Stevie Edwards of the South Carolina Review Recommends...

As both an editor and a teacher, I have a similar philosophy for responding to poems: I always try my best to evaluate each poem on its own terms. I try to identify, aesthetically speaking, what type of poem each piece is trying to be, and then I judge its success based on the style and mode. As someone who tends to write narrative poems, a less positive part of my MFA experience involved frequently receiving feedback that I should cut the narrative structure out of my poems and rewrite them in more of a lyric mode—frequently with about half of the words in the poems crossed off. My personal experiences with having my poems judged and edited based on criteria that seemed tangential to my aims as a writer have inspired me to read widely and diversely so that I can understand the choices being made in many different types of poems. It’s my goal as an editor to give every poem a fair shake, to meet it and evaluate it on its own terms. Coming to the submissions queue with this attitude of openness toward poems of many different aesthetics allows me to curate diverse and dynamic poetry sections.

—Stevie Edwards, poetry editor, the South Carolina Review