Dear Reader,

Welcome to the first-ever online edition of Black Warrior Review. We are so pleased to meet you here, and it is with thanks to incredible readers, writers, and artists like you that we continue to exist. In our call for submissions, we asked you to show us your havens: writing that questioned how we make our shape in the world, how we might continue living in and caring for the places we hold most dear, and how we might create these places to begin with. What we received was work that reflected, haunted, made us re-imagine beauty, strangeness, and everything in-between. What we wanted to say here, to every writer and reader, is that how you choose to make your shape on the page and in our community matters, and that we are beyond honored to share some space with you, dear reader, even far away and for a short while.

Overwhelmingly, we found work in our queue that didn’t turn away from shared grief, from loss. We found strong, daring voices in the face of a world full of anxiety and uncertainty. We found individuality and longing and meditations on personal and political histories in a variety of styles, all beautifully crafted on the page. We hope this work will speak to you as it did to us, that it will meet you on the page and invite you to consider, to take care, and to protect each other and these creative spaces of imaginative resistance.

Alongside the wonderful work that came to us through our queue, we’re thrilled to include photographs by Sera Hayes that explore nostalgia with equal parts quiet observation and eerie peculiarity, and an interdisciplinary chapbook by Katherine Agard that reflects on selfhood and belonging with gorgeous sophistication.

Thank you again for joining us here, on the screen.

Sincerely,

The Editors