December issue of Arkansas Review
features environmental look at Delta

The December issue of "Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies" has just been published by the Department of English and Philosophy at Arkansas State University.

Published three times a year, the periodical includes academic articles, fiction, poetry, interviews, visual art, and reviews which focus on the seven-state Mississippi River Delta.

The December issue features the transcript of a panel discussion, "What Is the Delta? An Environmental Sciences Perspective," which was part of Delta Blues Symposium IX, held at ASU in March 2003.

Organized by Jerry Farris, director of ASU's Environmental Sciences Ph.D. Program, the panel consisted of Charles Cooper of the United States Department of Agriculture, Jack Grubaugh of the Meeman Field Biological Field Station at the University of Memphis, and Billy Justus of the U.S. Geological Survey.

The issue also includes articles on the blues-influenced poetry of Sherley Ann Williams, written by Maria Johnson of Southern Illinois University, and stories about life on the road told by blues musicians, written by noted blues scholar Barry Lee Pearson of the University of Maryland.

Tom Williams, Creative Materials Editor for "Arkansas Review," contributed an interview with Delta novelist A. H. Harmon.

Other members of the ASU community whose work appears in the December issue include book reviewers H. Jason Combs, Brady M. Banta, Richard K. Freer, and Richard Allen Burns. Burns also contributed photographs as did ASU students Sadie Ivy and Virginia Sturgeon.

Fiction by George Singleton and Eric Tretheway, poetry, and an article on the newly established Tunica, Miss., Museum round out the issue.

The cover image, by Trina J. Dudley, is titled "Rural Sentinel."

The cost of the December issue is $7.50; an annual subscription $20. Checks should be made payable to "ASU Foundation" with "Arkansas Review" on the memo line and sent to the Department of English and Philosophy, Arkansas State University, P.O. Box 1890, State University, AR 72467.

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