_My first conversation with the Oxford American was thanks to Maxwell George, who at the time was an Assistant Editor at the magazine. He’d read my first book and was inviting me to submit some new poems for Editor Roger Hodge’s consideration. It was 2014, and I was living in and writing about West Texas, and maybe it was by this coincidence that Roger recognized my work, as he was raised in Del Rio and knew well the industrial cotton farms that were my subject. By whatever grace, he was generous enough to take everything I sent him that day, and a few weeks later, he invited me to become Poetry Editor, the second in our magazine’s history.

This summer’s issue is my tenth anniversary with the Oxford American, and it will be my last. When I joined the masthead, I felt the mainstream ideas on Southern poetry were still framed by the Fugitive Poets—upper middle-class white male poets famous for both craft and self-justification. I wanted to tell a different story.

Over the years, I have worked to curate a new profile of Southern poetics, one as complex and diverse as the region itself. I published new poems and poetry features by writers as different from each other as Nikki Giovanni, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Didi & Major Jackson, Tarfia Faizullah, Nathaniel Mackey, C.D. Wright, Rosa Alcalá, Kaveh Akbar, Dom Flemons, and Brian Blanchfield. It’s been a dizzying privilege. To make matters luckier, I have collaborated with three Editors of profound vision: Roger Hodge, the magazine’s second Editor; Eliza Borné, the magazine’s first woman Editor; and Danielle Amir Jackson, the magazine’s first Black Editor. I am grateful to each of them for more than I know how to say.

A region is only as healthy as it is biodiverse. Its flora and fauna thrive insofar as difference rules. I believe that the human imagination and its song, of which poetry is a part, is just one member of this region’s fauna; that we are not separate from all else that grows here. Our thoughts and our dreams are born of our places, and our literature is at its healthiest when it welcomes diversity as nature’s highest intelligence and guide. As Poetry Editor for the Oxford American, I have kept this belief at the center of my work. It is my hope that I am leaving you, dear Readers, with an anthology of permissions. May we all sing the songs of our places in each our own way, and may we all be made more whole for the contrapuntal suite of it.

—Rebecca Gayle Howell

Jericho Brown’s “Stand”
Issue 85, Summer 2014

For my first issue, I knew I wanted to publish poets who were writing the South in ways that were new and needed—and thrillingly original. In other words, I knew I wanted to publish Jericho Brown. At the time he was nearing the end of a six-year gap between his first book (Please, 2008) and his second (The New Testament, 2014), and his debut poems had long transformed my own sensibility for poetry’s truth and liberties. Jericho is, as we all know now, a rocketship of joy, skill, and wisdom, and he has since received both the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize. I am so glad that on his way to the moon he took a weigh-station stop with us, and I am ever grateful to Jericho for sharing with the world his South—a place of much violence, yes, but a place where hope can be resurrected by the tender, divine touch of Black Queer Love.

Erika Meitner’s “Dollar General”
Issue 94, Fall 2016 

When I wrote to Erika Meitner asking if she had any poems she’d like to submit to the OA, she was living in southwest Virginia—an Appalachian place known for its artisans and musicians, and the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shootings. This is important, because Erika writes in the tradition of documentary poetics—she is a poet who tries to bear responsible witness to her neighbors and her own life among them. “Dollar General” was still in concept the day I called, and Erika and I went back and forth through intensively edited drafts, long phone calls reading alternative lines out loud to each other. More than once I heard her notice a needed edit by realizing “it’s more true to say….”. How rare is that these days? For any neighbor to take the time to check their assumptions about another, to work to get the story right? “Dollar General” is collected in Erika’s fifth book, Holy Moly Carry Me (2018), which was a finalist for both the Library of Virginia Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Can we ever get the story “right”? Probably not. But Erika Meitner proves to me that it is in the trying we succeed.

Curtis Bauer’s El Hogar Que Compartimos / Homes We Share
Poems by Clara Muschietti, María Sánchez, and Fedosy Santaella
Issue 117, Summer 2022

Curtis Bauer lives and teaches in Lubbock, Texas—a place not exactly known for its reasons to stick around. Semi-arid, sprawling, and economically stratified, local lore maintains that no tree is native to the area. “I thought happiness was Lubbock Texas in my rearview mirror,” sang Mac Davis in the early eighties, and I know a lot of people today who agree with him. But Curtis, a poet and eminent translator of contemporary Spanish-language literature, is an expert on how to make a joyful home of the whole world—and does, whether he is in Lubbock or Spain or South or Central America or Maine. So when I asked our then Editor, Danielle Amir Jackson, for her approval to devote my pages to Oxford American’s first feature of translated poetry, I knew exactly who I wanted to publish—the translator I hold in the highest esteem for his understanding that art, place, and community are only as good as they are shared. El Hogar Que Compartimos / Homes We Share is a collection of three translations by Curtis, one each for poets from Argentina, Spain, and Venezuela. The poems sing of family loss, brazen mistakes, hurt, regret. Or, as Clara Muschietti writes at the end of her enclosed poem: “adentro de cada persona hay otra persona / que piensa más o menos lo mismo / pero en otro idioma.” All we have to do is listen.

