A busy summer of writing, writing, and more writing culminated in two weeks at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, where we made a lot of new friends (the thoroughly stocked bar we set up in our dorm room helped). We hope some of those folks are reading this now. We have a lot of people to thank for that experience, including the writers Jim Braziel and Kerry Madden-Lunsford for recommending us. We want to thank our parents and the UAB English Department for helping finance the trip during a particularly lean year. We also need to thank Steve Yarbrough and Diane Johnson, who ran our workshop, Jamie Quatro and Joanna Smith Rackoff, who were our fellows, and the incredible Sewanee staff, especially Adam Vines, aka Boss. We expect these relationships to continue to be productive for a long time to come.
Our Fall 2013 online issue is possibly the best yet. We have some powerful pieces of poetry and prose (we are thinking of the old joke from The Blues Brothers. We play both kinds of music: country AND western). But seriously folks, there’s a lot of great stuff here. This issue is lean and tight, like a featherweight boxer, and packs a mean punch. We’ve even thrown in a little essay of our own to shake things up a little bit.
We are also officially kicking off submissions for our annual print issue. In the past, the print issue has been comprised mostly of work we had already published online. This time, we are taking a different approach. Although work we have published online will be eligible for the print edition, we will feature a lot more work that is exclusively for the print issue. Because of the additional expense involved, the standards will be a bit higher, and the themes will be more focused.
We suppose we are evolving. We hear that’s what people do.
Steel Toe Review 