The 2025 issues, feature LGBTQ+ writers of North Carolina, guest edited by Dwight Tanner, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University. The print issue opens with Eric Solomon’s essay about R.F.D., “a rural national periodical connecting rural gay men and lesbians,” co-founded in the early 1970s by North Carolina native Allan Troxler and his life partner. This essay is described by editorial board member Zackary Vernon as “a fascinating exploration of . . . a little-known chapter of North Carolina’s queer literary and cultural history” and “an important rural/activist strain in queer thinking that is at once social and environmental.” This essay is followed by an interview with Andy Martrich talking about his new book on the unpublished manuscripts of the Jargon Society, inspired by correspondence with Thomas Meyer, partner of Jonathan Williams, the Asheville native and Black Mountain College alumnus who founded the small press. According to interviewer J. Gordon Faylor, Martrich has “discovered a ‘peripheral history’ of The Jargon Society that provides a striking, alternative history to one of the most quietly impactful small presses in American history.” Other interviews in the feature section are with Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jessica Jacobs, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and the issue includes two essays on Randall Kenan and an essay on Carter Sickels’s novel The Prettiest Star, which has been awarded NCLR’s Randall Kenan Prize for an essay or interview on a new North Carolina writer. The featured creative writing includes a short story by Jim Grimsley, author of the critically acclaimed novel Dream Boy, and the 2024 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize essay by Ashlen Renner. Several of these works are complemented by art created by North Carolina LGBTQ+ artists, and the cover art collage, designed by NCLR Art Director Dana Ezzell, features art by Tim Tate from his Queer Glass: 30 Years of Craft Activism collection. Tate co-founded the Washington Glass Studio/School in Washington, DC, based on Penland School of Crafts and his experience there as an instructor, as well as continued close association with the school as a supporter.
In other sections of the issue read Katherine Henninger’s John Ehle Prize essay on Kaye Gibbons’s novel Ellen Foster, Ben Fountain’s Thomas Wolfe lecture, and the winners of the 2024 James Applewhite Poetry Prize and Doris Betts Fiction Prize, as well as honorees and finalists from these contests and the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize contest, again, all complemented by fine art created by North Carolina artists.
The North Carolina Literary Review, edited by Margaret D. Bauer, is produced at East Carolina University.
