CALL FOR A NEW EDITOR
Embarking on its 47th year of uninterrupted publication, The Wallace Stevens Journal is something of a cultural institution.
No other twentieth-century poet in English has had a one-author journal devoted to their work for such a long time, and the quality of scholarship has remained consistently high. In recent years, the journal has amply demonstrated, through multiple special issues, how Stevens’s life and works continue to reward concentrated study from a wealth of perspectives, whether these be thematic (Stevens in relation to the everyday, or to music), methodological (cognitive literary studies, the study of world literature), pedagogical (teaching the poet in an international context), genre-oriented (his letter-writing as an intrinsic part of his literary heritage), or literary-historical (the influence of Whitman and Emerson, comparisons with Frost, Eliot, Yeats, Auden). Along the way, the community of scholars that the Wallace Stevens Society brings together by publishing the journal and organizing conferences, workshops, and panels has produced various spinoff collections of essays as well, including, most recently, The New Wallace Stevens Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
For a combination of reasons, the journal’s editor, Bart Eeckhout, will be unable to continue in this role beyond 2023, his thirteenth year at the helm. As a result, the journal is urgently looking for a new chief editor who would be willing to take it to its golden jubilee in a few years’ time and help plan for the future. That future might involve a change in format (e.g., annual instead of biannual publication), a collaboration with other one-author societies with relevant connections (e.g., Stevens’s contemporaries Moore, Williams, and/or Frost), a different production format (e.g., electronically only, open access, appearing at irregular intervals), and so forth. The new editor will be able to weigh heavily on such decisions, all while collaborating with the officers of the Society and the editorial board members.
Editing a journal is teamwork and to facilitate the job the new editor will be able to rely on a substantial group of collaborators: an art editor (for the covers), a poetry editor (for the unsolicited poems the journal includes), a book review editor, one or more associate editors (number and identity open for discussion), a managing editor (an important new function introduced to help the transition), an editorial board of more than twenty international experts, and a few volunteers helping out with aspects of copyediting and proofreading. For setting up panels and conferences that might result in the submission of individual essays or the launching of guest-edited special issues, the editor will be able to fall back on the
officers of the Society, which will have a new young President in function by the end of 2023. In all of these activities, Bart Eeckhout and the current President, Lisa Goldfarb, plan to stay involved as well, so that the new editor shouldn’t feel unsupported and can grow into their new role. The material production of the journal (typesetting, printing, distribution, financial management of subscriptions) is entirely in the hands of the Johns Hopkins University Press, which publishes over a hundred top-quality journals as part of its portfolio, Project Muse.
The role of editor of a specialized one-author journal requires a certain amount of expertise and particular skills besides a collaborative and entrepreneurial spirit and a professional position that allows you to commit for a number of years. But it has many rewards: it offers editing experience that is invaluable at various pedagogical and scholarly levels; it allows you to build a closeknit network of scholars who share very similar interests and are intensely grateful for the work you do; it offers the best possible research experience about a specific author because of the wide range of critical angles with which you engage in detail as an editor; and it does especially junior colleagues a great service by helping them to strengthen and present their work.
Interested candidates are requested to send a brief letter of motivation and a CV to the current editor of the journal and the current President of the Wallace Stevens Society at their respective institutional addresses: bart.eeckhout@uantwerp.be & lisa.goldfarb@nyu.edu. We will get back to you as soon as possible to discuss possibilities. We must ask, however, that you flag signs of interest without undue delay: to set up the transition, it is important that we can find a new editor by March 1, 2023.
Thank you for caring. It would be a great loss if The Wallace Stevens Journal were unable to continue in any form or shape beyond 2023.