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)