We all have places we want and long to be; as it happens, the place I most want and long to be right now is south Wales. Delightfully, Bucknell University is affording me this opportunity (and many others) as I prepare to go on leave for the 2013-14 school year.
West Branch will be in the exquisite and capable hands of the poet K. A. Hays, as Acting Editor, for the year. Katie is the author of two books of poetry: Early Creatures, Native Gods (Carnegie Mellon, 2012) and Dear Apocalypse (Carnegie Mellon, 2009). Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, and many other venues. She has also published her fiction and verse translations in such magazines as The Hudson Review, Cimarron Review, and Gulf Coast. She holds an MFA from Brown University and was 2011 poet-in-residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. In addition to editing West Branch, she'll also be serving in my stead as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and as Interim Director of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.
Please send Katie your best work! She'll be editing alongside our redoubtable managing editor, Andrew Ciotola; our associate poetry editors, Carolina Ebeid and (in Spring 2014) Justin Boening; and our crack squad of associate fiction editors, about whom more in a bit.
We also want to announce that henceforth our regular submission period will open on August 1, rather than August 15, as it has been for many years. This way your best work gets to us sooner, that we may revel in it.
Finally, if you haven't seen our latest print issue—WB 75—may we invite you to check it out, on our website or (even better) in print. You may explore it here.
Wishing you all the very best for 2013-14. Pob hwyl i chi,