Table of Contents

        by Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet         by Abby Geni         Mississippi Morning

Long Time No See

by Jianqing Zheng

        by Olga Ponomareva         by Catharine Savage Brosman         by Anthony Bukoski         by JC Reilly         by CL Bledsoe         by Judith Skillman         by Nick Bertelson         Our Lady of the Ozarks

Three Sisters

A

True Grit

Sonnet

by Casie Dodd

---

162

Arkansas Review 53.3 (December 2022)

        by Larry D. Thomas         by Brooke Harries         by Alton R. Stone         Delta Gateway Museum

210 W Main St.

Blytheville, AR by Gregory Hansen

        Zheng, The Dog Years of Reeducation, reviewed by Linda Parsons Blevins, A History of the Ozarks, Volume 3, The Ozarkers, reviewed by Lauren Adams Willette Houck, Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer, reviewed by Guy Lancaster Jones, A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas, reviewed by Brenton E. Riffel Collins, My Back Pages: The Teresa Poems, reviewed by D.C. Eichelberger          Cover Photo credit: Bonnie Matthews Brock is a Florida-based photographer and a school psychologist. She enjoys capturing a wide variety of scenes and learning and experimenting with shooting and editing techniques. Her images have been fea- tured on the covers of magazines such as Ibbetson Street, Wild Roof Journal, Poesy Magazine, and Humana Obscura; as well as on the pages of publications such as Ember Chasm Review, Oddball Magazine, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Beaver Magazine, and Lateral. Her works are archived at institutions such as Poets House NYC, Brown University, University of Buffalo, and Harvard University. View more of Bonnie’s images on Instagram @bonniematthewsbrock.

---

239

Arkansas Review 53.3 (December 2022)

Catharine Savage Brosman is Professor Emerita of French at Tulane University. Her recent works include poetry collections, A Memory of Manaus (2017), Chained Tree, Chained Owls (2020), and Arm in Arm: Poems (2022); short fiction, An Aesthetic Education and Other Stories (rev. ed. 2022); and biographical and crit- ical studies, Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide (2019), with Olivia McNeely Pass, and Mississippi Poets: A Lit- erary Guide (2020).

Nick Bertelson is a farmer from southwestern Iowa. His work has appeared in numerous journals. He is a James Hearst Poetry Prize finalist and author of Har- vest Widows (North Dakota State UP, 2019). He cur- rently screens fiction for New England Review.

CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Mar- riage, as well as his latest novel The Saviors and story collection Nobody’s Darlings. Raised on a rice and cat- fish farm in eastern Arkansas, Bledsoe lives in north- ern Virginia with his daughter.

Anthony Bukoski is the author of several short-story collections, including most recently The Blondes of Wis- consin (2021, The U of Wisconsin P). His stories have appeared in South Carolina Review, New Orleans Review, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. He frequently re- views fiction for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Casie Dodd lives in Fort Smith, Arkansas, with her husband and two children. Her writing has appeared in The Windhover, Oxford American, Front Porch Republic, and other journals. She is the Book Review Editor for Psaltery & Lyre and the Founder/Publisher of Belle Point Press, a regional small press celebrating the lit- erary culture and community of the American Mid-

South.

D.C. Eichelberger is an MFA candidate at the Univer- sity of Arkansas.

Roger Davis Gatchet is Associate Professor in the De- partment of Communication and Media at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His work primarily centers on rhetorics of public memory, tourism, and popular culture. As an active oral histo- rian and musician himself, Gatchet has worked on projects interviewing blues musicians in Austin, Texas. His work appears in journals such as Communi- cation and Critical/Cultural Studies, Western Journal of Communication, and Oral History Review.

Abby Geni is the author of The Wildlands, The Light- keepers, The Last Animal, and a forthcoming short story collection, The Body Farm, which will be published in the spring of 2024. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequently serves as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the Uni- versity of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Gregory Hansen is Professor of Folklore and English at Arkansas State University where he also teaches in the Heritage Studies Doctoral Program. He is the au- thor of A Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Seaman, and his publications focus on roots music, folklore and language, and public folklore.

