19 February 2026
Happy Lunar New Year. Happy year of the Fire Horse. This issue starts the eightieth number of The Georgia Review. We have run uninterrupted since our founding in 1947 by John D. Wade, thanks to consistent support from the University of Georgia, but our course has been varied.
We can count the years, but time bends weirdly in a literary quarterly. In 1935, another Southern Agrarian, Allen Tate, wrote an interesting essay called “The Function of the Critical Quarterly” in The Southern Review during its inaugural year. He starts with a question: what is the “use” (the scare quotes Tate’s) of the quarterly in an age when the monthlies and the dailies have gotten such absolute control of breaking news? He points out that
The quarterly is always too late, even if its standards are not stubbornly high. If the quarterly imitates the freshness of the weekly, its freshness is necessarily three months stale, refrigerated but not new; and if it envies the liveliness of monthly commentary, its peril is the sacrifice of leisured thought. In either instance the quarterly sacrifices its standards only to attempt a work that it cannot hope to do.
In a previous TOR (Winter 2020), I mentioned what I feel is the “difficult punctuality” of literary journals right now, but until finding Tate’s essay, just last week, courtesy of Siân Round’s The Serial South: The Little Magazine in the US South, 1921–1945, forthcoming from UGA Press, I did not imagine that the sentiment would be stated so exactly almost a century ago. (Imagine Tate now, when even 24/7 tv news seems to struggle to be first with breaking news.) When a quarterly gives up the misguided aim of trying to, as Tate says, “get[] news . . . while it is still, I imagine, hot,” it has a clearer sight of its true “problem”: “the act of organizing [its] material . . . into coherent criticism.” He elaborates:
A sound critical program has at least this one feature: it allows to the reader no choice in the standards of judgment. It asks the reader to take a post of observation, and to occupy it long enough to examine closely the field before him, which is presumably the whole field of our experience. (Italics in the original)
“Standards” and “judgment” are hallmarks of New Criticism, which Tate established with his fellow Southern Agrarian poetry folks at Vanderbilt: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. Literary journals were central to the promulgation of New Criticism, as designed. Each of the above Fugitive poets quickly found a journal when they dispersed from Vanderbilt: Ransom established The Kenyon Review, Warren and Brooks started The Southern Review, and Tate took over the helm at The Sewanee Review. As Michael Warner has proven in the masterful eponymous chapter in his Publics, Counterpublics (2002), publics are networks of strangers brought together through a circulation of texts and the exchange of ideas the circulation entails. Moreover, as one section title declares: “Publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation.” This is to say that the rhythm of history is much more idiosyncratic and culturally determined than is generally assumed, if we think of cultural groups in terms of publics. Just as once upon a time a particular group of people defined time by burning tapers and mapping celestial bodies, and now by clocks and calendars, the quarterly defines its public by its idiosyncratic rhythm. And just as those candles, clocks, and calendars structure certain characteristic practices, like prayer, or exchanging red envelopes, we can look at literary criticism and the literary quarterly similarly, which is to say we shouldn’t overlook Tate’s sleight of hand in the above. It’s not that there’s anything about the quarterly that’s necessary for critical acumen and culture. Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus (speaking of just one ancient culture) were able to comment on aesthetic objects within a discourse with others. Conversely, there is no imperative for the culinary quarterly Delish to fashion a critical program. The true invention here is a mode of literary criticism that is undeniably popular, powerful, and culturally important—whether one agrees with its tenets or not, and the temporality of this type of literary criticism, the rhythm of its beating heart, is pegged to the quarterly.
Although we at GR resist Tate’s call to make the establishment and maintenance of “standards of judgment” the quarterly’s ultimate aim, we embrace his charge to invest in “coherent criticism,” if we can turn the phrase inside out like a cheveril glove, not for GR to have a “dogmatic” (Tate’s word, employed admirably) critical program, but rather a space for our readers to cultivate a critical acumen capable of making coherence of the world any of us shares with various other folks and species. Yes, we find everything we have published in our pages aesthetically accomplished. But we also look for works that can teach us something about life caught between the instantaneity of utterly timely news and the aura of timelessness baked into a book. “Fine creative work is criticism of the second rate,” Tate says, “second rate” not in terms of quality, but in terms of a second order of criticism, akin to what Theodor Adorno says about aesthetic critique. We value literature that teaches us something about making sense of a world through interpretation, a type of reading that prominently emphasizes point of view and shared meaning-making with objects, texts, and the vibrance of other people. It is a continual wonder to see so much powerful writing that creates out of a situation in the author’s phenomenal world a second nature, an imaginative world that invites us in for communal meaning-making. The quarterly might be the most natural place to witness and appreciate the ineluctable belatedness of artistic creation, how the lag, the labor, and the hours of toil necessary for accomplished work require it to make its timeliness and exigence part of its working. It is a wonder to find this newfound urgency when we read the literary result, whenever it is.
In this issue our 2026 Georgia Review Critic-at-Large, Thomas Dai, looks at Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear to consider the value of literary criticism at a time when authoritarian regimes rely on an unrelenting whirlwind of breaking news to overwhelm their subjects’ sensibilities into complicity, fatigue, and/or confusion. We have a pair of essays that listen to music closely as life unfolds. Don’t miss Mark Mazullo’s reflection on traveling to Colombia to give a piano performance, only to find love while abroad. J. Bret Maney’s translation of Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila recounts lively childhood nights listening to jazz at his father’s knees. Ajanaé Dawkins shares an essay about Black spirituality and poetry, which focuses on one of my favorite aesthetic concepts out there, the Du Boisian Frenzy (cf. Summer 2021 TOR). I suggest you read the essay in tandem with Malik Thompson’s poems, as well as Elfrieda Amaka Nwabunnia’s. Stephanie Burt shares a folio of poems as technically dazzling as they are expressive. Blake Sanz shares a story of a group of young misfits in Mexico finding community and ways of life on a trip that leads them to the underside of Cancún. This issue also features the winner and featured finalists of last year’s Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Check out Mercedes Rodriguez’s winning poem as well as those by Kyle Okeke, Martha Ronk, Talin Tahajian, and Li Zhuang.
Out of the office:
• I am proud to share that the essay “Phantom Pains” by Rochelle L. Johnson has won the 2026 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. This award, as described by the John Burroughs Association, “is given annually for a published nature essay of outstanding natural history writing that presents vivid, first-hand, scientifically accurate accounts of nature.” Johnson’s essay previously won the 2025 Georgia Review Prose Prize, judged by Allegra Hyde. The accomplishment will be celebrated at an award luncheon on 13 April at the Yale Club NYC. Visit the John Burroughs Association website for ticket information.
• The 2026 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize is open. This year’s judge is Brian Teare. Please visit our website for details.
• On 2 April we will host Jamel Brinkley and Tarfia Faizullah at the Athens Public Library for our joint event with the Institute for African American Studies. The event is supported by the UGA Center for Asian Studies. There will be a reading, followed by a Q&A moderated by Mikhayla Robinson-Smith. Book sale and signing afterward, courtesy of Athens’ newest bookstore, Rec Room Books.
• We are also working out details with UGA’s Special Collections Library for an event to induct Alice Friman and Charlie Smith into the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame. The event will be happening in late April, specific where and when TBD.
• I’m also happy to announce that our imprint, Georgia Review Books, will continue with the University of Nebraska Press. Books will start appearing in early 2027.
G.M.
