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North Carolina hosts military bases for four out five branches and is home over 750,000 veterans who have answered the call to serve their country stateside and abroad. Whether explored through characters, journalism, memoir, poetry, drama, or other genres, veterans offer frank and enriching narratives about military experience, whether in combat or in other Military Occupational Specialties. This special feature section of NCLR seeks to bridge the gap between military personnel and civilians by celebrating veteran writers and their impacts on literary and cultural studies.

Read the 2026 guest feature editor’s blog post about what she’s looking for here.

Submissions must be received by August 31, 2025. Submit final essays/interviews via Submittable. 

Visit the Submission Guidelines page for full details on submissions.  

And if you know of recent literature by NC writers that should be reviewed in the feature section of the 2026 online issues, please email us at NCLRStaff@ecu.edu.

Creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry by or related to the theme should be submitted through relevant contest entries.

Our Guest Feature Editor, Anna Froula, is a Professor of English at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Her research interests span war cultures, gender studies, militarism, and zombie culture. She is co-editor of Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror” (Bloomsbury, 2010), It’s a Mad World: The Cinema of Terry Gilliam (Columbia UP/Wallflower, 2013), and American Militarism on the Small Screen (Routledge, 2016) and has published widely on gender and representations of US warfare. Dr. Froula is the faculty sponsor for the ECU Pirate Veterans Organization.