A new intercollegiate literary consortium, formed by the U of C’s Sliced Bread Magazine, will debut this spring. The consortium hopes to provide students a broader audience for their creative work and to encourage intellectual exchange between participating schools.

Conceived by fourth-year Eliot Bessette, the consortium will be a collaboration of literary and arts magazines from Columbia, Cambridge, and Johns Hopkins Universities, and the Universities of Chicago and Texas.

“I’m not sure why [the consortium] wasn’t realized before. It provides a nice counterpoint to our work­—seeing what other literary or artistically-minded students at other top universities are doing.” Bessette said.

Editors at each magazine will send a selection of their poetry and prose to the others, who will put as much work as space permits into their own publications; Sliced Bread will dedicate six to eight pages to this work out of its total of around 130.

Bessette, a senior editor at Sliced Bread, hopes the consortium will provide a way for University students to see their work circulated and published.

“As a direct benefit for our contributors, it gives them another outlet and audience that would otherwise be extremely difficult to access. It gives them an incentive to polish their work and submit, as it does for all the other universities,” Bessette said. “It just encourages everyone to work harder and hone their craft even more.”