Brooke Harries is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has ap- peared in Salamander, Sixth Finch, Laurel Review, and elsewhere.

Stephen A. King is Professor and Chairperson of Communication at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. He has published his work in several commu- nication and interdisciplinary journals including the Southern Communication Journal, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Howard Journal of Communica- tions, Journal of Popular Culture, and Popular Music and Society. He is the author of Reggae, Rastafari, and the

Contributors

---

240

Arkansas Review 53.3 (December 2022)

Rhetoric of Social Control and I’m Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta. King cur- rently serves on the editorial board of Rock Music

Studies.

Guy Lancaster serves as the editor of the online Ency- clopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System, and is the author, co-author, or editor of several books on race and violence, including Amer- ican Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U of Ar- kansas P, 2021) and The Murder of Oscar Chitwood in Hot Springs, Arkansas (co-authored with Christopher Thrasher and forthcoming from The History Press).

Linda Parsons, a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Hu- manities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner,

Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Re-

view, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah. Her sixth po- etry collection, Valediction, is forthcoming in 2023. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Olga Ponomareva teaches Russian and English at Mis- sissippi Valley State University. She comes from St Pe- tersburg, Russia. She is a Fulbright scholar, and her review of John Han’s book Whispers from the Rice Fields and her interview with Lenard Moore have appeared or are forthcoming in Valley Voices and Conversations with Lenard D. Moore respectively.

JC Reilly is the author of What Magick May Not Alter, a Southern Gothic novel-in-verse set in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Amo e Canto, winner of the Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook contest. She has work published or forthcoming from a number of journals, including Peregrine, Isotrope, Louisiana Literature, and Rougarou, and she serves as the Managing Editor of Atlanta Re- view. When she’s not writing, she crochets, plays ten- nis, or practices her Italian. Follow her @Aishatonu.

Brenton E. Riffel holds a doctorate in American His- tory from the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. He currently is a member of the faculty at College of the Canyons in Valencia, California. He has published a number of articles on the civil rights movement in, among other publications, the Arkansas Historical Quarterly and Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordi- nating Committee in Arkansas, edited by John Kirk.

Judith Skillman’s poems have appeared in Common- weal, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, and other lit- erary journals. She has received awards from Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust. Oscar the Misan- thropist won the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her new collection is Subterranean Address, New

& Selected Poems, Deerbrook Editions 2023. Visit

www.judithskillman.com

Alton R. Stone lives on a small farm near Wolf Bayou, Arkansas, and writes in his spare time.

Larry D. Thomas, a longtime contributor to Arkansas Review, is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. His po- etry and prose have appeared in a number of national journals, including Arkansas Review, Texas Review,

Concho River Review, Louisiana Literature, Delta Poetry

Review, Deep South Magazine, Valley Voices: A Literary

Review, and Red Dirt Forum. Of Southern heritage, he now resides in the Chihuahuan Desert of southwest- ern New Mexico.

Lauren Adams Willette is a Heritage Studies PhD can- didate at Arkansas State University; she serves as the Folk Survey Coordinator for Arkansas Folk and Tra- ditional Arts, the state folk arts program. Lauren’s re- search interests include the history and culture of Arkansas and the Ozarks region, folklore, intangible cultural heritage, and popular culture. She resides in Jonesboro, Arkansas, with her family.

Jianqing (John) Zheng is author of The Dog Years of Re- education (forthcoming), Enforced Rustication in the Chi- nese Cultural Revolution, Delta Sun, and The Landscape of Mind and editor of African American Haiku, The Other World of Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku. He is a two-time recipient of the literary arts fellowship from Mississippi Arts Commis- sion and edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review and Jour- nal of Ethnic American Literature.