North Carolina Literary Review

The North Carolina Literary Review’s 33rd flagship print issue continues illuminating the 2024 feature of North Carolina writings about disabilities, with Guest Feature Editor Dr. Casey Kayser. The feature section contains Delia Steverson’s essay on the autobiographical writings by deaf/blind author Mary Herring White and author Audrey Jennifer Smith’s interview with James Tate Hill, a writer with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy. From our 2023 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize contest is the essay “Buy Now!” by finalist Ashley Harris, a writer with M.S., and concludes with Taylor Hagood’s essay on disability and deformity in Ron Rash’s novel Serena and Donna Summerlin discussing mental health in Lee Smith’s novel Guests on Earth.
In the remainder of the issue, NCLR founding editor Alex Albright remembers Fred Chappell, former NC Poet Laureate, who passed away earlier this year. Award-winning author David Joy talked to Leah Hampton. Mark Powell was interviewed by Zackary Vernon. Donald Paul Haspel explores the impact of Paul Green’s World War I experience on The Lost Colony. Also included are an investigative piece by Stephanie Browner on Lorraine Hansberry’s planned play based on Charles W. Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition and Biographer Jean W. Cash writes about the influence of Gail Godwin’s Peace College years on her fiction.
Contest winners included are the 2023 James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest winning poem by Janis Harrington, and the third-place poem by Debra Kaufman and the Doris Betts Fiction Prize (sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network) by Paul D. Reali. Other fiction in the issue is Gary V. Powell’s short story.
NC visual artists featured within the print issue are Max Herbert (cover), RaeAnn McDonough, Catherine Edgerton, Joan Mansfield, Frank Hunter, Katharin Wiese, Andrea Bruce, Cameron Johnson, Ashley T. Evans, and Kate Nartker.