Inside / Out is the journal of literary and creative arts produced by the students of Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  It belongs to a seventy-year tradition of both official and underground student publications at Alverno, which have adopted many different forms, aesthetics, and attitudes in response to different interests & priorities, creative exigencies, and internal & external pressures felt by a diverse range of writers and artists.

Inside / Out appears to have begun as the publication of a student organization in 1984, building on predecessors like Vision (1948 – 1968) and a handful of small student newspapers and periodicals.  Inside / Out invited submissions in poetry, prose, and visual art from the Alverno community, which a student editorial board, in collaboration with a faculty advisor, selected for publication in an annual volume.  Funds to cover publication costs were raised through a variety of means: book raffles, patron drives, bake sales, t-shirt sales, and more.  Advertising in the pre-internet era was managed primarily through flyers, posters, and word of mouth.  A statement of purpose from 1996 identifies the intentions of the journal "[t]o serve the students, the Alverno community and the community-at-large by providing an annual publication through which Alverno students, faculty, staff, and alumnae can express their creativity and demonstrate their desktop publishing, marketing and communication skills."  Other goals included "a format that's accessible, inviting and self-explanatory," "[t]o foster artistic work contributions from ALL academic disciplines," "[t]o increase awareness of issues," and "[t]o become self-perpetuating."

In this last goal, Inside / Out faltered somewhat, its fortunes tied to those of its mother College.  Physical publications seem to have ceased after 2008.  At some point, a new effort toward a creative publication resulted in AlvernoINK, an online literary magazine launched in 2012 and updated yearly at least through 2017.  Unfortunately, only tantalizing fragments of the now-defunct AlvernoINK site remain preserved as snapshots on the Internet Archive.  One such snapshot from 2016 ties the production of AlvernoINK to the major focus of the coursework in EN-453 "From Printout to Publication."  Students in the English and the Creative Studies in Writing programs announced their intention to discard the scholarly stereotype of "large glasses, nasally monotone voices, and tufts of hair coming out of their noses and ears," aiming to "shed this reputation and build a new one as the hot, sarcastic sisters on the block.  We were determined to have a scholarly publication that had a clear, concise, and clean design with a snarky sense of humor; we firmly believe that literature does not have to be dull, boring, and nasally. Literature can be fun and sassy with a quick, dry sense of humor."

After 2017, student literary publications at Alverno become difficult to trace.  AlvernoINK may have transitioned from their dedicated website funded by the College of Arts and Sciences to a free Wix.com site during this period.  The connection of the publication to student coursework seems to have persisted through this period; for a brief time, students produced small zines in collaboration with Program Director for Art Education Andrea Skyberg.  Hints culled from social media suggest that at some point during the COVID-19 pandemic, the name reverted from AlvernoINK back to Inside / Out, and that at least one year's efforts were published entirely on social media platforms.  In 2024, under the burden of financial exigency, Alverno ended the academic programs whose students had historically contributed their art and efforts to the production of a literary magazine.  The following year, thirteen remaining students in a combined English & Creative Arts course collaborated to produce the 2025 Inside / Out, now platformed on a Google site.  Their efforts, available here, may constitute the very last edition of Inside / Out and the final student literary publication at Alverno College.




Every issue of Inside / Out from 1984 – 2008 is preserved in the Alverno Library archives.  The full collection is currently being digitized.