Winter 2023

In this issue, reporter Harriet Brown and photographer Lynn Johnson offer a deep dive into the impact of medicinal cannabis on children who suffer from severe illness. Faced with little to no options, in an often-hostile legal landscape, parents have turned to cannabis oil as a way to accelerate their children’s healing or offset the potent side effects of intense pharmacological regimens—often at great legal risk. The story represents years of reporting and intimate access to provide an unflinching look at these families’ experiences. The Winter issue also includes Laura Kasinof’s reporting from the remote Yemeni island of Socotra, where people find themselves at a crossroads between preserving the island’s unique ecological integrity and desperately needed development provided (with strings attached) by Arab and European speculators. This issue also features a pair of unique essays: Boyce Upholt on one artist’s response to the Great Silence of our galaxy; and Sarah Fuss Kessler on her experience leaving a cult, and how it led to a reexamination of the cult defector’s narrative. The fiction is dedicated entirely to Saskia Vogel’s standout translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Swedish family saga, told across layers of a mother’s memories. Garret Keizer reflects on the underestimated sublimity of gratitude, and Laura Kolbe takes a fresh look at artist Edvard Munch’s landscapes. Andrew Zubiri brings us a #VQRTrueStory on Abaca from the Philippines; Anuj Shrestha contributes an especially poignant Open Letter; and Jim Coan wraps up his run as the Drawing It Out guest columnist with the final installment of “Our Social Baseline.” Poetry from Daniel Halpern & Robert Hass, Austin Segrest, and the late Andrea Werblin Reid round out the issue.
Winter 2023

Volume 99, Number 4

Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2023 cover
Print: $20.00
Digital download: $20.00

Table of contents

Reporting 
Essays 
Fiction 
Poetry 
#VQRTrueStory 
Drawing It Out 
Open Letter 
Art & The Archive 
On Becoming 
Editor's Desk 

Contributor Profiles

Linnea Axelsson is a Sámi Swedish writer who holds a Ph.D. in art history from Umeå University. Her epic, Ædnan (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2018), won the August Prize. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Harriet Brown is a professor of magazine, news, and digital journalism at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse.

Lynn Johnson is a regular contributor to National Geographic. She was a Knight Fellow at Ohio University and teaches at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse.

Saskia Vogel is the translator of more than two dozen books of contemporary Swedish fiction and nonfiction and is the author of the novel Permission (Coach House, 2019).

Andrea Werblin Reid (1965 – 2022) is the author of Lullaby for One Fist (Wesleyan UP, 2001) and Sunday with the Sound Turned Off (Lost Horse, 2014).

Spring 2024 Cover; Photo by Mathias Depardon
Spring 2024
Volume 100, Number 1
Fiction Issue Cover. Photo by Adam Ekberg.
Fiction 2024
Volume 100, Number 2
Fall 2024 Cover. Cover art by Johanna Goodman.
Fall 2024
Volume 100, Number 3
Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring/Summer 2023 cover
Spring/Summer 2023
Volume 99, Number 1