About /

Our Mission /

Promoting artistic excellence through Southern literature.

Our Story /

The inaugural issue of SWR, published in June of 2009, was inspired by the Berry College Southern Women Writers Conference (1994/2012).

2022 Special Guest Editor 

Anamaria Santiago 

Anamaria is a Southern Latina who teaches first-year comp and sophomore lit surveys–including American lit, children’s and young adult lit, and comic books/graphic novels–at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When she’s not teaching, she’s in the garden or the woods, enjoying her amazing 6 month old, squeezing in writing sessions, or serving her community with various local non-profits. She has previously served as managing editor for NELLE literary journal and as editor and reader for several other literary publications.

Publisher / Editor

Alicia K. Clavell

Alicia K. Clavell has been writing about life and style in the South for almost two decades —whether in the pages of Southern Living magazine or in her book by Rockport/Quarry press, Southern Kitchens and Dining Spaces. Her writing has also been featured in magazines including Coastal Living, Decorating Step-by-Step, Lowe’s Creative Ideas, and Southern Living Weddings. She has served as editor or co-editor of Southern Living House Plans, Southern Living Kitchens & Baths, Birmingham Home & Garden, and Outdoor Advertising Magazine.

An award-winning poet, Alicia was recipient of the 2007 and 2009 University of Alabama at Birmingham Barkesdale-Maynard Prize in Poetry and the 1996 Berry College Eleanor B. North Creative Writing Award. She was also awarded first prize in the state poetry competition for the 2009 Hackney Literary Awards. Recent publications include the Birmingham Arts Journal and Red Truck Review. Alicia is a full-time writing instructor in Birmingham, Alabama; she is founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of the Southern Women’s Review. Please contact her at [email protected] or [email protected].

Co-Editor /

Helen Silverstein

Helen Silverstein is an artist, writer, and retired therapist. Helen weaves her experience as a therapist together with her work with very low-income families to create stories that take an authentic look at family relationships and societal hardships. She has published fiction and non-fiction in a variety of places, ranging from the Journal of Microliterature to The Liars League.  She is also a fiber artist, working primarily in paper,  constructed fibers, and clay. Helen has a Bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College in African American Studies and Religion and a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has also studied creative writing at the Stonecoast MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Editorial Board /

Tina Mozelle Braziel

Tina Mozelle Braziel, a graduate of the University of Oregon MFA program, directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  Her poetry has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Main Street Rag, Birmingham Poetry Review, Raleigh Review, and other journals. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building on Hydrangea Ridge.

Robert Collins

Born in New Jersey, Dr. Robert Collins was educated in Ohio, where he received his A.B. from Xavier University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Ohio State University.  While at OSU he received two Academy of American Poets Prizes.  He has published poems in a variety of literary magazines including Ascent, Cimarron Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Louisville Review, Connecticut Review, College English, Plainsongs, South Coast Poetry Journal, Ohio Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review.  He has received two Individual Artists Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 1993 and 1998, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize several times, received the Ascent Award for Poetry, selected by Brendan Galvin, and won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize. He taught American literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama in Birmingham for thirty years where he founded and edited Birmingham Poetry Review and directed the creative writing program. His chapbooks include The Inventor Poems, Greatest Hits, The Glass Blower, Lives We Have Chosen, and Occasions of Sin.  His latest book Naming the Dead was issued by FutureCycle Press in 2012 and is a finalist for the FCP Annual Book Prize.

Linda Frost

Dr. Linda Frost (Ph.D., SUNY at Stony Brook, 1990) came to UTC from Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, where she held the positions of Director of the Honors Program and Professor of English.  At EKU, Frost oversaw the revision of the honors curriculum and was the principal investigator on a $200,000 National Science Foundation grant to create the interdisciplinary biological and physical honors science course, SEEing Science in Appalachia.

A member of the Publications Board of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), Frost has published a number of essays in the Journal of NCHC and in 2012, she presented her work at the first international “Evoking Excellence in Higher Education” conference in Groningen, the Netherlands. Her current work-in-progress is Housing Honors, a monograph that includes the first large-scale survey of the physical structures honors occupies across the U.S.She is the author of Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1870 (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Conjoined Twins in Black and White: The Lives of Millie-Christine McKoy and Daisy and Violet Hilton (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).She is the immediate Past President of the Southern Regional Honors Council (SRHC) and with John Richardson, Director of the University Honors Program at the University of Louisville, co-hosted the annual SRHC conference in Louisville in April 2013.

Sandra Meek

Dr. Sandra Meek is the author of four books of poems, Road Scatter (Persea Books, 2012) , Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008), Burn (2005), and Nomadic Foundations (2002), as well as a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival (2001). A fifth book of poems, An Ecology of Elsewhere, is forthcoming from Persea Books in late 2015. She is also the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark 2007), which was awarded a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Agni, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review, among others. A recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has twice been awarded Georgia Author of the Year, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003 for Nomadic Foundations, which also was awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry. Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991, where she taught English at Boswelakgosi Junior Secondary School. She is Co-founding Editor of Ninebark Press, Director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. Born in El Paso, Texas, she grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado. She received her BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, and a PhD in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Denver. Since 1996, she has lived in Rome, Georgia.

Daniel Robbins

Daniel Robbins is a Hackney Award winner whose work has appeared in such journals as Birmingham Poetry Review, The Allegheny Review, Poetry, and StorySouth, among others. He was poetry editor and assistant editor-in-chief for Aura Literary Arts Review, copy editor for Kaleidoscope, and a technical writer for the UAB IT department. He received his MA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is currently working on a book about literature in the comic book medium entitled In Defense of Men in Tights.

Marc Silverstein

Marc Silverstein, Professor, received his PhD from Brown University. He specializes in modern and contemporary drama, feminist theory, postmodernism and literary theory. The author of Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power, he has published articles in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. From 1995-1997 he served as President of the International Harold Pinter Society. He is currently at work on a project exploring the epistemological, aesthetic, and ideological issues involved in staging historical drama.

James Watkins

Dr. James H. Watkins has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, and reference book entries on the subject of autobiography in the U.S. South. He edited the anthology Southern Selves: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing (Vintage, 1998) and is a member of the Executive Council of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. An Associate Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College, he teaches courses in U.S. southern literature (including a course on southern women writers), autobiography studies, 20th-century American literature, and the American West in film and literature. He served as co-director of the Southern Women Writers Conference at Berry College. Dr. Watkins received his MA and PhD in literature from the University of Florida.