WEST BRANCH ASSOCIATE EDITORS, and HAPPY NEW EDITORIAL YEAR!
Thanks for dropping by! As by now you will have noticed, West Branch’s submission queue has reopened. We await your very best work. Surprise us? Delight us!
As we dive into a new editorial year, I want to take a few minutes to introduce our associate editors. Without them West Branch would not be the journal it is (and we certainly would not have the excellent response times we pride ourselves in having).
First, we say sad goodbyes to our two Associate Poetry Editors (and Stadler Fellows) from 2015-16: Chet’la Sebree and E.G. Means. As I type this, Chet’la is transitioning from a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center to another at the Richard H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. We’re also excitedly awaiting Emily Goodman Means’s first collection, Natality, due out from Noemi Press in 2017.
We also say goodbye to the incomparable Jaquira Diaz, who served as one of our Associate Fiction Editors from 2013 to 2015. Jaquira follows two other WB associate editors to The Kenyon Review, where she’ll be a Kenyon Review Fellow for 2016-18.
Four of our Associate Fiction Editors continue to labor alongside me in the trenches of prose (Jessamine Chan and Cam Terwilliger are taking a break from their reading duties):
I will take this opportunity to congratulate Hasanthika on her excellent first collection, The Other One, which won the 2016 Juniper Prize for Fiction. Also congratulations to Bill, whose nonfiction book The Milan Miracle: The Town Hoosiers Left Behind is due out next month from Indiana University Press.
This month we welcome two new Stadler Fellows, one of whom will join West Branch as Associate Poetry Editor this fall. David Winter comes to us from Columbus, Ohio, where he earned an MFA and also served as poetry editor for The Journal. (Monica Sok, Bucknell’s other new Stadler Fellow, will be joining the West Branch staff in January.)
Part of the pleasure of working as Editor of West Branch is that managing editor Andrew Ciotola and I get to work with such extraordinary people every day. It’s a privilege.
Finally, if you haven’t checked out West Branch lately, we alert you to our most recent Wired issue, featuring fiction by Katherine Haake and Jenn Hollmeyer and new poets introduced by Camille Dungy. Our Spring/Summer 2016 print issue features poetry by Ali Stine and Rosalie Moffett, an essay by Eleanor Stanford, and a fantastic debut story by Josh Garfinkel. If you don’t subscribe, now’s the time.