Toyon Multilingual Journal of Literature and Art at Cal Poly Humboldt is a student-run platform for voices in written or spoken word and art. Toyon recognizes diversity across disciplines, cultures, and regional boundaries with an emphasis on inclusivity, intersectionality, and multilingualism. The journal promotes environmental and social justice, both in content and in practice. This collection contains past Toyon issue layouts, art prints, paperwork, printing press negatives and other miscellaneous Toyon-related pieces. The collection demonstrates the work by students to create the literary journal and exhibits how Toyon was created over the years.

Toyon as a publication was founded in 1954 at Humboldt State College, now Cal Poly Humboldt. It originally only published fiction pieces and poems, but it has grown over the years to include visual art, environmental justice writing, creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and spoken word as its current additional genres. The publication collects publishes work on a local and international level, and has been read in over 80 different countries In 2017, Toyon began to publish multilingual submissions within their written genres, and while it historically has published work in other languages, the addition of Translation as a genre of focus has helped Toyon expand as a publication. In the past Toyon has had issues that reflect a specific theme, and have dedicated a portion of submissions to pieces surrounding the issue chosen topic, for example, Issue #65 was focused around the theme of Migration and the Movement of People. Toyon has changed their online presence, to make their issues easier to access on different platforms, They now have an audiobook, e-book, as well as videos and written pieces of their Spoken Word pieces. As one of their features, Toyon magazine has several different awards that are given to recognized submitters of their respective categories. While they have added, removed, or renamed awards there are still several that are still annually awarded. These current awards are: Jodi Stutz Award in Poetry, 1987. Richard Cortez Day Award in Fiction, 1999. Renamed from Raymond Carver Award in 2012. Barbara Curiel Multilingual Award ​in Translation, Multilingual, or Spanish-Language Writing, 2015. Environmental Studies Program Award ​in Environmental Justice Writing, 2016. English Department Award in Critical Analysis, 2016. Toyon Staff Award in Visual Art, 2016. Fuerza Award in Spoken Word, Audio, and Multimedia, 2017. Redwood Empire Mensa Award in Creative Nonfiction, 2018.

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