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Meet the Editor: JC Andrews

Filed under: Meet the Editor, The Schooner Blog |

In this Meet the Editor series, we’re asking our assistant editors about their work on the Schooner and thoughts on their respective genres. Read our fourth installment with assistant poetry editor JC Andrews below.

JC Andrews
Assistant Poetry Editor

What brought you to UNL and to working with the Schooner? 

I came to UNL to get my PhD in Creative Writing. I had previous experience editing Indiana Review, and I wanted to continue that work with the Schooner.

What do you look for when reading submissions?

I look for poems that make ordinary images feel more exact through earnest description that I haven’t necessarily encountered elsewhere.

Can you recall one piece you were moved by and why?

In terms of reading for the Schooner, Dana Fang’s “Outdoor Education” has really stuck with me, even though it’s not a poem. 

Has working as an editor for Prairie Schooner impacted your own creative work?

We get to read a lot of quality work at the Schooner, and being exposed to that many poems people are writing right now is important to me as a poet myself. The time I spend reading helps me feel ready to write.

What types of poetic risks and innovations excite you?

This is a hard question, because I think poems take risks in all kinds of ways all the time that excite me, but right now, I think poems that do strange things with shape have my attention.

How do you know when a poem’s form is best serving its content?

I know this when I can’t imagine the poem taking any other shape than the one it has already taken.

What would you like to see more of in contemporary poetry?

I don’t think there is a shortage of contrapuntal poems, but I always want to see more of those.

JC Andrews is a lesbian poet from Springfield, Arkansas with an interest in poems that work as an un-ing, poems that hold questions as a form of caretaking. Her work can be found in Gulf Coast, the Massachusetts Review, and Waxwing. Most recently, her manuscript, Of an Ilk, was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series, and her poem, “Gargoyle,” was the first runner-up of the Palette Poetry 2024 Sappho Prize for Women Poets, judged by Megan Fernandes. She is currently a student and teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and her chapbook, TRILLION AMBER TRUMPETS, will come out in March with Sibling Rivalry Press.