Though “The Age of Anxiety” was Auden’s description for the unsettled mood of the mid-twentieth century, surely every era has a legitimate claim to the term. In early 2024, we find ourselves in undeniably precarious times—world unrest, a changing climate, threats to our democracy—and many of us are looking for meaningful ways to express our […]
Read More - Colorado Review Spring 2024
In “Reconsidering the Sunflowers,” Stephanie Harrison recalls her father’s habit of painting just one side of their family’s house a different color each year and the moment she saw this through fresh eyes: “Something in me had blinked and refocused. It was like the optical illusion I’d marveled over in fifth grade: beautiful woman or […]
Read More - Colorado Review Fall/Winter 2023
“I liked scanning the sky, looking for signals,” says the narrator of Kelly Luce’s “The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion.” “Even when nothing happened, there was still that heartbeat. It was a space—it was space—where I could process what was happening in my life.” We’re all probably looking and listening for signals most of […]
Read More - Colorado Review Summer 2023
“Whatever plans you think you got, you better get some others.” An ominous bit of advice given, in Brendan McKennedy’s “Deep River,” to a young woman struggling to make a meaningful life as a millhand in 1920s North Carolina, it might well be the motto for the last three years, when we’ve had to pivot, […]
Read More - Colorado Review Spring 2023
Longtime readers of Colorado Review have come to know the fall issue for featuring the winning story from the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. We are so pleased to showcase this year’s winner, Mike Murray’s “Night Owls,” selected by final judge Ramona Ausubel. Of this story, Ausubel writes: “ ‘Night Owls’ takes place in the darkness—characters […]
Read More - Colorado Review Fall/Winter 2022
As we make our way toward summer, our calendars begin to fill in anticipation of those longer days, those warmer nights: some of us braving travel again, some of us staying closer to home. Whether near or afar, we’ll likely spend more time with friends and family, though after more than two years of a […]
Read More - Colorado Review Summer 2022
As we approach the third year of the pandemic—an ongoing interruption, suspension, cessation—some of us have been struggling a bit with our sense of time: Did we do that last year or was it the year before . . . The months seem to flow one into the next, often without the usual demarcations of […]
Read More - Colorado Review Spring 2022
Among the many pleasures of this season is featuring the winning story from our annual Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. Now in its eighteenth year, the prize was established in honor of Liza Nelligan, a writer, scholar, literary editor, and alumna of Colorado State University’s English Department. This year, that story is Danny Thiemann’s “One […]
Read More - Colorado Review Fall/Winter 2021
It’s mid-May here as I wrap up this issue, and the snow from a not-unusual-for-Colorado storm just a few days ago is melting, giving way to something that bears some resemblance to spring, though I feel I hardly recognize it. For so many of us everywhere, this is a time when the familiar has been […]
Read More - Colorado Review Summer 2021
A year into the pandemic we each continue to find our own ways of understanding and grappling with the nature of isolation, seeking self-care and coping strategies in these Groundhog Days of staying in, staying safe, staying sane. Many of us are, not surprisingly, finding comfort and companionship in reading. Among the joys of literature […]
Read More - Colorado Review Spring 2021