Winter/Spring 2017

Dear Reader:

We are pleased to present you with our Winter 2017 issue of Wraparound South. It was tough to make a selection from the many amazingly accomplished works of poetry and fiction that we received this time around, and we are proud and flattered to have attracted so many great writers. We hope that you will enjoy our selection, writing that showcases our beloved Southern landscape from within and without.

Southern writers Ace Boggess and Russell Helms capture family biases and marriage dynamics in “Self-Report” and “Our Secret Infection” while Cannon Roberts gives us a startling portrait of a quirky, extended family reunion from hell with “Good Texas People.” Ellen J. Perry explores the dark grief of widowhood and redemption in “Solstice” while Shawn Girvan and Steven Stam take us back to childhood pranks and mishaps with “Weekday Afternoons” and “Stepping Stone.”  There’s also Lauren Sharhag’s lyrically portrays the humble plight of the down-trodden in “Mother’s Day,” “Liberation,” and “The Laborers.” 

Don’t bypass our featured interview with bestselling Southern writer Joshilyn Jackson on her latest release, The Opposite of Everyone, a novel about a racially mixed divorce lawyer in Georgia trying to put her broken family back together after her gypsy mother, an Alabama beauty whose main talent is to spin Southern tales about Hindu gods, announces she is terminally ill with cancer.

We have an outsider’s view of the South, too, with Jeffrey Tucker’s hilarious“Meditation On A Bad Shrimp Po-Boy” throwing shade on Southern posturing, and Wiilliam C. Crawford’s Nevada desert haints reminiscent of Southern ghosts in “Ain’t No Haint Going to Run Me Off.” South London writer Max Eevi weaves his own special spin on apocalypse in his hybrid piece “We Bough An Explosion In The Desert” and California-based Emily Strauss honors Albert Foxwood, Louisiana State Penitentiary’s longest held prisoner, in her poem “Solitary.”

There is more, meditations on love from the power of words in Richard Brobst’s “Learning the Language,” to the physiognomy of love in Anne Whitehouse’s “She Tossed Her Head,” and Corey Farrenkopf’s cruelties of unrequited love in “Placeholder” This issue of Wraparound South is all about romance and family and all degrees of love in between.

We hope you enjoy the reading, y’all. Don’t be strangers, now. Bring your friends.

Laura Valeri, Managing Editor