Spring 2021

This issue marks the first anniversary of the coronavirus through features that share themes of separation and dissonance—both physical and ideological, personal and public. Features include Dina Litovsky’s photo essay on the atmosphere of Manhattan’s first lockdown last spring; May Jeong’s report on the repatriation of Afghan migrants to a home country they barely know; Ryan Bradley on the worlds we find underground, which few of us even know about; T Kira Madden’s short story on the splitting of a self in grief; and Rachel Vorona Cote on the strange anachronisms that make recent period dramas so unique.
Spring 2021

Volume 97, Number 1

Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2021 cover
Print: $14.00
Digital download: $14.00

Table of contents

Reporting 
Essays 
Criticism 
Photography 
Fiction 
Poetry 
#VQRTrueStory 
Mapping 
Drawing It Out 
Open Letter 
Fine Distinctions 
Editor's Desk 

Contributor Profiles

Jenna Krajeski is a reporter with the Fuller Project based in New York and the author, with Nobel laureate Nadia Murad, of The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State (Tim Duggan, 2017). She was a 2016 Knight Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan.

Deb Lucke is an author and artist. Her comics have appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, and Heated, among others. She is a regular contributor to her local paper, the Highlands Current. She has received numerous awards, including from American Illustration, the Society of Illustrator’s Cartoon and Comic Annual, and the New York Press Association Awards. Her graphic-novel series, The Lunch Witch, earned starred reviews and is in development with Amblin Entertainment.

T Kira Mahealani Madden is the founding editor in chief of No Tokens, the author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (Bloomsbury, 2019), and an amateur magician. 

Jared Ragland is a fine-art and documentary photographer and former White House photo editor. His collaborative, socially conscious art practice critically explores Southern identity, marginalized communities, and the history of place. He was appointed visiting distinguished professor at the University of South Florida in 2019, is the recipient of a 2020 Magnum Foundation grant, and is currently at work in his home state of Alabama as a 2020–21 Do Good Fund artist-in-residence.

Jane Wong’s poems can be found in places such as Best American Non-required Reading 2019, American Poetry Review, AGNI, and Poetry, among other venues. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the US Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and others. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and the forthcoming How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021). 

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