Issues 99.1 and 99.2 now available
The Spring and Summer 2025 issues of Prairie Schooner have arrived! These issues mark a warm welcome to our new editor in chief, Timothy Schaffert.
Purchase the issues
Spring 2025 features Spaces: A Nonfiction Portfolio, which explores themes of place, identity, and the journey that connects the two. This portfolio opens with “Bruised and Glorious” by Keya Mitra, winner of our Summer 2024 Creative Nonfiction contest. Mitra takes us on a physical and mental pilgrimage as she hikes through the Camino Francés after a craniectomy, reflecting on illness, relationships, and alienation. Guest judge Safiya Sinclair wrote that the essay is “a beautiful, brilliantly moving work about the many ways that collective storytelling can create pathways to healing and to understanding ourselves in the world. It’s a love letter to the way language connects us, and gifts us a roadmap to ourselves; a way back to the home we thought we’d lost.”
The issue also features fiction from Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Morgan Christie, Anthony Yarbrough, and Tiffany Jimenez. Book reviews include Nicole Yurcaba reviewing The Sweating Sickness by Rebecca Lehmann and Lailah Shima reviewing Black Buffalo Woman by Kazim Ali. Poetry in the issue includes work by Carlina Duan, Divya Mehrish, George Uba, Dolapo Demuren, Zachariah Claypole White, and Cindy Tran, among others. The issue also includes six poems from Unbound: An Anthology of New Nigerian Poets Under 40 (Griots Lounge Publishing), featuring Romeo Oriogun, Ololade Edun, Funmi Gaji, Grace Olúfémi, Anointing Obuh, and Anthony Chibueze Ukwuoma.
Taking a dive into the archive, the Summer 2025 issue features archival selections under the theme Writers on Writing, with writers celebrating, lamenting, and reflecting on the writing and publishing process, as well as a portfolio of new work titled Craft & Instruction.
Among the archival pieces, Nancy Willard’s diary-style essay “Telling Time” explores the elusive nature of building a story and creating fully fleshed characters. “Will I like these characters?” Willard writes. “Will they like me? Will they tell me their secrets?” Willard’s essay documents the writing process from beginning to publication, spilling the creative nuances of each step.
Other essays from the archive include work by Judith Ortiz Cofer, Maxine Kumin, Meghan O’Rourke, Ted Kooser, Kwame Dawes, and Linda Pastan. We have also featured two conversations: an interview with Julia Alvarez by María García Teutsch and Silvio Sirias, as well as a roundtable on war writing with Donald Anderson, Doug Anderson, Sam Hamill, Peter Molin, Marilyn Nelson, and Stacey Peebles. Poetry in the issue includes Bill Sweeney, K. Srilata, Vivian Shipley, Toi Derricotte, and Erin Bad Hand.
In the the issues’s portfolio of new work on Craft & Instruction, we have essays by Chaun Ballard and Uche Okonkwo, as well as an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Ladette Randolph, Heather Lundine, and Sherrie Flick.
You can order the Spring 2025 issue and the Summer 2025 issue now through our online store. And for a limited time only, grab both issues for $20 – that’s $4 off the list price!
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