Founded in Boston in 1815, the North American Review is the oldest literary magazine in the US. Published at the University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls) since 1968, on six occasions during that period, it has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award (the magazine equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), and it has twice won the top award in the Fiction category–in head-to-head competition with The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and so on. No other university-sponsored periodical has an equivalent record of achievement. Published five times each year, the NAR is well-known for its early discovery of young, talented fiction writers and poets. But it also publishes creative nonfiction, with emphasis on increasing concerns about environmental and ecological matters, multiculturalism, and exigent issues of gender and class.

UNI is a quality, state-supported university of approximately 13,000 students, located on the west side of the Cedar Falls/Waterloo metro area in northeast Iowa.