Updates from Our New Team: HFR September Newsletter
The Hayden's Ferry Review Newsletter is now on Substack!
Dear Readers,
Greetings! My name is Issa Marc Shulman, and I am honored and delighted to serve as HFR’s Managing Editor this year.
I began working with HFR five thousand years ago (in 2023) as an intern, and then as an associate editor, before finally seizing the Managing Editor title in a thrilling coup (the previous ME graduated). As an intern, I dedicated myself to the project of cataloguing and categorizing old HFR issues—from our very first issue published in 1986, to the 74th (!) issue we mailed out this past summer—and was excited to see how the journal has grown and changed over the years. Above all, I was thrilled to see how HFR has remained committed to its goal of highlighting innovative work and diverse voices. Last year’s Managing Editor, Frankie Concepcion, said it best: “We see ourselves as part of a global writing community,” and we hope HFR continues to both reach and celebrate our writers and readers all over.
Thank you for being with us over the years, through Craft Chats and Issue Launches and special events. With Issue 75 in the cooker—and more exciting things to come—I look forward to what lies ahead!
Best,
Issa Shulman, Managing Editor
New Editorial Team Takes the Helm
With the beginning of the new school year, Hayden’s Ferry Review welcomes a new editorial team, including dedicated associate editors, great editorial assistants and volunteer community readers! The team remains led by full-time Editor in Chief Susan Nguyen.
Meet our genre editors below, and read about the whole team on our website.
Meet Our Genre Editors
Our genre editors set the tone for the work that gets published in HFR, creating guidelines and practices for our team of volunteer readers, soliciting work, and making final editorial calls. Later this fall, we’ll be sharing some information about what each editor looks for in submissions in their genre, so stay tuned! For now, start getting to know our genre editors below:
This year’s Poetry Editor is Zack Lesmeister, a mixed queer Mexican-Vietnamese American poet and filmmaker. They earned their BA in Creative Writing as a First Wave Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and are in their second year in the MFA program at ASU.
Our new Fiction Editor is Brennie Shoup, who is also in her second year in ASU’s MFA program. When she's not writing or reading, Brennie enjoys running, napping, and playing video games.
Translations Editor Brandon Blue is a black, queer poet, translator, and educator from the D(M)V. He’s an assistant editor for Storm Cellar Magazine and published a chapbook, Snap.Shot, in 2023. Brandon is in his third year in the MFA program.
Emad Jabini is our Nonfiction Editor. An Iranian-American writer and educator with an MA in Literary and Cultural studies from the University of Utah, Emad is in his third year at ASU. His interdisciplinary research and artistic work revolve around themes of liminality, displacement, assimilation, mass media, and pop culture.
We now have an Assistant Web & Art Editor: second-year MFA student Adia Robinson Butler. From the southwest suburbs of Chicagoland, Illinois, Adia has a BA from Ithaca College, where she majored in writing with a creative writing concentration and minored in graphic design.
In addition, Patrick De Leon is returning for his second year as Art & Web Editor. Patrick is originally from Southern California, but has called Phoenix, Arizona, home for over a decade. A third-year MFA student, he’s also an interdisciplinary artist working in video, printmaking, and photography.
What we’re up to:
Our team is hard at work reading the fantastic submissions we’ve received for issue 75. We’re also nominating our contributors for awards, planning virtual events, and lining up authors for interviews and craft chats. And our Social Media Manager, third-year MFA student Chloe Jensen, recently migrated our newsletter to Substack – which is why things look a little different here.
Over The Summer
On the Blog:
Katarina Marčeta reviewed Katerina Stoykova’s Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, a poetry collection that “cleverly describes the immigrant experience coupled with the diaspora identity of being stuck between two worlds.”
Sarah O'Brien reviewed Midwatch by Navy veteran Jillian Danback-Mcghan.
Colleen Burner’s Sister Golden Calf is “a stunningly honest and intimate exploration of sisterhood, desire, and grief,” wrote Sierra Bravo.
Summer Web Issue Now Live
The theme of our Summer 2024 Web Issue, Futurism as Resistance, is inspired by the evocative words of Etel Adnan: "Writing is the power of memory come to life. It brings us back to what we lost, what we thought we forgot."
The work in the issue, available to explore online now, delves into memory, liberation, and diversity as forms of resistance against an uncertain future. It aims to uncover the transformative power of memory in shaping our understanding of the past and navigating the complexities of the present, using it as a tool for resistance against erasure and oppression.