The Messenger was founded in 1878 by the literary society of Richmond College and became the literary magazine of the university in 1920, when Richmond and Westhampton Colleges were united under a single administration. Through much of the twentieth-century, the magazine considered submissions from writers outside the university and published a broad range of literary material. Paul Bowles, once invited to guest-edit an issue, solicited work from Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, among others.
Today, the magazine accepts submissions exclusively from undergraduates enrolled at the university. Work appearing in The Messenger has been variously anthologized in national publications. Further, each year a panel of English faculty members awards two cash prizes for outstanding work submitted to the magazine: the Margaret Haley Carpenter Award for Poetry and the Margaret Owen Finck Award for Creative Writing.
