[GREENVILLE, NC]
The North Carolina Literary Review continues the 2026 feature, “Military Writing in North Carolina” in the NCLR Online Spring 2026 issue. Guest Feature Editor Anna Froula calls attention to the issue’s unexpected relevance, “We are at war again,” and laments, “We don’t have to keep choosing this violent human condition, but we do, again and again, again and again.” The vivid imagery of poetry by military veterans Walter Bennett, Louis Girón, and Joseph Shea (all Barrax/Bayes Poetry Prize Contest finalists) highlight the imagery of the destruction and chaos veterans witness, capturing the “absurdity of war.”
Also included in the feature section is a review by Jon Kesler of Paul Crenshaw’s This We’ll Defend, A Noncombat Veteran on War and its Aftermath and creative nonfiction by another veteran, UNC Wilmington Professor Michael Ramos. The creative writing in these pages includes art by veterans Amy Louise Brown, Jacob Joubert, and Reuben Jarvis Mabry, whose work is also on the issue’s cover. The 2026 special feature is supported by a Healing Arts grant from the North Carolina Arts Council for honoraria for our writers and artists.
NCLR Editor Margaret Bauer introduces the issue’s Flashbacks section with congratulations to her mentor Dr. James W. Clark, Jr., for being inducted into the Order of the Long Leaf Pine. She recounts his active role in our state’s literary community long past his retirement from NCSU. Other contributors and reviews within this section include E. Thomson Shields, Jr.’s review of Lynn Domina’s Approaches to Teaching Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Evan Peter Smith’s review of Bland Simpson’s Clover Garden, and Barbara Bennett’s review of Jason Mott’s People Like Us. Other reviews flash back to past feature topics including “Writing Towards Healing” (2021) and “Children’s and YA Literature” (2006).
This issue’s North Carolina Miscellany section starts with Martin Brinkley’s eulogy for the late Justice Willis Whichard. Brinkley remembers the friendship and statewide service of a beloved North Carolinian. Also included are several poems from the 2025 James Applewhite Poetry Prize as well as Zachariah Claypole White’s honourable mention short story from the 2025 Doris Betts Fiction Prize Contest. Several more book reviews in this section bring the total books reviewed in this issue to twenty-six.
NCLR Online issues are open access. Find the full table of contents of this issue and, upon its release, a link to the issue here.
Produced since 1992 at East Carolina University, North Carolina Literary Review has the mission to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary culture. NCLR introduces new and emerging writers; reintroduces forgotten authors; showcases work in literary criticism, interviews, book reviews, fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; and reports on the state’s literary news. The featured artwork is by exclusively North Carolina artists. NCLR’s award-winning journal is published by the University of North Carolina Press and is supported by ECU, North Carolina Arts Council, the North Carolina Literary & Historical Association, and the Friends of NCLR.
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