Coinciding with Census Day, April 1, the latest issue of The Georgia Review, Spring 2020, is now available for purchase. In honor of the decennial count, a crucial institution of the American democratic process, we are publishing a Spring issue that presents authors’ and artists’ explorations in various genres of what it means to attempt representation of the diverse communities that comprise the United States.
Special features include “Un-Redacted: A Census of Native Land,” a collection of writings by Native authors on the legacy of settler colonialism in the U.S. edited by LeAnne Howe and Nathan Dixon; a section on the internment of people of Japanese descent in North America during WWII, with a conversation between Joy Kogawa and Masumi Izumi and an essay on early graphic memoirist Miné Okubo; and dispatches from an innovative research project on prison labor in the post–Civil War “New South” undertaken by faculty and students at UGA, Spelman College, and other institutions.
With 300 pages of original poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, and art, the issue also contains a forum with public intellectual and writer Ralph Eubanks, theater and performance critic Martin Harries, Athens activist Sujata Winfield, and writer and Undocupoet founder Janine Joseph; work inspired by the topic of the census, each piece titled “The Citizenship Question”; a selection of historic census records and original maps; and a portfolio of paintings by Eddie Arroyo, with an interview and a new work created for this issue. Supplementary materials will be available online, including a multimedia feature on the 4 September 2019 readings in support of Writers for Migrant Justice.
Several pieces address Southern history and contemporary culture. In an excerpt from her forthcoming book Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, Mab Segrest explores the legacy of a troubled Georgia institution. In “A Distant Goal We Seek,” Ralph Eubanks reflects on Mississippi census takers’ difficulties in describing the marriage between his white grandfather and black grandmother and the racial classification of their children (when mixed-race marriage was illegal in the state), and how those tensions continue to resonate in the United States today. Soniah Kamal discusses “Writing the Immigrant Southern in the New New South,” and her experience of finding literary community in Georgia as an immigrant from Pakistan.
See full table of contents at thegeorgiareview.com.
The issue will be used in several university classes around the country. We invite readers to join the discussion on social media, using the hashtag #GRCensus2020.
Subscriptions and single-issue orders may be purchased at thegeorgiareview.com. Student subscriptions are available year-round for $25. Special rates are also available for classroom adoption—contact garev@uga.edu for information about teaching with The Georgia Review.
The Georgia Review, an award-winning quarterly literary journal, was founded at the University of Georgia in 1947. Visit www.thegeorgiareview.com or call 706-542-3481 for further information.