Editor Interview: Red River Review

Writing & Visual Arts

We admire publications and publishers that combine strong editorial vision, artistic seriousness, and care for the communities they serve. A few we especially admire include The Indianapolis Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, Copper Canyon Press, Atlanta Review, Scalawag Magazine, and Gulf Coast. We appreciate The Indianapolis Review’s attention to poetry and visual art, Tupelo Quarterly’s commitment to creative risk and generous literary community, Split Lip’s voice-driven contemporary work, Copper Canyon’s long-standing devotion to poetry, Atlanta Review’s international reach, Scalawag’s place-based storytelling and cultural engagement, and Gulf Coast’s meaningful intersection of literature and fine arts.

As an editor, I’m drawn to writers whose work carries emotional depth, formal intelligence, image, voice, narrative force, witness, humor, moral imagination, and imaginative risk. Some writers I return to include Ocean Vuong, Li-Young Lee, Wislawa Szymborska, Eavan Boland, Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, Joy Harjo, Carolyn Forché, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Hass, Federico García Lorca, Fady Joudah, Quan Barry, William Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, Flannery O’Connor, Sandra Cisneros, Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris, Raymond Carver, Mary Karr, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Anton Chekhov, Haruki Murakami, and Gabriel García Márquez.

Red River Review is a literary arts journal for writing, visual art, and creative practice. We publish poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid/interdisciplinary work, photography, and visual art.
What sets us apart is our interest in work that feels alive on the page or in the image. We look for strong voice, memorable imagery, emotional depth, humor, a sense of place, and a willingness to take risks. We want work that helps us see differently and stays with us after we’ve read or viewed it.
We read with care, present accepted work thoughtfully, and preserve published work in a lasting digital archive. We see Red River Review as both a publication and a place for ongoing creative practice.

Send us work that feels necessary. We are interested in poems, stories, essays, hybrid work, photography, and visual art that show attention to language, image, structure, narrative movement, and emotional truth. We welcome risk, strangeness, quietness, intensity, and formal experimentation when the work feels intentional and fully considered. Please read the journal before submitting — it’s free — follow the guidelines carefully, and send work that represents your strongest current practice.

The ideal submission creates a sense of encounter: with a voice, image, question, landscape, body, pressure, or way of seeing that feels particular to the writer or artist. We are drawn to work that trusts its own materials — image, scene, plot, setting, voice, structure, and silence — to carry meaning rather than explaining itself. We want the resonance to arise from the work itself. In writing, we look for something unfolding on the page: an atmosphere, tension, image, or human complication that continues to deepen after we finish reading. In visual art and photography, we look for work that creates a sustained act of attention. The strongest images do more than document a subject; they reveal a way of seeing through composition, texture, light, color, gesture, atmosphere, or visual tension. An ideal visual submission should invite us to return to it and continue noticing.

Because Red River Review has expanded to include short fiction, creative nonfiction, flash, hybrid, and interdisciplinary work, we want submitters to know that these pieces do not need to follow a conventional model. We welcome work that is quiet, fragmented, nonlinear, image-driven, lyric, or formally experimental. But the work still needs an anchor: tension, relational experience, revelation, a distinctive voice, or a unique way of seeing or being in the world.
A story or essay does not need a traditional plot or tidy resolution, but it should be held together by something carefully developed. There should be a sense of movement, pressure, consequence, or discovery — some reason the piece takes the shape it does. The same is true for visual, hybrid, and interdisciplinary work: we are open to many shapes, but we want to feel that the work understands the shape it has chosen.

We do not read cover letters or bios during editorial review. Publication credits do not influence our decisions; we want the work to speak for itself. We may ask a few permissions questions related to publication, archiving, marketing, and promotion, but these are administrative, not evaluative. If we accept your work, we’ll contact you directly for a short bio, social links, website, and a high-resolution JPEG image for the contributor box.

We read poems, flash, and shorter work in full and often aloud. For longer fiction and creative nonfiction, we read far enough to understand the piece’s voice, structure, stakes, and direction. Because our prose limit is 3,000 words, we do not expect long stretches of setup before the work begins to develop. The opening does not need to be loud or dramatic, but it should begin establishing the pressure, movement, attention, or relational charge that will carry the piece forward.

Work under consideration is read by both the editor and associate editor. We discuss the piece, consider its fit with the issue, and work toward consensus before making a final decision. When needed, we may bring in an outside reader for additional perspective on language, subject matter, form, cultural context, or visual/interdisciplinary practice. Our goal is to make thoughtful decisions that serve the work, the contributor, and the issue as a whole.

A day in the life of an editor at Red River Review usually means moving between reading, production, and keeping the journal running — often around a day job. I might be reading submissions, rereading work under consideration, or talking through pieces with the associate editor. I might also be laying out an issue, managing the archive, gathering contributor materials, checking permissions, preparing the newsletter, handling marketing, or thinking through how to bring readers to the work.
Since the relaunch, the role has involved more than choosing what to publish. It means shaping each issue, maintaining the archive, presenting the work well, and building systems that will help Red River Review grow into its expanded vision. Like many independent literary projects, it happens in the margins of ordinary life, which makes sustainability and care with time especially important.