49 and counting

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Most Yale student publications cover the local beat—the campus and New Haven. But in 2012, an online student periodical called These Fifty States set out to publish essays, poems, photos, and videos from each of the 50 US states. (Find it at thesefiftystates.org.) Jordan Cutler-Tietjen ’20, coeditor in chief along with Laura Glesby ’21, says they look for pieces that “attend carefully to the language of place.” Past contributions include a student’s “audio postcard” about fiddle music in Tennessee, an account of hiking in Vermont, and an essay about Astoria Park in Queens, New York. Faculty have gotten in on the action, too. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and fiction professor Michael Cunningham wrote about Provincetown for a 2015 issue. One thing that’s missing: the site has never published anything about South Dakota. But Cutler-Tietjen promises that will be remedied in the next issue.