Dear Readers,

Welcome to the very first issue of The Swannanoa Review. We are so excited to share it with you. 

This literary magazine’s ethos takes its cues from two institutions near the Swannanoa River Valley: Black Mountain College—an experimental, arts-focused college with a lasting legacy despite its brief existence—and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College—the country’s first low-residency writing program whose teachers and students have made an outsized mark in the literary world. 

As impressive as the list of alumni and faculty from both these schools are, what inspires us more are their prevailing character traits: a generosity of spirit, a willingness to experiment, and a serious (and seriously joyful) creative rigor. 

That is what we hope The Swannanoa Review may bring to the world. 

In these pages, you’ll find poems and short fiction from 24 contributors: 22 poets and 2 fiction writers. In the Table of Contents, we have sequenced the writing deliberately, so if you’re eager to read it all “cover to cover”—and we hope you will!—consider following the order put forth there. The pieces chime and resonate and enhance each other in remarkable ways. If we do say so ourselves. 

We feel very lucky that when we solicited work for this first issue from some friends and teachers—Debra Allbery, Sally Ball, Jennifer Grotz, Maurice Manning, Heather McHugh, and Matthew Olzmann—they said yes. We want to particularly acknowledge Christine Hale, who granted permission for us to print the work of her late husband, the writer and teacher Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy, who died in 2022. Not knowing how this might go, we found ourselves surprised (and slightly overwhelmed) by the number of unsolicited submissions we received for our first issue—a wonderful problem to have. We are so grateful to everyone who took a chance on a brand new magazine and submitted such excellent work. 

We genuinely could not have begun to put together this magazine without our team of poetry and fiction readers: Jason Bowman, Georgia M. Brodsky, Madison Cyr, Eli Karren, Maja Lukic, and Jacob Sheetz-Willard. We so appreciate their care, humor, and know-how—they made this possible. 

And to you, reader of the very first issue of The Swannanoa Review: thank you for being here. We can’t wait for all there is to come. 

Happy reading,

Reed Turchi & Kate Welsh
Founding Editors