The Forum for Undergraduate Student Editors is an organization that strives to cultivate a diverse and active community of undergraduate students, faculty, and university partners for the purpose of collaboration, conversation, and solution building for problems facing the literary world today. Through conferences, caucuses, reviews and interviews, the Forum for Undergraduate Student Editors hopes to create a collective of voices and a rich rhetoric among undergraduate literary journals, their editors, contributors, and readers.
​
​
Full Mission Statement Below
Full Mission Statement
FUSE’s mission is to foster visionary magazine work and to support undergraduates who are eager to pursue careers in writing, publishing and editing. FUSE provides a wide range of tools necessary for students to further their editing and writing endeavors, and is designed also to be accessible to professors of editing and publishing courses, faculty advisors of literary magazines, and directors of undergraduate programs.
​
The main goal of FUSE is to operate through the formation of college chapters that work to encourage magazine staffs and writers within their own communities as well as at other schools. The members of FUSE run workshops, write reviews of literary magazines, and provide assistance as well as a social outlet for undergraduate editors and writers. This supportive environment opens doors for professional training and teamwork within writing departments. In addition to the main goals, a FUSE chapter might publicize literary journals and blogs, hold fundraising events, organize extramural trips, host readings, and much more. A FUSE chapter is a small group meant to draw people with a common interest into a much bigger family of editors and writers across the nation.
​
The FUSE website aims to encourage communication among and between students at schools with FUSE chapters, and it helps new schools discover the FUSE resources. The FUSE website hosts a continuously evolving archive of undergraduate writing across North America. By providing links to individual journals in the Directory, FUSE shares and promotes innovations in editing and publishing. FUSE also reviews undergraduate magazines, celebrating aspiring writers and editors and helping to enlarge the readership of these magazines.
​
To supplement its web presence, FUSE holds an annual conference where students can display their magazines, attend workshops in magazine design, and participate in readings and contests.
History
In the fall of 2002, students and faculty at the Writers Institute of Susquehanna University began working on a plan to establish a community for undergraduate editors nationwide. They travelled to the AWP conference in Baltimore in 2003 and held a caucus on undergraduate editing and publishing. Many attendees showed interest in the proposed organization, and so the Forum for Undergraduate Student Editors, to be known as FUSE, was born.
​
FUSE has held a caucus at AWP every year since 2003 with the exception of 2011, when the caucus was hosted off-site at American University. The 2011 caucus marked a significant step in forwarding FUSE’s mission. Led by students from Susquehanna University, Bennington College, and Widener University, it consisted of a panel on publishing and technology; a roundtable discussion on funding, submissions, and launches; and the first-ever national elections of student and faculty directors. The first National Board of Directors, led by Dr. Catherine Zobal Dent, faculty president, and Michael Fiorilla, undergraduate student president, laid the groundwork for what FUSE National would be and how it would function. In the spring of 2012, the directors launched a national website, and at AWP in Chicago in 2012, students from Bennington College, Bowling Green State University, Susquehanna University, and Tusculum College were elected to leadership positions.