Spring 2022

VQR’s Spring issue tends to coincide with a buoyant season. But just as the most recent surge of the coronavirus pandemic has ebbed, war has broken out in Europe. Anxieties are piling up, and yet people seem determined to step stubbornly into some semblance of an outdated normalcy. If anything, this spring is a conflicted and bittersweet season. The work herein—including Claire Rosen’s unforgettable cover image—embraces that tension. It’s a tension that animates Ellyn Gaydos’s feature essay on love, death, and life on a New York pig farm, where the brutal and the sublime intertwine daily. Conflicting sentiments run through other works: cruelty and tenderness in a boyhood memoir by Joseph Earl Thomas; Miranda Featherstone’s essayistic reflection on commitment in the face of agonizing losses; Ara Oshagan’s photo portfolio on disconnect and ritual among the Armenian diaspora; and a suite of fiction—by Karin Lin-Greenberg, Evgeniya Dame, and Gothataone Moeng—featuring familiar pasts fast dissolving into uncertain futures.
Spring 2022

Volume 98, Number 1

Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2022 cover
Print: $20.00
Digital download: $20.00

Table of contents

Essays 
Memoir 
Photography 
Fiction 
Poetry 
Human Practice 
Open Letter 
Drawing It Out 
#VQRTrueStory 
Editor's Desk 

Contributor Profiles

Jim Coan is an American affective neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, writer, podcast host, human-rights activist, and psychology professor at the University of Virginia, where he serves as director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscie

Miranda Featherstone is a social worker and a writer. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times and the Yale Review. She lives in Rhode Island.

Gothataone Moeng is a former fiction fellow in the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Ara Oshagan is a diasporic multidisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural worker whose practice explores collective and personal histories of dispossession, legacies of violence, identity, and (un)imagined futures.

Anuj Shrestha is a cartoonist and illustrator who resides in Philadelphia. His comics have been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Comics.

Spring 2024 Cover; Photo by Mathias Depardon
Spring 2024
Volume 100, Number 1
Fiction Issue Cover. Photo by Adam Ekberg.
Fiction 2024
Volume 100, Number 2
Fall 2024 Cover. Illustration by Johanna Goodman.
Fall 2024
Volume 100, Number 3
Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring/Summer 2023 cover
Spring/Summer 2023
Volume 99, Number 1