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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2022
The Many Hats a North Carolina Writer Wears by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor In fall 2021, NCLR celebrated thirty years in print, and I started my twenty-fifth year serving as Editor. We began our third decade broadening our digital reach with NCLR Online in 2012, producing an annual issue released in winter. In 2022, we are adding a fall issue, publishing more book reviews, more frequently. Indeed, in addition to compiling them in now biannual online issues, we are sharing them weekly via social media in fulfillment of our mission to promote North Carolina writers. Evolving in the midst of a pandemic has not been easy. Our staff size shrank rather than expanded as we were assigned only one graduate assistant in the fall and did not get the permanent staff position we’d hoped for after last spring’s strategic planning. Still, we are moving forward with our plans: UNC Press has digitized the early print back issues for us, and we are now preparing those for distribution. Therefore, if you are looking for content previously available in print only, you will find it through libraries’ digital subscriptions, in PDFs that maintain NCLR’s unique design. Your clicks will provide another (albeit modest) revenue source for NCLR. Providing the full run of NCLR via digital databases will also fulfill an NCLR mission: to preserve North Carolina’s rich literary history. We are also working on transforming the NCLR website, last updated with our 2009 design transformation. Stay tuned for progress on that. And we continue to campaign for permanent, fulltime editorial staff support, for, like the rest of the NCLR
editorial staff, I too am a writer who teaches (and edits), and there are still only twenty-four hours in the day. As do so many of the writers in our pages, I understand the many hats we don in our vocation, each representative of a labor of love – at times exhilarating, at times exhausting. My own passion for both teaching and writing and my appreciation of those who do both inspired the special feature topic I chose for my twenty-fifth year as NCLR Editor. In the following pages, read the bio notes of the writers whose poems and essay are published in this section, as well as the authors of the books reviewed, the reviewers themselves, and the awardees: all are or have been teachers. Celebrate with me the gift they are to their students as well as to their readers – indeed, to their communities and to the state of North Carolina. As this academic year began with optimism that normalcy was resuming, we hosted some in-person events at our home institution, including a reading by our Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg from her first novel, Searching for Jimmy Page. Longtime NCLR contributor George Hovis interviewed Christy for these pages. In more than the obvious way, her interview is particularly appropriate for this section of the issue featuring Writers Who Teach. Christy’s significant role in getting the word out about her own novel teaches through example what is expected of so many writers these
