NCLR 2020 showcases state’s expatriate writers
The 2020 issue of the North Carolina Literary Review — available to subcribers now —showcases North Carolina expatriate writers and others with deep roots.
The review’s online version is also available and contains a record number of book reviews and exclusive content.
The printed edition features writers from Harriet Jacobs, who moved north to escape enslavement in North Carolina, to Glenis Redmond, who travels over 35,000 miles a year bringing poetry to the masses, thus earning the title “Road Warrior Poet.”
The issue includes essays on other writers with North Carolina roots: Charles Chesnutt, Tony Earley, Lionel Shriver and Stephanie Powell Watts. Retired Emory professor and Goldsboro native Jim Grimsley’s interview with retired LSU professor and fellow Goldsboro native Moira Crone features her own art. The interview was selected by Elaine Neil Orr to receive the 2020 John Ehle Prize.
The issue’s cover features art by A.R. Ammons, an eastern North Carolina poet who spent most of his career teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Also interviewed are Durham native, novelist and California television writer Gwendolyn Parker; poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, from her current residence in Hawaii; longtime Texas resident Ben Fountain, talking about growing up in eastern North Carolina; and Raleigh native Mary Robinette Kowal, recipient of the three biggest speculative fiction awards, the Hugo, Nebula and Locus, for her novel “The Calculating Stars.”
“You can’t throw a rock in this state without hitting a writer,” said Margaret Bauer, NCLR editor. “It turns out that it might be dangerous for North Carolina writers if rocks are thrown anywhere, not just within the state’s borders. The Old North State seems a fertile starting point, even if some writers do not remain.”
Despite these authors branching off to faraway places, their writing roots are deep in North Carolina. The subject of one essay, Watts, describes her novel as “The Great Gatsby” set in rural North Carolina. And Hedge Coke said, “I am never really away from the land and waters there. … Closing my eyes, [North Carolina] is always present.”
This issue also presents the 2019 James Applewhite Poetry Prize winner, “Meditation in a Glass House” by Wayne Johns, and the other finalists selected for honors: poems by Debra Kaufman, Glenis Redmond, Valerie Nieman, Jane Sasser and, recently deceased, Marty Silverthorne. The namesake of the award, James Applewhite, and former North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell have both contributed new poetry to the publication.
The 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize-winning short story “Something Coming” by Katey Schultz, the premiere Paul Green Prize essay by Rachel Warner about renowned author Zora Neale Hurston’s brief residence in North Carolina, and senior associate editor Christy Alexander Hallberg’s interview with Charlotte writer/musician Jeff Jackson are also included.
The 2020 print issue is available with a subscription to NCLR. The online version includes many more stories including an essay by Kerry Madden-Lunsford, now a Tennessee resident, about one of her North Carolina-inspired children’s books, and George Hovis’s “Virtual Road Trip” interview with five other expatriate North Carolina writers.
NCLR is produced at East Carolina University. Additional funding is provided by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.