Virginia Woolf once wrote that “middlebrows” only have books by dead authors and paintings from dead artists because to have living art requires living taste. We feel fortunate to routinely open up envelopes from living artists and bring to you the poems and short stories that strike us as particularly evocative of our time. Thank you for taking a risk with what you read, and for daring to have living taste.

Prompted by a friend who was feeling the spirit of National Poetry Month, one of us spent April sharing poems with a small group of friends that more often expounds on the latest comic piece in The Onion or the outrage of Rolling Stone’s myopic list of greatest records. We typed in poems we wanted the others to see and e-mailed them out. Instead of subjecting the poems to deep analysis, we would often reply with a “wow” or a “thanks.” We hope that for our readers Crab Creek Review is also such a sharing among friends. Of course we don’t deny that the works herein are open to criticism and may provoke more profound insights, but we do hope that one or two elicits just a simple 'wow.'

This type of pure appreciation is something we’ve all learned to foster through the example of Terri Stone, our co-editor who has recently left the collective in order to spend more time with her wife and daughter. Whether she was advocating for a poem that might speak to the reader without requiring a Ph.D. or bringing us a story that could make people laugh, Terri has been one of the major reasons our magazine can still make the claim of accessibility. We admire the way she took publishing into the classroom and gave a new generation of writers a hands-on approach to getting their work out there. We looked forward to her jokes and now miss them at out meetings, even if we are pretty sure she overheard the bulk of them in the middle school cafeteria. We thank her for telling stories about her child that actually were funny! After seven years of working together, we are most grateful that Terri shared with us her love of writing and know from experience that she loves the people in her writing world even more.

We also would like to thank Shawnti Rockwell and Alison Charnell for their production help with this issue. Here it is.