Christina Thompson, Editor
Christina Thompson is the author of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All (Bloomsbury, 2008) and the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Her essays and articles have appeared in Vogue, American Scholar, Journal of Pacific History,and the 1999, 2000, and 2006 editions of Best Australian Essays.
Editorial Philosophy: My area of expertise is literary nonfiction, including history, memoir, travel writing, literary criticism, narrative journalism, the personal essay, and other sub-genres. I like writing that displays a high degree of literary awareness and technical control. It can take any shape or form and I am interested in almost any subject. I also read, select, and edit the short fiction, commission and edit the book reviews, consult on the selection of both visual arts and poetry, and oversee the production of the journal.
Websites: www.comeonshore.com; http://seapeople.wordpress.com/
Major Jackson, Poetry Editor
Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton, 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His third volume of poetry, Holding Company, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. He is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Editorial Philosophy: I am excited most by poems that defamiliarize the well-known, poems that are taut and elegant in their unfolding, yet not overwrought or overtly inventive. A plain style can be as compelling as one that reaches for transcendent utterance, while poems that delve into underexplored areas or risk saying the unsayable also capture my attention. I like poems that exhibit rich moments of figuration, poems that are conscious of rhythm and meaning, and poems that make claims on our lives or enact historical, social, literary, and spiritual awareness, while remaining grounded in the multiple facets of our lives.
Website: www.majorjackson.com
Nam Le, Fiction Editor
Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He is author of The Boat (Knopf, 2008), which has received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prize Minister's Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature (Best Writing Award), the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Book of the Year, a U.S. National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Fiction Selection, as well as numerous other awards, fellowships and shortlistings. The Boat has been translated into 13 languages and its stories widely anthologised.
Editorial Philosophy: What am I looking for? The threshold for me is pretty basic: does this story make me want to keep reading it? Beyond that it’s really case by case. In general, I’ll go for something raw and strong over something polished and less strong, something strange over something familiar. It’s that Justice Potter Stewart calculus: you can’t put a name to it but you know it when you see it.
Website: www.namleonline.com
Judith Larsen, Visual Arts Editor
Judith Larsen has taught painting, drawing, and design at Wellesley College, the Boston Architectural Center, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Mass. College of Art, and Harvard University. She is represented in the DeCordova Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Graham Gund and Stephen D. Paine Collection. She is currently represented by the RHYS/MENDES Gallery in LA and Brazil and by Eli Klein Fine Art in New York.
Editorial Philosophy: The process of gathering art for the Harvard Review begins with a global scavenger hunt for images that might lend themselves to a narrative environment. This unruly collection is then curated into various groups, one of which eventually coalesces into the art for a single issue. In each publication I try to represent a range of known and unknown artists, artists of different ages and genders, and many types of media, while trying to span the bridge from realism to abstraction. I also try to include at least one artist who is dealing directly with the written word.
Website: www.judithlarsen.com
Laura Healy, Managing Editor
Laura Healy is the translator of Roberto Bolaño's poetry collections The Romantic Dogs (New Directions, 2008), Tres (New Directions, 2011) and The Unknown University (New Directions, forthcoming). Her translations of Bolaño and other Latin American poets have appeared in Harper's, Paris Review, The Believer, The Nation, and many other journals. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she also runs a web design company, Chocolog Media, that specializes in site design and web marketing for writers, artists, and publishers.
Editorial Philosophy: I try to keep Harvard Review running smoothly, doing everything from opening the mail to reading submissions. I am also trying to help the journal adapt to the future by pushing for more translations and online features, and by redesigning this website.
Websites: www.lhealy.com, www.chocolog.com
Alex Camlin, Designer
Alex Camlin is the Creative Director at Da Capo Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition, he has designed book covers for several other publishers, including Faber & Faber, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon and Schuster, and Picador. He has taught courses in book design at Emerson College, and his work has been recognized several times by the AIGA, Print Magazine’s Regional Design Annual, and Bookbuilders of Boston.
Design Philosophy: After several years of designing covers for Harvard Review, I was excited to have the chance, in 2007, to bring a singular vision to bear on the entire package—interior and cover. The resulting text design is intended to provide a more inviting, book-like experience for the reader, and a more flexible, useful design for the Harvard Review editors. The new cover design functions as both a template—which anchors the identity of the journal with a static yet iconic structure for information—and a “blank canvas” where an attempt is made to capture the essence of the rich and eclectic forms of writing and art found in each issue. Look for the covers to come in pairs—each new design will be reinterpreted in the following issue, and then reinvented before further reinterpretation.
Website: http://alexcamlin.blogspot.com/
Readers and Interns
Harvard Review is extraordinarily grateful for the help we receive from our dedicated interns and readers.
Current Readers:
Rachel Dutkowski (senior fiction reader)
Deborah Pursch (senior non-fiction reader)
Current Interns:
Kailyn Corrigan
Rumur Dowling
Mark Chiusano
Sezen
Elizabeth O'Brien
Alexandra
Erik Fredner
