The editors would like to dedicate this issue to Kelly Cherry, a long-time supporter of storySouth and all the little magazines. Cherry was the author of more than twenty books and chapbooks. Her collections of poetry include Death and Transfiguration, God’s Loud Hand, Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems, Physics for Poets, Songs for a Soviet Composer, Rising Venus, Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems, Somewhere Was a Man Who Loved His Wife, and The Retreats of Thought: Poems. Her works of fiction include Sick and Full of Burning In the Wink of an Eye; The Society of Friends, which won the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award for Short Fiction; We Can Still Be Friends; and The Woman Who. An accomplished writer of nonfiction, Cherry also published memoirs, including The Exiled Heart, and essay collections, such as Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing Life.
The recipient of numerous honors and awards, Cherry was named the poet laureate of Virginia in 2010. She received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and Yaddo. She taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for more than 20 years. Kelly Cherry lived on a small farm in Virginia with her husband, the fiction writer Burke Davis III, until her death in March 2022.
Where She Was – Issue 1, Fall 2001
A Tribute To Robert Watson: Poet, Novelist, Professor, Editor, Traveler to Inner and Outer Worlds – Issue 28.5, Winter 2010
A Review of ‘System of Ghosts’ by Lindsay Tigue – Issue 42, Fall 2016
A. VAN JORDAN is the author of four previous collections of poetry: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), all by W.W. Norton & Co. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and aLannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). He serves as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature at The University of Michigan. Currently, he’s serving as the Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University.
These two poems and the short story, “When I Walked, I Cried to Dream Again,” are from Jordan’s forthcoming book, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, (WW Norton & Co, 2023).
Two Poems: as·ter·isk | sus·pect
VALERIE NIEMAN is the author of nine volumes of poetry and prose, most recently, In the Lonely Backwater, a YA/crossover thriller in the Southern gothic tradition. Nieman has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council as well as major grants from the states of Kentucky and West Virginia. A former professor and journalist, she now teaches creative writing at conferences and venues such as the John C. Campbell Folk School.
Valerie Nieman’s In the Lonely Backwater by Fred Chappell
“To Look Closely at the World”: An Interview with Valerie Nieman by Evan Fackler
RACHEL MARIE PATTERSON is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. Tall Grass With Violence, Rachel’s debut full-length collection, was released in 2022 by FutureCycle Press and her chapbook, If I Am Burning, was published by MSR in 2011. Rachel’s poems appear or will soon appear in many journals, including Harpur Palate, Cimarron Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Smartish Pace, Parcel, The Journal, Thrush, Nashville Review, Redivider, and Fugue. She won an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2012, and in 2019, her poem “Connemara” was selected as a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize. Patterson now lives in New Jersey with her husband and daughters, where she works for the State of New Jersey.
“I feel the weight of all women in my work”: A Conversation with Rachel Marie Patterson by Maddie Poole
Four Poems: For Rosemary Kennedy, Lobotomized Age 23 | Metarie I. | Metarie V. | Walking in Tall Grass with Violence