The latest issues of the Crab Creek Review and Willow Springs have hit bookstore shelves; urban mail slots; post office boxes; lonely concrete doorsteps; and rural mailboxes complete with dusty gravel road, swaying willows, and distant red barn all over the region the last couple of days.   

Guided by editors Natasha Moni, Lana Ayers, and Kerry Banazek, Crab Creek features a beautiful new story by Kathleen Alcalá entitled "The Accidental Zoo", held in an embrace of new poems by Marvin Bell, Peter Munro, and many others. Another highlight for this reader was Steven J. Stewart’s new translation of a Margarito Cuéllar poem.

Founded in 1984, the independent Crab Creek Review is one of the Pacific Northwest’s iconic literary journals, providing a forum for both emerging and established voices.

Since its inception in 1977, Willow Springs has helped introduce such voices as Stuart Dybeck, Tobias Wolff, Sam Hamill, and many others.

Willow Springs’s sixty-second issue contains conversations between current or former magazine editors with Tess Gallagher–"she was generous enough to invite us to her home where she served us homemade date-bran muffins and raspberries that she had picked the day before. We ate and talked over coffee in a room with walls of windows, surrounded by trees"–and David Shields. Poems by Tony Hoagland, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and Melissa Kwasny, and a troubling, unforgettable essay of witness by Stacia Saint Owens entitled "Temporary Classroom" help the issue seem to vibrate in the reader’s hands.

Willow Springs editor Sam Ligon will be on hand during the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, teaching an afternoon workshop in the short-short story and joining a panel discussion about literary journals.

For those of you getting ready for the Conference, we’ll see you in three weeks! One spot remains in the Kathleen Alcalá workshop; the rest of the Conference is full. For more information, contact Registrar Hali Johnson at 360.385.3102, x114.