2024 Book of the Year Finalists & Book Lovers Gift Guide

  Book of the Year to be announced Sunday, December 15.  Which one will win? Any of these titles make fine holiday gifts. (Finalists listed alphabetically by title.) Birdhouse Jesus by Terri Chastain Using a combination of charm and horror and finally transcendence, Chastain creates a protagonist who comes to terms with childhood abuse by […]

SLR welcomes Mary Ellen Thompson as Associate Editor

We welcome Mary Ellen Thompson to Southern Literary Review’s staff as an Associate Editor. She likes to read and review fiction, historical fiction, biography, Southern fiction, and cozy mysteries, memoir is iffy and just depends on the subject. She doesn’t like violence, crime, or whining. She does like doing author interviews and gaining insight into […]

Linda Parsons

Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection, Valediction, contains poems […]

Bradley Sides

Bradley Sides is the author of two short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. His fiction appears at BULL, Ghost Parachute, Necessary Fiction, Psychopomp, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been nominated for Year’s Best Weird Fiction and featured on LeVar Burton Reads. Bradley holds an MFA from […]

Michael Blanchard

Michael Blanchard is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Pearl Diver’s Daughter and Other Poems (2023). A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he now lives in the Cadron Valley of Arkansas, where he teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and edits SLANT, the university’s international journal of contemporary poetry. […]

Dr. Kelly Kolodny

Kelly Kolodny is a Professor of Education at Framingham State University in Massachusetts. Her books include Normalites: The First Professionally Prepared Teachers in the United States (2014) published with Information Age Publishing and Moments that Matter in the Learning and Development of Children: Reflections from Educators (2020) also published with Information Age Publishing. She co-authored with Mary-Lou […]