Contributor Comments

Writers don’t just describe the settings they inhabit, they make them their own. Twain’s Mississippi River, the Brontës’ haunted moors, Langston Hughes’ Harlem—even as these places change, they are forever defined by the writers who loved them and preserved them in language. In Issue 13.2, our poets explore the emotional complexities of setting, drawing on …

What do we do with memory? As far as our writers are concerned, they certainly aren’t going to take contributor Todd Hearon’s comic advice: “Forget it.” Instead, these 13.2 contributors’ poems explore how memory connects us with the people we’ve lost and with former versions of ourselves, trapping us as well as giving us solace. …

You have a body. You are a body. And yet your body is not ALL you are. Yep, the mind/body problem is scary stuff. It has puzzled philosophers for centuries and driven countless philosophy undergrads to change their majors to business. But our contributors are not afraid of corporeality, or if they are, they use …

Each new issue of The Cincinnati Review is like a baby to us. We nourish it, change it, tell funny anecdotes about it, and murmur gentle encouragements in its ear about the amazing lit mag issue it will someday become. And then, when the new arrival comes along, we crowd the older children into a …

Our general reading period may be over, but that doesn’t mean our work is finished. Instead, we’re focusing on our summer contest, which is now open for submissions (submit!). Rumor has it that an armored truck, possibly filled with bees, will deliver the prize money in special-ops fashion, though we suspect it will probably be Nicola’s Honda, …