East Carolina University's award-winning literary journal, the North Carolina Literary Review, edited by Margaret Bauer, recently published its 2003 issue, which featured Aviation in North Carolina Literature and Letters, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight.  The special feature section includes an interview with North Carolina novelist Clyde Edgerton, in which he discusses his experiences as a pilot for the US Air Force during the Vietnam War.  Edgerton entertained a full house at the Willis Bldg. in Greenville Sept. 4 with readings and songs to celebrate the 2003 NCLR edition.

In this issue, former assistant editor of NCLR, Melissa Edmundson, named Outstanding Graduate Student of the English Department in 2002, contributed an article about the correspondence of North Carolina pilots during World War I. Lorraine Robinson also contributed an article on an eighteenth-century German novel, in which the main character flies across the ocean and lands in the area now called Winston-Salem.  English Department graduate assistant Maryscot Mullins, one of the "flight" issue's assistant editors, wrote an article on the World War II poetry of Randall Jarrell.  Assistant editor since 2001 and English Department graduate assistant Celeste Pottier added a sidebar on ECU English alumnus Rick Atkinson's latest Pulitzer Prize (his third).  Atkinson was also an embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne Division, covering the 2003 conflict in Iraq.

On the cover of NCLR 2003 are rare images from the Wright brothers' 1911 glider experiments on the Outer Banks.  These cyanotypes were owned by Alpheus Drinkwater, the telegrapher who announced the Wrights' 1903 success to the world.  Drinkwater's daughter, Marguerite Drinkwater Booth, allowed these blue-toned prints (an early method of photography) to be reproduced and published for the first time by NCLR.  Lorraine Robinson interviewed Mrs. Booth for the Joyner Library Manuscript Collection's oral histories and was instrumental in obtaining the cover images for NCLR.  The cover design is by an alumnus of ECU's School of Art, Mary Thiesen, who served as NCLR's Art Director for three years and under whose directorship NCLR won its Best Journal Design award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 1999.

The 2003 issue also includes an essay on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel by recent North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee, Elizabeth Spencer, author of numerous novels and short stories, including The Light in the Piazza, which was made into a movie starring Olivia DeHavilland; poetry by Duke University Professor James Applewhite, who has a dozen collections of poetry published by Louisiana State University Press; and another interview with Clyde Edgerton and his friend, the late Tim McLaurin, novelist and memoirist who died in 2002 after a long battle with cancer.

Other contributers from the ECU Dept. of English include: Tom Shields, who wrote  an essay review of "New Works on Roanoke and the 'Lost Colony'"; Mary Carroll-Hackett (now assistant professor at Longwood College in Virginia), who reviewed Wendy Brenner's latest collection of fiction, Phonecalls from the Dead Stories (Algonquin 2001); Lorraine Robinson, who provided her latest installment in the serialized "Dictionary of North Carolina Writers"; and Jake Mills, who contributed a personal remembrance of Tim McLaurin.  Bill Hallberg and Randall Martoccia collaborated in choosing the fiction for this issue, and Peter Makuck's new short story collection, Costly Habits, was reviewed by Michael Parker of UNC-G.