Dear Readers,
This is Ryan, the poetry editor, writing to you tonight to give you a quick update to what has been going on lately at the Shanghai Literary Review.
Our first publication is going to be coming out on July 1st, and I think all of us at the Review are super excited about its release. When I look through the work selected, I know that our inaugural issue will always be something special.
We have writers from around the world bringing up issues both large and small, and when I read over these pieces I learn things about Shanghai, but there are lessons from around the world as well. What a bookstore means to someone without access to books. What life in a small Indian village feels like. What tragedy looks like from the other side of the world. These perspectives display the power of writing at its best, and I think their voices have stories that reach out to everyone.
As always, though, we are accepting new work, so I would encourage you to submit if you are considering doing so. There's no fee to submit, and we are always happy to see new voices in the stack.
For now, we are just coming off of The Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday dedicated to the poet Qu Yuan. He drowned himself in a local river, but the local people rushed out in their boats to recover the body. When they couldn't find him, the threw rice balls into the river to keep the fish from eating the body. The boat races continue today, a moment each year that celebrates the close connection a people can have with their poetry.