Table of Contents
Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies
(formerly Kansas Quarterly)
Arkansas Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (August 2025)
Video games, Blackness, and the South:
The Procedural Antiracist Praxis of Mafia III...................................................... 83
by Taylor Orgeron
The Ozark Flutist (poetry) ............................................................................................ 98
by Glenda S. Pliler
Fixed Match (fiction) ...................................................................................................... 102
by Joseph Thomas
Four Poems (poetry) ....................................................................................................... 112
Off 8th Street
Nest
Audrey’s House
American Flag Chest Piece
by Katherine Kallas
No Longer Silent: Marguerite and Margaret, Two Arkansan
Women Writers and their Shared Stories of the South ............................... 114
by Kerri L. Bennett.
Sparrow Wings (Tala) (fiction) .................................................................................. 125
by Michael Copperman
Two Poems (poetry) ........................................................................................................ 130
At a Rural Valero
Invisible Rift
by Tim DeJong
Grading Don Quixote (fiction) ................................................................................... 132
by R.M. Kinder
Three Poems (poetry) ...................................................................................................... 140
Getting in the Cows
Rice Farming
How To Dream the Delta
by CL Bledsoe
The Unknown Immigrant (fiction) ............................................................................ 143
by Murali Kamma
Delta Sources and Resources ....................................................................................... 154
The University of Arkansas Virtual Museum
Online Resource
by Marcus Charles Tribbett
Reviews .................................................................................................................................... 155
Zheng and Touchet, Still Motion: Poems and Photographs,
reviewed by Michael A. Antonucci
Bearden, Mississippi Hippie, A Life in 49 Pieces,
reviewed by William V. (Bill) Davidson
Contributors .......................................................................................................................... 159
Correction: This year, the Spring/April 2025 issue (Arkansas Review Volume 56, Issue 1) was mailed with
an incorrect issue number misprinted on the front cover (incorrectly printed as Issue 3). Although the
correct issue number is listed on the table of contents page, we sincerely regret the error! The correct
version of the front cover appears below and has been updated on our website at arkreview.org.
Contributors
Michael A. Antonucci is Professor Emeritus at Keene State College, where he taught courses on Black literature and culture. His monograph Understanding Michael S. Harper is available from U of South Carolina P. He is coeditor of the collection of interviews with Michael Harper forthcoming from UP of Mississippi.
Kerri L. Bennett, PhD, is an Instructor of English at Arkansas State University, where she teaches Freshman Composition, World Literature, and Heritage Studies Research Seminar. She has co-edited the last four editions of A-State’s first-year writing textbook, the newest of which is First-Year Composition@Arkansas State University: Writing with the Pack. She holds an MA in English from Arkansas State, an MAT from the University of Arkansas at Monticello, and a PhD from Arkansas State. Her research interests are in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Women Writers, First-Year Writing, and Multimodal Composition.
CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including Riceland and Having a Baby to Save a Marriage. Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.
Michael Copperman’s work has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review, and Copper Nickel, among others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His memoir Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (UP of Mississippi, 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF. His next book, Seeking Eden, about the extremes of the American subculture of wrestling as seen through the story of five-time national champion Kenny Cox’s pilgrimage into the Na Pali jungle, is forthcoming in the Fall of 2026 from U of Iowa P.
William Van (Bill) Davidson holds degrees from Rhodes College (BA Political Science 1962), the University of Memphis (MA Geography 1967), and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (PhD Geography 1972). Since 1965 he has conducted field research as a historical-cultural geographer among the minority cultures of Yucatán and Central America, especially in Honduras. He has served as geography editor of the Handbook of Latin American Studies at the Library of Congress and is the author of numerous works on the ethnogeography and ethnohistory of Central America and the Caribbean. Retired from the faculty of the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, he and wife Sharon Solomito live in Memphis, Tennessee.
Tim DeJong currently lives in central Texas but is originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He has poems published or forthcoming in Waxwing, Image, Rattle, The Penn Review, Modern Language Studies, and other journals. His poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. His website is timothydejong.com
Katherine Kallas is a writer and artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work investigates how memories are constructed and reimagined, exploring themes of nostalgia and home-coming. Her writing has recently been published in Spires Journal and Contemporary Verse 2. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Murali Kamma is the author of Not Native: Short Stories of Immigrant Life in an In-Between World (Wising Up P), which won an Independent Publisher Book Award. A graduate of the University at Buffalo and Loyola College, India, he's the managing editor of Khabar, an Atlanta-based magazine in English. His fiction has appeared in Havik, Evening Street Review, Rosebud, BigCityLit, Apple Valley Review, and other journals. He has interviewed, among others, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, William Dalrymple, Amitav Ghosh, and Pico Iyer. His fiction has also been published in anthologies like The Best Asian Short Stories.
R.M. Kinder is the author of three collections of short fiction and two novels: A Common Person and Other Stories (Richard Sullivan Award U of Notre Dame 2021); A Near Perfect Gift (U of Michigan Literary Fiction Award 2005); Sweet Angel Band (Helicon Nine Willa Cather Award 1991); An Absolute Gentleman (Counterpoint 2007); and The Universe Playing Strings (U of N Mexico P 2016). Her stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Descant, Southern Humanity Review, Arts and Letters, most recently in Green Hills Literary Lantern, and is forthcoming in Main Street Rag.
Taylor Orgeron is a native of Louisiana who resides in Oklahoma as Associate Professor of English in the Department of Language & Literature at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. Her research and teaching interests include first-year composition, digital/multimedia writing, and game studies. Her other work can be found in The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Emerging Genres: New Formations of Games.
Glenda S. Pliler is a poet, essayist, and author whose work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wittenberg Door, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection The Agony of Intimacy explores the evolution of love and human connection. Originally from Missouri, she now lives and writes in Florida.
Joseph Thomas is a graduate student studying creative writing at the University of Louisville. His work has appeared in the Equinox Literary Magazine, The Laurel Review, Necessary Fiction, and Nebo: A Literary Journal. He holds a BA in English—Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and he is currently working on a short story collection taking place in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Marcus Charles Tribbett is General Editor of Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies and Associate Professor of English at Arkansas State University, where he also teaches for the interdisciplinary Heritage Studies doctoral program. He has published scholarly work on classic and contemporary blues performers, on a nineteenth-century slave narrative, and on contemporary novels by Jessmyn Ward and Tupelo Hassman. His most recent work, an essay on New Orleans bluesman Mem Shannon, appeared in Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans’s Literary History, edited by Nancy Dixon and Leslie Petty (UP of Mississippi, 2025).
Arkansas Review 56.2 (August 2025)