VQR contributor Chimamanda Adichie been named a MacArthur Fellow. Richard Leiby writes in the Washington Post:

Nigerian-born novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — whose most recent book is “Half of a Yellow Sun” — took the call in Lagos last Monday. It was her 31st birthday. “It’s very exciting,” she said, still chortling at week’s end. “I really appreciate the recognition. ”

And the $500,000?

“I don’t have to think about taking a teaching job for the next five years,” said Adichie, who recently moved to Columbia to be with her fiance, Ivara Esege, a physician at the University of Maryland. “I can write and get well paid for it for the next five years, which is the best possible position for a writer to be in.”

We published her short story, “A Private Experience,” in our Summer 2004 issue. Another writer was named a fellow this year, too: New Yorker music critic Alex Ross.

Charlotte Kohler, the sixth and longest serving editor of VQR, passed away this week—one day shy of her 100th birthday. She held the editor’s chair from 1942 through 1975, helming the journal confidently from the dark days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor through the fall of Saigon.

Kohler studiously avoided the spotlight, but she deserves to be remembered as one of the most important journal editors not only of her own time but of the entire 20th century. She brought the titans of literature to the pages of VQR—writers like Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eudora Welty—but, more importantly, she had an uncanny eye for major new talent. She was the first American editor to take a chance on Nadine Gordimer (who went on to receive the Nobel Prize), the first to publish Adrienne Rich and Hayden Carruth, both of whom went on to win National Book Awards, and she was an early supporter of George Garrett, Reynolds Price, and Wallace Stegner.

She was also an incredibly courageous editor. In 1945, she featured drawings by Diego Rivera when he was seen by many in the United States as too pro-Communist, but she also published Ezra Pound in 1958 at a time when he had only narrowly escaped hanging for treason for his pro-Fascist leanings. (Of Pound’s “Canto 99,” VQR board member Thomas Abernethy wrote: “If this is poetry, God save the arts!” But Kohler published it anyway.)

And she never lost her touch. For the 50th anniversary issue, published in 1975 right before Kohler retired, she assembled a virtual who’s-who of literature—Cleanth Brooks, Hayden Carruth, Richard Eberhart, Donald Hall, Howard Nemerov, Reynolds Price, William Stafford, Allen Tate, Peter Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward. For more than three decades, she was one of the best—maybe even the best. None of us now employed at VQR had the pleasure of knowing Ms. Kohler, but we work every day to honor the high standard she set.

A brief obituary is up at the Charlottesville Daily Progress. A profile of Kohler, written by Tim Arnold, was  produced by the University of Virginia Office of Public Affairs earlier this year.

Update: The New York Times has posted a longer obituary.

A feature of our Fall 2008 issue will be the work of photographer Sascha Pflaeging and interviewer Laura Browder, who has talked to dozens of female combat veterans for their collection, “When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans.” We’ve been previewing the article for the past couple of months, adding a new interview to our website each week.

Now Browder and Pflaegling’s work is going on the road, in the form of forty enormous portraits of the women with accompanying excerpted text from their interviews. The show opens in Richmond, VA this Friday, where it will remain until December, when the exhibit will tour on a schedule TBD.

1. The Love Poem Project is modifying love poems by replacing the word “love” with another word or phrase. For example, Love = MTV:

MTV is always patient;
MTV is always kind;
MTV is never envious
or arrogant with pride.
Nor is it conceited,
and it is never rude;
it never thinks just of it
or ever get annoyed.

See also Love = Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk and Love = Watched Caddyshack With. (Via Kottke)

2. In the New York Times, Margo Rabb writes about having her novel shunted into the young adult ghetto:

For me, the thrill of my book’s having been sold outlasted my confusion over its classification. Then, as the publication date approached, I received a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. One morning in the dining room, another writer asked who was publishing my book; I told her that it was Random House, and that it was being published as young adult.

“Oh, God,” she said. “That’s such a shame.”

3. Wired Magazine is doing something nervy: blogging every step of the development of a feature article. Internal e-mails, videotaped meetings, each draft, page proofs, etc, all posted on their blog for full public review. I’m just jealous we didn’t do this first at VQR. (Via Boing Boing)

We’re looking for the next young Michiko Kakutani, James Wood, Susan Sontag, or Edmund Wilson. Could it be you?

To find out, we’re running a Young Reviewers Contest to encourage reviewers and critics under the age of thirty. The winner gets $1,000 and a one-year publishing contract with us, worth up to another $3,000. We’re accepting submissions through the month of September, so you’ve got a few weeks to produce your own in-depth review of a book published during 2008.

There’s no entry fee. Don’t even think about e-mailing or snail-mailing in your submission. Proof of age will be required from the winner, so though your friends might humor you in having celebrated your 29th birthday three times, we’re not buying it. We don’t care who you are, just how well you write: all submissions are read blind, with a little software magic that anonymizes any personally-identifying information. We’ve got lots more rules and details—do yourself a favor and read them over before you start writing.

While some may argue that encouraging youngsters to read and think critically about books is akin to suggesting they take up Morse Code, we’re old-fashioned that way.