snyder. It was also created to “provide the San Francisco State literary community with the opportunity to exchange aesthetic blows with the greater writing community at large,” as he put it.

Since Snyder took over as editor-in-chief, he has made a couple of changes to the journal. In the ninth edition of the publication, he added photographs and artwork. He has also changed the way the journal looks inside. “Design has also been an emphasis, and I hope that the result of these efforts has been an improvement in the presentation,” he explained.

The literary community has also taken notice of the journal. Besides having published writers compose stories for the magazine, it has won numerous literary awards. Kolin Ohi’s “A Backward Glance” won the 1997 Best American Gay Fiction Prize for an anthology; Bill Roorbach’s “Thanksgiving” won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction in 2000.

Staff in the creative writing department are proud of what "Fourteen Hills" has accomplished. Maxine Chernoff, department chair of creative writing, said, “Every issue is illuminating. It strikes me what a good job they are doing. It’s interesting to see a magazine as open as it is.”

Even with all the praise it receives, "Fourteen Hills" is still struggling. Its circulation number is less than 1,000, and with the recent school budget cuts, “It will be much more difficult for them now,” explained Chernoff.
“The editorial process will move much slower.”

Even with the added difficulty, Snyder has a vision for the future of "Fourteen Hills." He hopes to increase distribution of the magazine to include more bookstores to carry the journal and to see a “communal collaboration” between the genres in the publication. On top of all that, with “the minor miracle of enough funding,” as he put it, Snyder hopes to add color to both the artwork and the photographs featured in the journal. He also has planned an anthology of previously printed "Fourteen Hills" fiction to be printed, due out by this summer.

The celebration will be at 7:00 p.m., at City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave. at Broadway in North Beach. For more information, visit the City Lights events website at http://www.citylights.com/events.html, or for more information on Fourteen Hills, visit http://mercury.sfsu.edu/~hills/.