10 Years of Crosstimbers Magazine

If you ask an ecologist, the cross timbers is a unique habitat spanning from southeastern Kansas across Oklahoma into central Texas that marks the boundary between the forests of the eastern United States and the Great Plains.

Ask a Drover, though, and you’ll discover that Crosstimbers is an interdisciplinary magazine that is USAO’s liberal arts mission put into practice.

Begun in 2001 by Regents Professor of Art Cecil Lee (M.F.A., Ohio State University, 1956,) Crosstimbers magazine is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary of drawing lines between disciplines and ideas that would otherwise remain unconnected.

Described by Editor-in-Chief Dr. Ingrid Shafer as, “more of a literary magazine than an academic journal,” Crosstimbers seeks articles that are free of discipline-specific jargon and embrace the liberal arts mission of writing intelligently for general audiences.

The Spring-Summer issue for 2011 features essays, poetry, fiction and reviews from a diverse body of contributors that span from educators to alumni. Highlights include Lee’s examination of the deceptive relationship between creativity and novelty as well as alumnus Greg Johnson’s essay on how Japan’s military history shaped its educational present.

Several issues of Crosstimbers, including the most current, can be read in their entirety online at http://www.usao.edu/crosstimbers. The magazine also has a Facebook page and a Twitter feed for social media enthusiasts.