Under review

Jeanne Leiby cringes at the mention of being the first female editor in the Southern Review’s 73-year history, preferring instead to be called simply the literary journal’s next editor.

“You wouldn’t have said Bret Lott was the fifth male editor,” she says. “That would be silly. My gender should be a footnote, not a highlight.”

Still, Leiby said she couldn’t be happier in her new post, which she took over in January after Lott left the Review to focus on his writing and return to teaching at the College of Charleston, where he was writer-in-

residence and professor of English before coming to LSU in 2004.

Leiby, 43, is originally from Michigan. She taught for a decade at the University of Central Florida, including the past five years as editor of the literary journal Florida Review.

She stumbled upon the Southern Review job listing in March while searching the Modern Language Association Web site, hoping to find a job for one of her graduate students.

“The Southern Review has such an illustrious history and it’s so much a part of the literary landscape, my first reaction was, ‘Oh, this is an inside hire,’” Leiby says. “I figured they probably already knew who they were going to hire. That’s not to say anything bad about LSU, that’s just the way these things sort of happen. They usually have someone in mind.”

Still intrigued by the prospect of working at the Southern Review, she made a promise to herself that she wouldn’t labor over her submission. She cranked out a cover letter and updated the materials in her digital portfolio in an hour and sent it off.

LSU contacted her in June for an interview and offered to fly her in. She accepted, but politely declined the airfare, opting instead to drive, eager to test out her new convertible and to explore Baton Rouge. She fell in love with the city and the campus and, despite a successful interview with university officials, left convinced it would be an inside hire and so she didn’t expect she’d hear back from them again. That cynicism melted in early July after Vice Provost Chuck Wilson called to tell her the job was hers.

“She has an almost palpable vitality when it comes to matters of literature and its publication,” outgoing editor Lott said in his farewell letter. “Rest assured, dear readers, that the Southern Review is in good hands.”

Leiby’s predecessors have included some of the most celebrated literary minds of our time, including Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren and literary critic Cleanth Brooks.

Leiby took over the journal’s top post in January, and the summer 2008 issue will be her first. Contained in its pages will be the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Philip Levine, a personal favorite of Leiby’s, whom she credits as one of her biggest inspirations. He will join the ranks of Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Aldous Huxley and Wallace Stevens, celebrated writers who’ve graced the pages of the Southern Review.

Leiby has stayed busy since January. Instead of hiring a co-editor, Leiby got approval to create two post-graduate fellowships, each paying $32,000, the second-highest paid fellowships of their kind in the country (the highest being $56,000 at Princeton University.) Each fellowship comes with a two-year contract and full benefits.

In only 30 days Leiby is happy to report she received 70 “absolutely stunning applications from all over the country.”

“We have a wonderful staff here, but it takes a lot to put out four issues a year,” Leiby says. “We’re really at capacity so these new positions can help us free up some time to do other things that I think the Southern Review should, could, might do.”

Leiby is interested in community-based outreach, starting community writing groups, creative writing workshops and participating with local schools. She also wants to update the Review’s Web site with blogs, writers forums and podcasts of writers reading their work so people have more reason to visit the site than simply to “find out submission guidelines.”

“The Southern Review is a great magazine, but it needs to be a great community, too,” Leiby says. “We should be the hub of the literary community here and we are in some ways, but maybe not in enough ways.” lsu.edu/tsr