On April 30 Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review will release its spring, 2018 issue (Volume 67, No. 2) on its website shenandoahliterary.org. The magazine is also announcing the winners of its annual prizes, the retirement of its long-time editor R. T. Smith, plus the hiring, through the WLU English Department, of new editor Beth Staples.
The new issue includes five stories, five essays and two dozen poems. Contributors include Shenandoah veterans David Wojahn, Stephen Gibson, Sarah Gordon, Alice Friman and Thomas Reiter, as well as newcomers John Glowney, Amy Reading, Paul Daniel and April Darcy, whose short story about the perils of modern love, “Free Fall,” is both her first publication and the winner of the magazine’s annual prize in fiction.
Highlights of the issue include poems about hawks, Puritans, a toad, swarming bees and a poignant consolation from Plutarch to his wife. Short stories deal with a child’s discovery of compassion and a bizarre look at the shadowy side of the art collecting world. Essays consider whales (in the sea and in Moby-Dick), poetry that resists the temptations of fake news and the winner of the annual Thomas Carter Prize for Nonfiction, Daniel Paul’s erudite and witty “Significant Otters,” which is about the life and charm of otters.
The winner of the annual Boatwright Prize for Poetry is Lisa Beech Hartz for her poem “Portrait of Sherwood Anderson, Ripshin Farm, Doris Ullman, 1928,” which depicts a meeting in Virginia between acclaimed author Anderson and renowned photographer Ullman. The poem was published in Volume 67, No.1 last fall. Hartz lives in Tidewater Virginia and directs the Seven Cities Writers Project, a non-profit cost-free workshop.
Daniel Paul is pursuing a PhD at the University of Cincinnati. April Darcy lives in New Jersey and holds an MFA from Bennington. Honorable mentions in poetry are Lisa Russ Spaar of Charlottesville and Austin Segrest of Alabama and Georgia, now pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri. Lynn Sloan’s essay “Nature Rules” from 67, No.1 is the honorable mention in fiction.
Shenandoah’s prizes are not the result of a traditional contest with a submission deadline but instead have for several decades been chosen from among the work selected for publication in the journal across a volume year. All works published in Shenandoah are eligible for the prizes in their appropriate genres, but special submissions are not considered. The prizes come with honoraria of $1000.
Smith has been editing Shenandoah since 1995, when he left Auburn University and the editorship of Southern Humanities Review. Staples comes to WLU from UNC-Wilmington, where she has been editing Ecotone and directing Lookout Books. She has previously edited Hayden’s Ferry Review for Arizona State University and will be an assistant professor in WLU’s English Department. The new schedule for submission of work to Shenandoah will be announced on the website in mid-summer.