# 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)**](https://kb.astate.edu/books/volume-56-issue-2-august-2025/page/four-poems) ....................................................................................................... **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](http://sdc.cast.uark.edu/)
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**
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**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.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-05/4jdimage.png)
---
## **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)