Crystal Wilkinson’s “Dig If You Will the Picture”
Issue 95, Winter 2016 

Prince had just died. Eliza Borné, our Editor at the time, told me she’d like to find a way to pay our respects, and because Crys and I are chosen family, I happened to know that Prince had no bigger fan in the literary community than Crystal Wilkinson. But when I called to see if she’d want to work on a memorial for him, it became clear to us both that doing so would ask a lot of my dear friend. “Dig If You Will the Picture” tells the story of the assault Crys survived as a little girl, and how Prince’s unabashed sexiness came to save her from the shame. It is the first public statement Crystal issued on the subject, and the months she took to write and edit it were fraught with both care and courage. The end result was, of course, pitch perfect. It flourished on social media and is collected in her book Perfect Black (2021), which received the NAACP Image Award. I have also seen the essay regularly adopted as a college text. Though “Dig If You Will the Picture” was not easy to write, Crystal honored Prince’s fearlessness by writing words that have healed countless survivors who now know they are not alone.

Nomi Stone’s “Listening to the (Dixie) Chicks after America Invades Iraq, the Year I Came Out”
Issue 111, Winter 2020

I came up in a South unbranded by “red” states and “blue” states. I, like Nomi Stone and her (Dixie) Chicks, remember a time when a person could have neighbors who could be political opposites but still share a dish at the same potluck. A time when our kindness hadn’t yet been gerrymandered. In 2003, while performing in London, the Chicks famously denounced President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Immediately, the band received death threats and were blacklisted from country radio stations across the U.S., as if they could not be both “country” and “liberal.” By not hiding, the Chicks gave Southerners an opportunity to remember that we belong first to each other. Nomi wrote this poem as a commission for our “Greatest Hits” Music Issue, where she joined several prose writers on the topic of iconic Southern artists who changed the trajectory of American music. I can’t help but notice, however, that she was writing it during another alarming season of democratic polarization. The story the poem has to tell is this: if just one person has the strength to stand against tides of oppression, she can give rise to the next person’s strength, and the next.

Jacob Shores-Argüello’s “Ghost Story”
Issue 98, Fall 2017

Jacob Shores-Argüello grew up on planes. Flying, landing, flying, always somewhere between the mountainous agrarian economy of Costa Rica—his mother’s country—and the urban poverty of Southside Oklahoma City—the community where his mother and father built their lives. Home is not an abstract idea to him, but rather a state of being, of loving his mother and father, who were always gone and going and brief. In today’s Costa Rica, a city has granted citizenship to pollinators, plants, and trees. An acknowledgement of the rights of all those who live there, the right to a home. “Ghost Story” begins here. The Costa Rican river and the poem’s little boy speaker are learning from each other—how to speak new languages, how to play games. They are playmates, equal creatures, this river and boy. One of the many reasons I love Jacob’s poetry is this established deep ecology in the face of climate change, the vital need for equity among us all. Since publishing “Ghost Story,” Jacob has received some of the literary world’s most lauded prizes—Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, The Lannan Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. The world built in “Ghost Story” is at the heart of what will be his third book, a transformational collection soon to be released.

Nikky Finney’s “The Battle Of and For the Black Face Boy”
Issue 90, Fall 2015 

Nikky Finney was my first poetry teacher. It was in her workshop at the University of Kentucky that a twenty-year-old me decided my life’s devotion. Although my work for the OA has largely been a season of beginning new conversations, this publication comes out of a conversation that has been filled with my awe and her instruction throughout my entire adult life. By the time the Fall issue of 2015 rolled around, I felt I was ready to offer my teacher something real in return—the magazine’s first long poem feature. “The Battle Of and For the Black Face Boy” is an epic poem that began as a libretto commission Nikky received from the University of Maryland to honor the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War’s end. “I wanted to write a poem that traveled from the horror of one day to the lifting of our chins the next—that paid homage to how we keep moving; keep stepping forward,” Nikky writes in her introduction to the poem’s release in our pages. Editing one’s own teacher is daunting, let me tell you. But Nikky’s generosity is true, and she and I went into the weeds together, thinking hard about even the punctuation, working to ensure the poem sung out on the silent page. In this country, only a handful of poets are carried across history. Nikky is already one of them, and this poem will tell you why. “The Battle Of and For the Black Face Boy” is included in her extraordinary fifth collection, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Verse (2020). It was also a key selection by the judges of Oxford American’s 2016 National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s “We Always Needed You”
Issue 87, Winter 2014

The annual release of Oxford American’s music issue is a publishing event, a glossy juggernaut of the nation’s best music writing, which we print in the tens of thousands of copies and often sell out. The Texas Music Issue was a particularly auspicious occasion, given the state’s one-of-a-kind music heritage. It was also the first music issue I helped edit, and it was the one where I began asking what would become my primary query with our music issues: if we are celebrating how music sings itself in specific places, isn’t poetry just another kind of music? So I invited several Texas poets to write for the issue, as I would do in future issues for poets living in Georgia, North and South Carolina, Kentucky. 

Of all such poems I have published over the years, it is Naomi Shihab Nye’s “We Always Needed You” that continues to live in my thoughts daily. Like many of Naomi’s poems, the scene is deceptively simple. It’s the parking lot of a Townes Van Zandt show, outside some low lit honky-tonk. It’s a kiss on the cheek and a girl frozen inside the amber of that kiss. But as Naomi says Townes taught us all: “nuthin’ was not nuthin’.” Townes Van Zandt’s genius was in his humanity, broken and soaring. His songs, too, are deceptively simple. When I read this poem, I can feel his lips against the one-day poet’s cheek, a passing of the calling—from one humble storyteller to the next. In the following years, Naomi Shihab Nye would prove she was never a girl frozen in amber. She became a founder of this country’s Arab-American poetry movement and the recipient of the highest acclaims, including the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. Thank you, Townes. Thank you, Naomi. The truth is, we did always need you. And I hope we always will.