148
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Welcome to NCLR and Expressions of Appreciation by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor We welcome new writers with new subjects to our pages in this section of each issue. The number of new (to us at least) writers of a range of experience should encourage the writers among our readers to submit their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to our competitions this year: the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition (submissions for which are due February 15), the James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition, and the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize competition. Writers, please check the guidelines of the latter for a possible earlier submission period, moving it from summer to winter. After closing Flashbacks with the 2018 Doris Betts Fiction Prize winner, we open this section with the story selected for second place. Academics like myself will appreciate its candid exploration of an issue we have either suffered personally or commiserated with colleagues over: partner hiring – or rather, the scarcity of opportunities in academia for both members of a couple to find comparable jobs in the same department. Non-academics may be surprised to learn that two people with the same educational background often work in the same department with very different salaries, teaching opportunities, and workloads, due to colleges and universities choosing to fund more cheaper adjunct positions over adding higher salaried tenure lines. David Hopes’s story brought back memories of saying goodbye to friends, not to mention my department losing excellent teachers and scholars, every year my first several years in academia because of this issue. Six of the Applewhite Poetry Prize finalists new to NCLR are published in this section, and we welcome all to our pages. I appreciate finalist Jeanne Julian for coming to Greenville to read her poem as one of the “openers” for final judge Amber Flora Thomas’s
book launch reading. As I write this introduction, we are planning other reading of our competitions’ finalists across the state, thanks to funding from a North Carolina Arts Council grant. Preparing the poems for publication, I noticed in the biographical note for finalist Craig Thompson Friend that he is working on a biography of North Carolina’s Lunsford Lane, a quite fortuitous finding, as we’d received a submission on Lane, and I thank Professor Friend for his advice on it. Look for the essay in the print issue, either in 2019 or 2020. The latter issue, I’ll take this space to announce, will feature “expatriate North Carolina writers.” Find more information about this issue on the Next Issue page of our website. Also during the time we’ve been finalizing this issue, I’ve heard word that one of the finalists here, Wayne Johns, has published a new collection of poetry, which we will be sending out for review in next year’s issue. The two reviews in this section, both of two books, bring the total books reviewed in this issue to 39 (up from 29 in 2018). A conversation with one of our regular reviewers, Catherine Carter, has inspired me to share NCLR’s reviews more regularly on our social media pages. Publishing the reviews in these open access issues allows us to reach a broad audience, and we want to take full advantage of that for our writers. Once this issue is released, we will be ready to begin the process of assigning books for review consideration for next year’s issue, so please send us yours at your earliest convenience. Find book review guidelines on our website. Also, if you are interested in writing a review, please contact us to let us know. Perhaps some of the forty writers and editors whose books are reviewed here would like to give back in this way. We would certainly appreciate it.