Ted Genoways Named New Editor of VQR

Ted Genoways has been named the eighth editor in the 78-year history of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Genoways, who received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Virginia in 1999, is currently associate editor of the Walt Whitman Hypertext archives at the University of Iowa. He was also founding editor of Meridian, a journal of literature at U.Va.

“I could not be happier taking over the Virginia Quarterly Review,” Genoways said. “This is the job I have always wanted and exactly the place I have always hoped to do it. I have had a long-standing desire to edit a literary magazine in general, and the VQR has had a strong national reputation. Having done my masters of fine arts at U.Va., this is the place I always hoped to work some day.”

Genoways, 31, takes the helm of VQR following the retirement of Staige D. Blackford, editor for 28 years. Genoways’ experience includes having been an editor at Minnesota Historical Society Press, advisory editor of Callaloo, a journal of African, African-American and Afro-Caribbean arts and letters at U.Va., publicity director for the Virginia Festival of the Book and editorial assistant and project supervisor at the Texas Tech University Press.

He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2002 Pushcart Prize, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award and a John Ciardi fellowship in poetry. His work has been published by Shenandoah and Southern Poetry Review.

“Ted Genoways will build effectively on the foundations of Staige Blackford’s tenure as editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review,” said University President John T. Casteen III. “He brings to the Review substantial editing and writing experience, energetic intelligence and visionary thinking about what the VQR can become. I look forward to his leadership and to a new era for the VQR.”

VQR, one of the nation’s most venerable literary periodicals, was founded in 1925 by University President Edwin A. Alderman as “a national journal of literature and discussion” and boasted D.H. Lawrence and Andre Gide among its first contributors. Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot and Thomas Wolfe soon wrote for it, as did Thomas Mann, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Frost, Bertrand Russell, H.L. Mencken, George F. Kennan and Robert Graves. U.Va. faculty members Anne Beattie, George Garrett and Gregory Orr have been among the magazines’ manuscript readers, and novelists Robert Olen Butler and T.R. Pearson have been among those first discovered in its pages.