Table of Contents
Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies
(formerly Kansas Quarterly)
Arkansas Review, Vol. 56, No. 3 (December 2025)
Eldorado (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... . . .. 163
by Linda Parsons
The Coin Collector (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
by David Fowler
Two Poems (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Deer Stand Marginalia
First Shoot
by Scott Dickison
Losing Richard (memoir). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
by Dale Fairbanks
Sunset in Eureka Springs (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
by Mary Meriam
A Swamp Tale (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
by Charles Moffat
The Province of All the Time in the World (poetry). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
by Terry Minchow-Proffitt
A Boneyard of Laughter-Silvered Wings (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
by Dana Chamblee Carpenter
After Cairo (poetry). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
by Madelyn Musick
Three Delta Poems (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Delta Shackscape
Delta Rain
Delta Summer
by Jianqing Zheng
One Mississippi, Two Mississippi . . . 1964 (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 206
by Mark Dozier
Delta Whites (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
by Eulea Kiraly
Christmas on the Delta (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
by Floyd Collins
mark the time (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
by Dan Jacoby
Lee’s Girl (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
by S.E. Wilson
Two Poems (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . 226
Picking Cucumbers in the Rain
My Parents Tell Me the Bluebirds Have Gone
by Andrew Alexander Mobbs
Three Poems (poetry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Winter Crows
The Natural World
Terminus
by Claude Wilkinson
Delta Sources and Resources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South (traveling art exhibition)
Mississippi Museum of Art
Jackson, Mississippi
by Marcus Charles Tribbett
Reviews. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Plummer, ed., Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, reviewed by Gregory Hansen
Rost, Catching Hell from All Quarters: Anti-Klan Activists in Interwar Missouri, reviewed by David Roediger
Lemco, Wading In: Desegregation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, reviewed by Brent Riffel
Contributors
Dana Chamblee Carpenter is the award-winning author of Bohemian Gospel, The Devil’s Bible, and Book of the Just. In 2020, she collaborated with HarperCollins/Thomas Nelson on an anthology, Women Who Wrote: Stories and Poems from Audacious Literary Mavens, designed to introduce these women writer-ancestors to readers in a bold new way. She has a PhD in American and Women’s Literature from the University of Mississippi, though she recently escaped the world of academia and now writes full-time.
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.
Scott Dickison is a poet and minister in Jackson, Mississippi. Originally from North Carolina, he holds a theological degree from Harvard Divinity School and an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte.
Mark Dozier is a writer of fiction, both long-form and short stories. He was raised in the South and went on to travel the world and eventually become a world history and geography teacher both in America and abroad in Singapore and Sierra Leone. His upbringing and travels have heavily influenced his writing. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Florida and has had a short story published in the Mississippi Review and in Leg Iron Books’ Halloween anthology, Monster (October, 2024).
Alma Dale Fairbanks, a painter by trade, a writer by habit, has her large-scale canvases in collections all over the continental United States, as well as Australia and Nova Scotia. She is currently working on a book of paintings, essays, and a memoir of her travels as an artist.
David Fowler has stories in The Threepenny Review, North American Review, River Teeth, Pithead Chapel, and Oxford American. He's legally blind and writes, slowly, in Jackson, Mississippi, after living in New York and on a ranch in Texas.
Gregory Hansen is Professor of Folklore and English at Arkansas State University where he also teaches in the Heritage Studies PhD Program. He recently coedited Sustaining Support for Intangible Cultural Heritage and he has published on roots music, public folklore, and a range of topics. He recently was inducted as a Fellow of the American Folklore Society.
Dan Jacoby is a graduate of St. Louis University, and Governors State University. He has published poetry in Bombay Gin, Euphony, Red Fez, Black Heart Review, R.K.V.Y, Steel Toe Review and other fine publications. He is a former educator, steel worker, and counterintelligence agent. His work is influenced by the poets John Knoepfle, Al Montesi, Dobby, and John Logan to name a few. He has been nominated in 2015 and 2020 for a Pushcart and Best of the Net in 2021. He is the author of the book Blue Jeaned Buddhists.
Eulea Kiraly is a second-year MFA candidate at the University of Central Arkansas, where she served as managing editor of the Arkana Literary Magazine. Before starting the course, she lived less than an hour from the Mississippi River and taught in three different prisons in the Arkansas Delta. Before that, she lived in Australia, where her works of short fiction, poetry, and arts journalism appeared in Artlook, ANU Reporter, Canberra Times, and Muse. Recent publications in the United States include poetry and creative nonfiction with Thimble and Medicine and Meaning.
Mary Meriam studied poetry at Columbia University (MFA) and Bennington College (BA). She works as an editor and publisher of lesbian poetry and art, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas Monticello. Her most recent poetry collection is Pools of June (Exot Books, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Literary Imagination, Literary Matters, Poetry, Prelude, Subtropics, and The Poetry Review
Terry Minchow-Proffitt lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He was raised in the rural Delta of eastern Arkansas and draws great inspiration from this region and its people. His poems have appeared in various journals and magazines. His published collections and chapbooks are Seven Last Words (2015), Chickentrain: Poems from the Arkansas Delta (2016), Sweetiebetter (2019), and Pray Tell in the Key of Blue (2024).
Andrew Alexander Mobbs is the author of the poetry collection, In These Glorious Pastures, and two chapbooks, A Walk in the Garden (Bottlecap P, 2024) and Strangers and Pilgrims (Six Gallery P, 2013). A Pushcart Prize nominee, he’s grateful his poems appear in Frontier Poetry, Terrain.org, Arkansas Review, New Delta Review, and other fine publications.
Charles Moffat is a retired archaeologist, 76 years old, who has carried out many archaeological projects in the Midwestern United States during a career that spans 48 years. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois. A few of the sites he has investigated are unusual and inspire him to imagine stories about their ancient occupants. A conversation with a member of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey provided stimulus for the story published in this issue of Arkansas Review.
Madelyn Musick is a Missouri-born, Minnesota-raised writer, teacher, and photographer. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina–Wilmington where she studied poetry. She is a 2025 Tin House poetry workshop alum. Her work is forthcoming in the McNeese Review and Little Patuxent Review.
Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville.
Brent Riffel holds a doctorate in American History 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 Coordinating Committee in Arkansas, edited by John Kirk.
David Roediger teaches American Studies at the University of Kansas. His recent books include An Ordinary White, The Sinking Middle Class, and How Race Survived US History.
Marcus Charles Tribbett is General Editor of Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies and Associate Professor of English at Arkansas State University. He has published scholarly work on blues performers, on a nineteenth-century slave narrative, and on contemporary American literature.
Claude Wilkinson is a critic, essayist, painter, and poet. His most recent poetry collection is Soon Done with the Crosses. He received the Whiting Award for Poetry in 2000.
S.E. Wilson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, The Berlin Literary Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Louisville Review, New World Writing Quarterly, and The Saturday Evening Post, among others.
Jianqing (John) Zheng is author of The Dog Years of Reeducation, Enforced Rustication in the Chinese 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 Commission and edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review and Journal of Ethnic American Literature.
Arkansas Review 56.3 (December 2025)