As many of you who have been following us for a while know, we took a couple of years off. This was largely because I found my teaching job to be extremely time consuming, and I also needed time to finish my MFA at the Sewanee School of Letters and complete my latest novel The Fireball Brothers. The book is out, the degree done other than the thesis (which is mostly written), and I’ve settled into a more comfortable pace with my job, so things are loosening up a little bit.
Thanks to some of the folks that I met at Sewanee, we have a completely new staff of readers. I’d like to take a moment to introduce them all here.
Jason R. Kesler lives in Carrollton, Georgia, where he teaches at the University of West Georgia. He has an MFA from the Sewanee School of Letters at the University of the South.
Elizabeth Savage is a high school English teacher with Claes Distinction who writes poetry and dabbles in fiction and is an MFA candidate at the University of the South for the class of ‘20. Elizabeth supports the arts in her hometown of Evansville, Indiana, and volunteers at community and student theater productions in the region.
Laurie Perry Vaughen is a Tennessee poet whose work has been featured at Word of [South] Festival, Georgia Center for the Book, and New Discord. She holds an MFA from the Sewanee School of Letters and has been published in Crab Orchard Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cold Mountain, Greensboro Review, and Chattahoochee Review. She works as an editor at Abingdon Press.
This new crew has injected much needed fresh air into the lungs of our little web magazine. I appreciate their dedication and hard work. When we announced that we were accepting submissions again, we got quickly overwhelmed and eventually had to put a pause on it so we could catch up.
But in case you haven’t noticed, submissions are now open for Issue #29.
We also have a new feature with this issue called Book Roundup. This is a listing of new books by authors that have been previously published in STR. We wanted a way to continue are relationship with these authors and help them promote their new work, and the Book Roundup is our way of accomplishing those two goals.
Finally, we’ll soon be heading into our tenth year of existence. Our first issue came out in October of 2010. So look for some of the ways that we’ll be celebrating over the next year, including our fifth print issue toward the end of that year.
In this issue: fiction by Robert Earle and Lee Rozelle; poetry by Ashley M. Jones, Sarah L. Webb, Kayla Sargeson, Richard Hamilton, Jesse Breite, John Davis, Jr., Frank Modica, and Brad Rose; non-fiction by Carita Keim; and illustrations by George Mostoller! Photos on our front page are by Tym Cornell.
