Notable alumni featured in the magazine while students include Susan Choi, Sinclair Lewis, Meghan O'Rourke, ZZ Packer, Max Ritvo, Sarah Sze, and Thornton Wilder.

[1][2] This contention is based on differing interpretations of publication continuity—Columbia Review traces its origins back to the now-defunct Literary Monthly, which published its first issue in 1815.

In 1936, the magazine published a centennial issue featuring several alumni authors, including Stephen Vincent Benét, William Lyon Phelps, and Gifford Pinchot.

[4] The magazine publishes one issue per semester, and awards the annual Francis Bergen Memorial prize to a student author.

In recent years, the magazine has conducted and published interviews with high-profile twentieth and twenty-first-century literary figures such as Junot Diaz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel memoir Maus, and Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor for The New Yorker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.