When Chet’la Sebree and Andrew Ciotola wrote me to ask if I’d serve as acting editor for 2021-2022, I answered immediately. Yes. I have served as an associate editor for West Branch for nearly a decade and I count my involvement with the journal as a career highlight. It’s not just the camaraderie of a […]
From the Editor: May 2021
As my ten years as editor of West Branch draw to a close, I’m thinking much about the gatekeeping role of any editor. This gatekeeping quality is irreducible: the power to choose which voices to present, which voices to decline.
From The Editor: June 2019
Dear Friends, Readers, and Submitters: Thank you for supporting West Branch this year! We’ve now completed our reading for the year—and responded to every single submission in our queue. For those of you who keep track of such things, we received 5,018 submissions during the 2018-19 reading year, of which we accepted … forty-seven. If […]
From the Editor: Spring 2017
AND WE’RE OFF! Dear Everyone, A quick note to welcome our readers, and submitters, back from the summer, parts of which I spent focused on the woolly adelgids currently munching their way through the hemlocks in my yard. (First the elms and the chestnuts, then the ashes, now the hemlocks ….) On a more positive […]
