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I co-founded Kudzu Review with several of my classmates from the University of Montevallo to create a place dedicated to promoting ecological art, fiction, poetry, and essay. We were granted 501(c)3 Nonprofit status this year as a publishing house, Kudzu House Press. In the distant future, we hope to publish one or two titles per year of fiction and poetry. 

 

The journal was originally published twice a year, on the winter and summer solstice, but this year (2013) we have expanded to adding an additional issue on the fall equinox, The Kudzu Scholar, an issue dedicated entirely to essays on ecocriticism. Kudzu Review is intersted in the concept of nature as a discourse baised on the theoretical movements of feminism, new historicism, and post-colonial study. The following exerpt from a recent editor's note helps to explain the focus and scope of the journal:

 

Thoreau said that “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” This phrase is often, as many critics note, misquoted as “wilderness,” and this mistake reveals much about the way that we construct nature as a distant object of sacred purity. The difference between wilderness and wildness is the difference between nature and Kudzu. Our journal’s mission is to explore what happens when the barriers that keep the natural object separate erode, when the invasive takes root. Our journal’s focus is the Wildness that exists outside the bounds of wilderness. Though invasion is destructive and erodes the structures of environments, we hope that there is still room to be wild in a ravaged landscape. Be it dark, violent, mysterious, and beautiful, Wildness is pure potential.

—Literature of an Invasive Species.

Kudzu Review

Artwork by Sean Abrahams

"Starting a literary magazine [is] a bit like trying to push your head through a straw.” —Helen Sullivan, editor of Prufrock.

Southern Humanities Review

—Alabama’s Premier Literary and Critical Journal

During my first semester at Auburn University, I began volunteering as a reader for Southern Humanities Review. In my first summer as a master's student, I was offered to work as an intern over the summer. I was interested in learning how a larger journal managed their high volume of submissions and what communications between a larger staff looked like. Getting to work with other students and editors was very rewarding. I learned strategies for effective commenting and methods for dealing with large volumes of submissions in a timely fashion.

 

Handling hundreds of submitted pieces was useful in inculcating practices in professionalism in my own submissions. I realized the importance of knowing how to properly format and present your work when submitting, not only to journals of creative writing, but to scholarly journals and jobs. It was fascinating to get to watch work move from submission, where it was sorted and recorded, to readers, who commented on the works, to editors who deliberated and arranged the work, and finally to mail out the print copies to the journals international readership.

ePortfolio, Auburn University

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