Editor's Note: The Soundings team compiled this issue before the November election, so it makes no mention of it. However, given the myriad reactions across the globe and within our RWW community to the results of elections at the federal, state, and local levels, we wanted to note these events. We face many unknowns, especially for the most vulnerable and historically exploited members of our community. Though we know it is but a small offering, we hope that this issue of Soundings offers a reprieve into craft and community and instills courage for the years ahead. Our world needs your words now more than ever.

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Dearest RWW Community—

I write to you all now, my sweet community of writers, in a flurry. I am in my thesis year of the program, and many of you may relate to me when I admit that I keep finding myself knee deep in a close reading of some enjambment or some anaphora in a cold sweat, asking myself a la Talking Heads: “Well, how did I get here?” Gluttonous, I turn to the balm of more poems in these moments. In particular, I turn to Summer Farah’s sequence of poems turning to Etel Adnan with reverence and tenderness, pointing to and interrogating earnest pop cultural obsessions. In “I Tell Etel Adnan about Mitski,” Farah writes, “Do you trust anxious intuition? That looks into the future with a nervous throat? Sometimes, what looks back is as affirming as it is warning: you know what this path can bring.” As I face the end of my time in this program, the days washing at my feet and pulling away as the tide, I wonder if poetry (and Summer and Etel and Mitski) might teach me something, too, about trusting anxious intuition.

In exercising this trust and in compiling this issue, I also encounter further balms for my nerves in the flurry: we at Soundings are thrilled to publish RWW faculty Renee Simms’s “But, Is It True?” which opened our residency this past summer. As I revisited Renee’s work, I felt the memory in my wrist of scratching out my notes as she offered us a portal of possibility to consider how we craft emotional truths in our work. In this issue, we also celebrate a slew of newly published books by RWW faculty, offering some hope for the prospects of publishing and some insight into the labor of writing. We also take a look back at residency with a photo album sourced from our RWW community. As always, we also celebrate our community through our Publications, Announcements, and Literary Citizenship listings.

Finally, I want to celebrate Kerry Heckman who has joined our editorial team as both our Contributing Writer and Assistant Editor. We are so thrilled to have her on the team!

We hope you enjoy the Fall 2024 issue of Soundings!

—antmen pimentel mendoza