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Winter 2020
The essays in our Winter issue showcase writers displaying a fundamental talent—that of deep, lucid inquiry into widely shared experiences. Julia Cooke offers a kind of close reading of the birth narrative—its power and its politics; Pamela Erens mines fresh critical insight from the novels of literary phenomenon Elena Ferrante; Simon Han, meanwhile, tests a new metaphor—that of sleepwalking—for the experience of living through 2020; and in the final installment of his borderlands trilogy, Francisco Cantú explores the origins and cultural power of Tejano-music titan Selena. Other features include a story, reported in collaboration with the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), on the growing popularity of homesteading in the age of the pandemic; photographer Brian Palmer’s sublimely rendered visual documentary of forgotten African American burial grounds; and fiction and poetry that forgo convention for more adventurous constructions of interior life. (Cover Art: Hudson Christie)
Winter 2020
Volume 96, Number 4
Print: $14.00
Digital download: $14.00
Table of contents
Reporting
Essays
Criticism
Photography
Fiction
Poetry
Editor's Desk
Mapping
#VQRTrueStory
On Becoming
Fine Distinctions
Contributor Profiles
Beth Bachmann is the author of three books, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Temper (2009), Do Not Rise (2015), and CEASE (2018). A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry and VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry, she lives in Nashville and New York City.
Sarah Blackman is the Director of Creative Writing at the Fine Arts Center, an arts-magnet high school in Greenville, South Carolina. She is the author of two books: Mother Box and Other Tales (FC2, 2013), winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award; and the novel Hex (FC2, 2016). Her story, “The Little Blue Horses,” is part of a collection of ekphrastic prose and takes its title from the 1911 painting by Franz Marc.
Irène Mathieu is a pediatrician and writer, and the author of milk tongue (Deep Vellum, 2023), Grand Marronage (Switchback, 2019), orogeny (Trembling Pillow, 2017), and the galaxy of origins (dancing girl, 2014). Winner of the Bob Kaufman Book Prize, the Yemassee Journal Poetry Prize, and Editor’s Choice for the Gatewood Prize, her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine, Boston Review, Southern Humanities Review, Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Mathieu is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Assistant Director of Programs in Health Humanities at the University of Virginia.
Brian Palmer is a Richmond, VA-based journalist. With colleagues Seth Freed Wessler and Esther Kaplan, he received the Peabody Award for “Monumental Lies,” a 2018 Reveal radio story about public funding for Confederate sites. Palmer is the Joan Konner Visiting Professor of Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Photo: Erin Hollaway Palmer
Armando Veve is an illustrator working in Philadelphia. His drawings have been recognized by American Illustration, Communication Arts, and Spectrum, and awarded gold medals from the Society of Illustrators. He was named an ADC Young Gun by the One Club for Creativity and selected to the Forbes 2018 30 under 30 list.
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