The Oxford American launched in Spring 1992, which makes this year the magazine’s 25th anniversary. The Spring 2017 issue will kick-off our year-long commemoration with a number of exciting features: the first in a series of excerpts from Jesmyn Ward’s highly anticipated forthcoming novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing; a selection of photographs by longtime OA contributor Jack Spencer, from his new book This Land; and a previously unpublished poem by Margaret Walker, with an introduction by Kiese Laymon.

Other highlights from the issue: Essays and dispatches from across the South, including New Orleans; West Palm Beach, Florida; rural Texas; and Lexington, Kentucky. Micromemoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly. Poetry by Morri Creech, George Ella Lyon, and more. Short fiction by Glenn Taylor. An examination of Guy Davenport by Brian Blanchfield. An investigated feature about an unsolved double murder in Kentucky by reporter Nick Tabor.

Plus: columns by John T. Edge and Chris Offutt; Rien Fertel on the history of Mardi Gras’s Flambeaux carriers; David Searcy on Wayne Hall’s mystic assemblage art; and a powerful lyric essay by Michelle García about her 2016, a year of despair, hope, and art. 

Cover image: "Starfall," St. Augustine, Florida (2008), by Jack Spencer.