Allison Wright

Allison Wright is the Executive Editor and Publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review, the 2019 National Magazine Award winner for General Excellence. She is the immediate past president of the nonprofit literary organization WriterHouse and former editor of Tiny Hardcore Press. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, VQR, CNN, Popular Mechanics, the Texas Observer, Literary Hub, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She teaches journalism at the University of Virginia, where she is an affiliate of the Center for Biomedical Ethics & Humanities. She is also a member of the American Society of Magazine Editors, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Overseas Press Club.

At national conferences, college talks, and other events, she has presented on several topics, including the representation of women in media, imposter syndrome, sports & media, adolescents in America, competitive cheerleading, the future of journal editing, socially conscious fiction, debut novels, and alternative-academic careers. Work she has edited has been honored with inclusion in several of the Best American series anthologies and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, among other prizes.

She holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, where she wrote a doctoral dissertation on the cultural history of cheerleading. While there, she taught courses on youth cultures, women in US history, American autobiography, classics of world poetry, and matrimony in America.

A native Texan, she lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. She can never have enough coffee.