Our editorial team is delighted to present readers with our eighth issue of Good River Review, now the award-winning literary magazine of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. Recently, we were notified that our fledgling journal won a Pushcart Prize for Liz Femi’s poem “the world is a stool on my head but by all means take a seat,” published in our sixth issue. Liz’s poem is included in the new anthology The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025. We also recently learned that the poem “Variations on the Electric Slide” by Audrey Rose, published in our seventh issue, will be published in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology. Congratulations to Liz, Audrey, and to our editorial team, but especially to managing editor and poet Ellyn Lichvar who has a real knack for selecting outstanding work from our submissions.
As usual, Ellyn also suggested the art for our Fall 2024 cover, drawn from the extensive and moving body of work of Vernon Town, friend of our school of writing. When Ellyn showed us what she had in mind for the cover for our eighth issue, our editorial team answered with an enthusiastic “Yes!” The art for this issue is atmospheric, foreboding, and, yet, somehow, also hopeful. It feels just right as we await the results of our historic presidential election. I imagine many, but especially American women, will feel an affinity with it.
Of course, we’re proud of all the work in this Fall 2024 issue: from an excerpt from Cecelia Woloch’s long poem LABOR: The Testimony of Ted Gall, forthcoming soon as a chapbook from Accents Publishing, to the moody and moving short film by Michael V. Hayes “a waking dream in a sleeping life.” There’s something beautiful in this issue for all readers to find—prose, lyric, dramatic work as well as Lynnell Edwards’s interview with Kevin Prufer focused on his debut fiction Sleepaway: A Novel. Our eighth issue also features the important and timely book reviews of two memoirs and a poetry collection: respectively, Jessica Hoppe’s First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream; Jonathan Corcoran’s No Son of Mine; and Jessica Jacobs’s unalone.
In this season of thanks, I want to express gratitude to all, especially the writers who contributed beautiful work to Good River Review. Curating every issue takes a team effort, from the masthead editors to our Naslund-Mann graduate students who each participate in editorial discussions. As has been said lately here and there: it’s hard work, but it’s good work.
I hope all enjoy reading the latest issue of our award-winning literary journal!
Kathleen Driskell
Editor in Chief
Good River Review