Table of Contents
Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies
(formerly Kansas Quarterly)
Arkansas Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (April 2025)
The Pear Orchard (fiction) ............................................................. 3
by Cary Holladay
Jail, No Bail (poetry) ............................................................... 15
by William Heath
Survival of the Baddest: Etheridge Knight’s Hard Rock Aesthetic ................. 16
by Claude Wilkinson
The Planter’s Wife: Five Poems (poetry) ........................................... 20
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away
Mary’s Wish
Marrying Mr. Hunt
Cyrus
Judgment Day
by Anne Bucey
“It had turned them all into voyeurs”: Celebrity as the Antithesis
of Community in Molly O’Keefe’s Wild Child ...................................... 25
by Guy Lancaster
Trust is a Tick (poetry) ............................................................ 37
by Scott T. Hutchison
A Certain Number of Kills (fiction) ............................................... 38
by Catherine Niolet
Train Ride (creative non-fiction) ................................................. 44
by Jacqueline Guidry
Bacchanalia (French Quarter, New Orleans) (poetry) .............................. 49
by Larry D. Thomas
Lake Pontchartrain (fiction) ...................................................... 50
by Pier Roberts
Two Poems (poetry) ................................................................. 57
French Quarter and Beyond
Pornography
by Allan Johnston
Water Belly (fiction) .............................................................. 59
by Austin Price
Still Life with a Dead Pond (poetry) .............................................. 68
by Terry Belew
Wasteland Survivors (fiction) ..................................................... 70
by Kevin Novalina
The Turning Seasons (poetry) ...................................................... 74
by Floyd Collins
Delta Sources and Resources ....................................................... 76
Historic Arkansas Newspapers available for free as part of Chronicling America
The Library of Congress’s Historic American Newspapers collection (online)
by Katie Adkins and Darren Bell, Arkansas State Archives
Contributors ..................................................................... 77
Contributors
Katie Adkins is the project director for the Arkansas Digital Newspaper Project at the Arkansas State Archives and works with the Library of Congress on the National Digital Newspaper Program.
Terry Belew lives in rural Missouri with his wife and two sons. His debut poetry collection, The Deep Blue of Neptune, was selected as the winner of the 2024 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize by Alison Hawthorne Deming and is forthcoming from Kent State UP. He earned his MFA from the University of Nebraska-Omaha and his MA from Missouri State University. His work has appeared in recent issues of Southern Humanities Review, Meridian, Tar River Poetry, The Pinch, and Storm Cellar, among many others.
Darren Bell is an Archival Assistant specializing in microphotography at the Arkansas State Archives, digitally preserving newspapers from across Arkansas. For questions related to newspaper digitization and other Arkansas State Archives resources, contact state.archives@arkansas.gov
Anne Bucey is a writer living in Atlanta, GA. She earned an undergraduate degree in history from Kenyon College, an MEd from Georgia State University, and an MFA in writing from Spalding University. Bucey’s work has appeared in various regional and national journals, including The Healing Muse and Tipton Poetry Journal. A chapbook collection of her poems, A Shade Pulled Just Barely, will be published this year by Finishing Line P. Research into two antebellum plantations in Mississippi led to poems comprising a longer unpublished manuscript titled, Canebrake. The poem “Canebrake,” from that collection, was a 2023 finalist for the Ron Rash Award and was published by Broad River Review last year.
Floyd Collins holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the University of Arkansas. He has authored several volumes of poetry, including My Back Pages: The Teresa Poems (2022). The Living Artifact, a selection of his essay-reviews, appeared in 2021. Most recently Waking Past Midnight: Selected Poems, a career retrospective, was published by Stephen F. Austin State UP in 2023.
Jacqueline Guidry’s first collection, Visions, Stories, is forthcoming from Lamar U Literary P. What We Carry was selected as one of nine novels long-listed for Regal House’s Petrichor Prize. The first chapter of that novel appears in Embark. Jacqueline hopes to include “Train Ride” in a hybrid collection centered on Cajun life, past and present. Other works from the collection-in-progress appear in Rosebud and storySouth.
William Heath has published four poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, Going Places, and Alms for Oblivion; three chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio, Leaving Seville, and Inventing the Americas; an award-winning novel about the civil rights movement in Mississippi, The Children Bob Moses Led; a history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a book of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Hiram College. He lives in Annapolis, MD. www.william-heathbooks.com
Cary Holladay has published eight volumes of fiction, most recently Brides in the Sky (Swallow P, Ohio UP). Over one hundred of her stories and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies. Her awards include an O. Henry Prize for “Merry-Go-Sorry,” based on the case of the West Memphis Three, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Memphis, where she directed the creative writing program and was named a First Tennessee Professor. She is a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Converse University. She lives on a farm in her native Virginia with her husband, the writer John Bensko.
Scott T. Hutchison is the author of two books of poetry, Reining In (BlackBird P) and Moonshine Narratives (Main Street Rag Publishing). Previous work has appeared in Arkansas Review, Louisiana Literature, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review. New work is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Kestrel, The Opiate, and Trampset.
Allan Johnston earned his MA in Creative Writing and his PhD in English from the University of California, Davis. An award winning poet, his work has appeared in over sixty journals, and he has published three full-length poetry collections (Tasks of Survival, 1996; In a Window, 2018; Sable and Selected Poems, 2022) and three chapbooks. His scholarly articles, as well as his translations and co-translations with Guillemette Johnston, have appeared in multiple journals. Johnston has taught most recently at Columbia College and DePaul University in Chicago. He is co-editor of JPSE: Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education.
Guy Lancaster is currently the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), and the author of a number of books on race and violence, including American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U of Arkansas P, 2021).
Catherine Niolet is a writer from Mississippi. Her work has previously been featured in Ninth Letter, and she is currently at work on her first novel. A graduate of Mississippi State University and Brooklyn Law School, she currently lives in Birmingham, AL, with her family.
Kevin Novalina has had fiction and poetry published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. He has won multiple writing fellowships and awards and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes.
Austin Price is a literary critic and journalist whose interviews, reviews, and essays have appeared in publications such as The Hopkins Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Comics Journal. Alongside the cartoonish Matthew Rainwater, he is the creator of the webcomic Batmonster. He is currently at work on his first novel.
Pier Roberts is from California but spent most of her childhood summers in Louisiana where her mother was from. She is a teacher, reader, writer, hiker, amateur chef, and avid swimmer and paddleboarder. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Unbound, Spotlong Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and Travelers’ Tales, Turkey, among others. She lives with her teenage twins and two rescue cats.
Larry D. Thomas, a previous contributor to Arkansas Review, served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Of deep Southern heritage, he has published poetry in a number of Southern journals, including Valley Voices, Deep South Magazine, Delta Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, and Green Hills Literary Lantern. Buttonhook P recently brought out his online chapbook, Letting the Light Work (Poems of Mexico) and two poetry pamphlets, Gems and Bestiary: Far West Texas.
Claude Wilkinson has been Provost Scholar and also John and Renée Grisham Visiting Southern Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. His poems have appeared recently in Alabama Literary Review, Arkansas Review, Chronicles, Poetry South, and Southern Quarterly, and his recent poetry collections include Marvelous Light, World without End, and Soon Done with the Crosses.
Arkansas Review 56.1 (April 2025)