New Editors’ (Plural) Blog

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor

Welcome to our new website, with all of its new means of fulfilling NCLR‘s mission to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary history: reminding readers of back issue content, releasing new book reviews weekly, alerting the community to upcoming events, and sending out updates from NCLR’s editors. The plural possessive of this blog’s name is intentional. I will share this space with my editorial team who work largely behind the scenes, thus sharing these generous folks with y’all. I am so grateful to them for volunteering their time to our mission for years, even decades for most.

I also want to express my gratitude to my colleague Timm Hackett, who created this website, and to the North Carolina Arts Council, for the 2021-2022 program support grant that funded Timm’s preliminary work during our semester break last December to get started. Thanks too to the Charles Frazier Family’s Cold Mountain Fund at the Community Foundation of WNC. Their generous donation to NCLR funded Timm’s summer work developing the full site. And of course, too, I thank the ECU Graduate School and Department of English for the spring and summer graduate assistants who helped Timm and me to populate the back issue pages and the fall graduate assistants who helped us to move posts from 2022 from our social media into sections of our new site. This website project has been no less a team effort than our issue production, and I don’t want to leave out the undergraduate interns who’ve participated as well, adding web skills to their resumes as part of their internship experience.

After our 20^th annual print issue release in 2011, we added NCLR Online, with a winter release, approximately 6 months from the print issue. The online issues, which are open access, provide a broader reach for book reviews and allow us to publish more of the finalists of our contests, while keeping our print issues closer to 200 than to 250 pages. So after our 30^th issue, we added a fall online issue and have set the schedule for the winter and fall issues to be released about 4 months on either side of the summer print issue mailing.

These online issues and the new website will also serve to promote two other new initiatives: seeking pedagogical submissions to NCLR that will inspire teachers to bring more North Carolina literature into their K-12 and post-secondary classrooms and a performance poetry contest. The pedagogical project has been funded by a Community Research grant from North Carolina Humanities, and the first selections will appear in 2023. The Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Contest is sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society. Another thank you goes out to NCPS President and long-time NCLR Editorial Board member Celestine Davis, who brought this idea to me a few years ago and then developed it into reality over the summer (and more thanks for the previously mentioned Charles Frazier Family donation, from which we were able to provide a stipend for Celestine’s work on this project),

NCLR‘s fourth decade also includes an addition to NCLR’s staff: WE ARE HIRING! How long have I waited to say those words (most of my 25 years as Editor). With a Spark the Arts grant from the North Carolina Arts Council and additional support from ECU’s Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, we are hiring a digital editor to take over this new website, as well as our social media, Youtube, and online event programming. I am looking forward to talking with potential new NCLR team members about working with us.

Thus far, with the help of so many people here at ECU (especially our Website Developer Timm Hackett), our website transformation has been a relatively smooth process, but we foresee finding a few glitches after the rollout, so if you find broken links or can’t find something you are looking for, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Let us hear from you!

Thanks for reading NCLR for the past 30+ years. Please subscribe, submit, support to join our evolution!