2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
25 Years of NCLR, 5 Years of NCLR Online by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor
RIGHT NCLR Editor Margaret Bauer with Assistant Editor Randall Martoccia and former intern Bridget Todd, who was the guest speaker at the East Carolina University English Department’s fall 2015 graduation celebration FAR RIGHT NCLR 2015–16 Editorial Assistant Teresa Bryson and 2015 Intern/2016 Editorial Assistant Amanda Smith at the 6th annual Applewhite poetry–inspired art exhibit co-sponsored by the City Art Gallery and NCLR, Greenville, NC, 22 Jan. 2016 (art by Richard Fennell)
COURTESY OF MARGARET BAUER
The weekend prior to starting this introduction, I heard one of my colleagues from ECU’s School of Music express his delight over the opportunity in Greenville, North Carolina, to enjoy a Saturday afternoon concert featuring faculty and student musicians from such prestigious programs as Julliard and the New England Conservatory. Almost twenty years on the faculty at East Carolina University, I am not surprised by the various accomplishments and opportunities that take place here. This is the home of the award-winning North Carolina Literary Review, after all, and I have had the great opportunity to serve as the editor of this particular gem on ECU’s crown. In this capacity, I have the opportunity to work with talent every day, that of both the writers and artists whose creations we publish and of the determined and enthusiastic editorial and design teams that put our issues together. I know what people are capable of accomplishing when it comes to sharing the arts and humanities with an audience, wherever they are, but especially in North Carolina, it seems to me. Greenville is one of many vibrant arts communities in the Old North State. In response to my noting over the past year or so that we were coming up on NCLR’s twenty-fifth print issue, without exception (including founding editor Alex Albright), people have responded something along the lines of, Already? Even the original art director, Eva Roberts, whose design distinguished NCLR from any other literary magazine or literature journal I’d ever seen before, was genuinely shocked when I mentioned the pending milestone the last time I saw her.
Looking back at the early reviews of the premiere issue, I smile to read, “The only bad thing to say about the first edition of East Carolina University’s new venture, the North Carolina Literary Review, is that it seems almost too good. If the editors and writers can keep this up twice a year, they will have given a very definite gift to the state’s readers.” Well, it did take twenty years before we were able to produce two issues a year, but here – and this surprises me – is “already” our fifth issue of NCLR Online, created to allow the book reviews we publish to reach as many readers as possible and to have more space for even more reviews (thirty-one new books are reviewed in this issue), as well as more creative writing (this issue includes twelve of the finalists from the James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition and a poem by Applewhite himself). And we still have over two hundred pages coming in print this summer. As a way of reviewing and celebrating a quarter century of NCLR, this issue opens with an interview with me, introduced and edited by Zackary Vernon, a young scholar who has become one of our regular contributors over the past several years, with questions also contributed by another of NCLR’s young writers, Annie Frazier, who has had a story selected as a finalist in the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition (in 2013, published in 2014) and, more recently, received second place in the 2015 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition (her poem to be published in the 2016 print issue). Questions also came from my own colleague here at ECU, Donna Kain, who specializes in technical and professional communication and is a long-time member of the NCLR editorial board, in which capacity she has worked with us on linking content to (and creating) audio and video for these online issues.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DIANE RODMAN
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