Cosmos helped me find the joy of not-knowing, the bittersweet delight of bewilderment.

In his editor's note for the Spring 2021 issue, SR editor Adam Ross reminds us that spring is a time to dwell in inevitability and uncertainty. "The leaves," as he says, "bud in spite of us.” And this season of change and healing brings with it recommendations that ask us to bear witness, to re-examine ourselves and our sense of understanding.

The going wisdom seems to be that this spring we will emerge from our year of pandemic—from what has been, given the staggering loss of life and ceaseless political strife, a dark winter—into “something like normality.” I beg to differ.

The Sewanee Review is pleased to announce that Vievee Francis is the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

This essay gave me my first taste of the singular sense of peace that arises from satisfactorily explaining things to myself through writing, and I think I’ll be chasing that magic for the rest of my life.

This story is full of loss, but to me, this is the real tragedy of the book: the smaller, quieter sadness of how easily we could misinterpret how to live and miss our entire life.

Can you imagine sitting in a café in the near future, among strangers, lovers, and children, the relief of another human lightly touching your wrist? Can you imagine all of the gentleness that is still to come of this world?

I think in all of my work, I am interested in characters who find themselves stranded in moments and in lives that they did not see coming. You wake up one day and suddenly you’re an adult, and all of those choices you didn’t even know you were making have cohered into a life and set of circumstances. How do you negotiate that? How do you navigate the alienness of your own life?

Many are predicting a long, dark winter. We hope this issue keeps you company as the season gives on to spring.