‘North Carolina Literary Review’ explores the changing state of North Carolina
The North Carolina Literary Review (NCLR) focuses on the state’s ever-changing historical, environmental, and literary landscape in its 2013 issue.
The issue’s special feature section includes interviews with Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier; Maria DeGuzmán, founder of the Latina/o Studies program at UNC-Chapel Hill; and novelists Wiley Cash and Anna Jean Mayhew. It also has essays by Bland Simpson and Gustavo Perez Firmat, a short story by Big Fish author Daniel Wallace, and the 2012 James Applewhite Poetry Prize poem by Mark Smith-Soto. “North Carolina’s constant state of change is reflected and recorded in the state’s literature,” writes editor Margaret Bauer in her introduction to the special feature section. “One of the greatest of North Carolina’s gifts is its literature.”
Other sections of the issue feature a series of poetry and prose by former North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell; poetry by James Applewhite, a member of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame; and the second-place and honorable mention poems by Laurence G. Avery and Grace Cloris Ocasio from the 2012 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition,; and “The Saint,” a short story by Leah Hampton, which won the 2012 Doris Betts Fiction Prize.
Also in the 2013 issue: UNC-Asheville Professor Erica Abrams Locklear discusses the Native American connection, specifically the Lumbee Indians, in the novel Mandy Oxendine by late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century African American writer Charles Chesnutt, which was not published until 1997. Elon University Professor Anthony Hatcher reintroduces James Ross, author of one novel, They Don’t Dance Much, originally published in 1940 and reprinted this year by Mysterious Press. And author Bland Simpson remembers his colleague Jerry Leath (Jake) Mills in a poignant essay about their friendship.
Published by East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, NCLR has won numerous awards in its now 22 years of publication—most recently from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2010 for Best Journal Design. The 2013 issue received support, too, from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition and from the North Carolina Writers Network, which sponsors the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition. Several finalists from these competitions were published in NCLR Online earlier this year.
The cover art for NCLR 2013 is by Mary Shannon Johnstone and Dana Ezzell Gay, both on the faculty at Meredith College in Raleigh. Gay, NCLR Art Director since 2009, also designed the cover and much of the content. Other content designers include Pamela Cox of Five to Ten Design in Washington, NC; Stephanie Whitlock Dicken, a Pitt Community College graphic design instructor; and Karen Baltimore, a graphic design student at Meredith College.
NCLR 2013 will go out to subscribers in June and will be available in independent bookstores across the state. The official launch of the issue will take place at the Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming on the campus of East Carolina University, September 20–21. Several of the writers featured in this issue will be in Greenville for this event. For program information, go to www.ecu.edu/lithomecoming.
For a complete table of contents for this issue, subscription and purchase information, go to www.nclr.ecu.edu.