FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
[GREENVILLE, NC]
The North Carolina Literary Review is proud to announce the publication of its thirty-fourth issue. Our 2025 feature is “North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature,” continuing the recent focus of promoting overlooked or underprivileged literature and authors from across the state. The 2025 Guest Feature Editor is Dwight Tanner, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University. Tanner writes, “I am incredibly proud of the ways that every piece in this special feature section explores, illustrates, and engages with this critical practice of imagining and creating new and potentially better possibilities.”
Eric Solomon’s essay about R.F.D., “a rural national periodical connecting rural gay men and lesbians,” co-founded in the early 1970s by North Carolina native Allan Troxler and his life partner Carl Wittman, opens the issue. This essay is described by editorial board member Zackary Vernon as “a fascinating exploration of . . . a little-known chapter of North Carolina’s queer literary and cultural history” and “an important rural/activist strain in queer thinking that is at once social and environmental.”
Next is an interview with author Andy Martrich talking about his new book on the unpublished manuscripts of the Jargon Society, inspired by correspondence with Thomas Meyer, partner of Jonathan Williams, the Asheville native and Black Mountain College alumnus who founded the small press. According to interviewer J. Gordon Faylor, Martrich has “discovered a ‘peripheral history’ of The Jargon Society that provides a striking, alternative history to one of the most quietly impactful small presses in American history.”
Other interviews in the feature section are with UNC professor and poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Yetzirah Executive Director and poet Jessica Jacobs, and novelist De’Shawn Charles Winslow. Also included are two essays on Randall Kenan and an essay on Carter Sickels’s novel The Prettiest Star, for which the author, Anna Creadick, received NCLR’s Randall Kenan Prize for an essay on or interview with a new North Carolina writer. The featured creative writing includes a short story by Jim Grimsley, author of the critically acclaimed novel Dream Boy, and the 2024 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize essay by Ashlen Renner.
Several of these works are complemented by art created by North Carolina LGBTQ+ artists, and the cover art collage, designed by NCLR Art Director Dana Ezzell, features art by Tim Tate from his Queer Glass: 30 Years of Craft Activism collection. Tate co-founded the Washington Glass Studio/School in Washington, DC, based on Penland School of Crafts and his experience there as an instructor, as well as continued close association with the school as a supporter.
“Dwight Tanner has curated a collection of LGBTQ+ voices, some of which will be familiar to NCLR‘s readers, others new. I invite submissions from queer writers and interviews with and essays on more writers from this community for any of our issues,” says Editor Margaret Bauer, a reminder that the feature section is a major part of each issue, but not all of it.
In other sections of the issue read Katherine Henninger’s John Ehle Prize essay on Kaye Gibbons’s novel Ellen Foster and Ben Fountain’s Thomas Wolfe Prize lecture. As usual, the print issue contains the winners of the James Applewhite Poetry Prize and Doris Betts Fiction Prize, as well as honorees and finalists from these contests and the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize contest. All are complemented by fine art created by North Carolina artists.
Produced since 1992 at East Carolina University and published by the University of North Carolina Press, the mission of NCLR is 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 literary news stories. We complement the writing with the work of North Carolina artists and photographers.
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