PASSING THE LITERARY TORCH Atlanta Review gets new editor, home at Georgia Tech

By Collin Kelley

Call it the passing of a literary torch.

After 22 years, the founder of Atlanta Review literary journal, Dan Veach, has announced he will hand over the editorship to award-winning poet and Georgia Tech professor Karen Head. Georgia Tech will archive the journal and make the stellar roster of poets who have appeared in its pages over the past two decades available online.

A short list of those poets include Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney, Gunter Grass, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky and Eugenio Montale, along with American Poet Laureates Natasha Trethewey, Billy Collins, Maxine Kumin, Ted Kooser, Josephine Jacobsen, Charles Simic, Charles Wright and Mark Strand. Many of poetry’s Pulitzer Prize winners have had their work published in the journal, including Stephen Dunn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tracy K. Smith, Paul Muldoon, Louis Simpson and Carl Dennis.

The impetus to start the journal, Veach recalled, was to create a place for all the great Atlanta poets who couldn’t get their work published. However, in