The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had (Kelsay Books, 2024) by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke chronicles the life of Enid, an Appalachian housewife born in 1919, through vivid imagery and keenly observed detail. The poet creates rich portraits not only of Enid’s personality and growth, but also of the people, landscape, and culture that shape her life […]
“The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had,” Poems by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
June 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
“The Burning Side” by Sarah Damoff
May 20, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Sarah Damoff’s second novel, The Burning Side, is just as rich in poignant moments and nuanced characters as her first, The Bright Years, which Southern Literary Review selected as its 2025 Book of the Year. The Burning Side explores two very different marriages, revealing both the best and the worst of committed love. One begins […]
“The Mango Tree” by Annabelle Towmetich
April 15, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Annabelle Tometich’s delightful sense of humor sweetens even the toughest, most humiliating moments of her life in her outstanding memoir, The Mango Tree (Little, Brown and Company, 2024). Beginning with an epigraph from her mother’s Facebook feed, the book announces its tone immediately: laugh-out-loud funny. “I shook my family tree and a bunch of nuts […]
“Ava: A Novel” by Victoria Dillon
April 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Just as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World invited us to imagine test-tube babies and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale invites us to imagine fertile women enslaved as breeders, Ava: A Novel by Victoria Dillon opens us to the possibility that in a post-Roe world, human birth might evolve into something entirely different. I mean, entirely […]
“Leaving Edgefield” by Carolyn W. Hooker
March 16, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Leaving Edgefield (2025) by Carolyn W. Hooker is a compelling work of historical fiction centered on the life of Carrie Butler, a Black teen from Edgefield, South Carolina, who went to work as a domestic servant in the Thurmond house in 1924. The story is told through Carrie’s richly imagined voice as she lies on […]
Claire Matturro interviews Robert Gwaltney, author of “Sing Down the Moon”
March 16, 2026 by 2 Comments
Claire Hamner Matturro: Robert, first, thank you for sharing some time and your answers with Southern Literary Review. You have a very full schedule of book release events for Sing Down the Moon, plus you are the vice-president in Atlanta of the Easter Seals North Georgia, Inc, and serve as Fiction Editor for the Blue […]