Jon Parrish Peede

For personal reasons, W. Ralph Eubanks has decided to leave the team of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Ralph brought his unique talents, commitment, and dedication to the magazine, and has made substantial contributions as Editor of VQR, with four National Magazine Award nominations during his tenure, including one for General Excellence in the Literature, Science, and Politics category.

Though she received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for a collection of deeply personal poems, one of Claudia Emerson’s finest gifts was for inhabiting the voices of others, creating essentially a Spoon River Anthology for rural Virginia.

love the summer issues of commercial magazines with their exotic vacation escapes. Notwithstanding the crass product placement of beachwear, they are welcoming at a time of the year when we need to recharge. Certainly, the VQR staff wants our magazine to be welcoming, too, regardless of how much it differs from our glossy cousins on the newsstand. In this issue, you will find the characteristic summer fare of stories set in far-​flung locales, but with our distinctive editorial treatment.

In this issue, we have called upon innovative thinkers to write about where literature is headed as a field and business. We wanted essays that were well reasoned, however speculative in nature. We wanted them to be aggressive, even edgy, yet fair and defendable not just on their merits but their facts. Toward that end, we open with a thought-provoking lead essay by Richard Nash.

We are proud to announce that W. Ralph Eubanks has been selected as editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Ralph will shape the content for the print and digital magazine, website, and future e-books and will provide creative direction to our organization.

From the eclipsed icons of silent film to the stars of Bollywood, from the set of a breakout, made-for-tv movie to how the publicity game is played, from Walt Disney’s Snow White to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, we have tried to provide an insightful glimpse at how screenwriters, illustrators, actors, stunt persons, producers, directors, and crews bring words and images to life on the silver screen.

In recent years, the organization VIDA—Women in the Literary Arts has tallied the number of female and male contributors to leading cultural magazines. It’s called The Count. The findings are shocking: 20-30 percent of contributors to publications such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker are female. For VQR, this year’s count is 49.

We are proud to announce that VQR contributing editor Natasha Trethewey has been named the Poet Laureate of the United States. “Natasha Trethewey is an outstanding poet/historian in the mold of Robert Penn Warren, our first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry," Librarian of Congress James Billington stated. "Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.”

As our readers realize, we underwent a staff transition at VQR over the past two years and at times had only one employee, Ted Genoways, selecting and editing the magazine’s content. Thus, it is remarkable that VQR received three National Magazine Awards nominations this year, including one for general excellence.

The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) today honored the Virginia Quarterly Review with three nominations for its prestigious National Magazine Awards—the magazine world's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes. VQR, edited by Ted Genoways, was named as a finalist in three categories: General Excellence, Fiction, and Photography.

As publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review, it’s my pleasure to announce the appointment of Jane Friedman as Web Editor. Friedman, the former publisher and editorial director of Writer’s Digest, will join our staff in June to develop online and digital content and a larger social media presence for VQR.

I have been fortunate to peek in on the tireless creation of “Half-Lives: The Chernobyl Workers Now,” a short film by Maisie Crow with production assistance from frequent VQR contributor Jesse Dukes. Their poignant video complements a superb work of narrative journalism, “The Resurrection” by Maria P. Vassileva with Crow's photographs, in our Fall 2011 print issue.