This year's feature section, guest edited by Kirstin L. Squint, is historic, the first focused on Native American Literature of North Carolina. The feature section includes creative nonfiction by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), and poetry by Mary Leauna Christensen (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), and Tonya Holy Elk (Oglala Lakota/Lumbee descent), as well as painting, photography, sculpture, and pottery by Cherokee, Lumbee, and Catawba artists. The cover is a paper weaving, a new form created by Eastern Band and Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rhiannon Skye Tafoya, based on the traditional Cherokee river cane basket. In addition to the work by Indigenous writers and artists, the special feature section also includes literary criticism and an interview by scholars of Native American and Southern literature. They discuss work by Cherokee writers Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Gladys Cardiff, and Blake Hausman; Lumbee writers Brittany D. Hunt, Leslie Locklear, Christina Pacheco, Barbara Braveboy-Locklear, Anetra L. Dial, Becky Goins, and Wendy Moore-Cummings; and the eighteenth century testimonio of a woman from the town of Joara, mostly likely Catawba, Teresa Martin. The Flashbacks and North Carolina Miscellany sections of this issue include another interview (with Phillip Lewis about his debut novel The Barrowfields) and more literary criticism (on John Darnielle's fiction), as well as the 2022 winners and other honorees of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize (1st place, Ellen Miller Reid, and 2nd place, Theresa Dowell Blackinton), Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize (winner Audrey Jennifer Smith), and James Applewhite Poetry Prize contests (1st place and honorable mention poems by Barbara Campbell and second place by Nancy Swanson).
