John Linstrom is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection To Leave for Our Own Country (Black Lawrence Press, April 2024), a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at The Climate Museum in New York City, and the series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press. His editions of Bailey's work include The Nature-Study Idea and Related Writings (Cornell UP, forthcoming), The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion (coedited; Cornell UP, 2019), and The Holy Earth (Counterpoint, 2015). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Northwest Review, The Christian Century, and North American Review; his literary nonfiction has appeared in The Antioch Review and Newfound; and his scholarship appears in The Sower and the Seer: Perspectives on the Intellectual History of the American Midwest (Wisconsin Historical Society, 2021). He holds a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University and an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University, and he lives with his wife and baby daughter in Queens. He is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Medium.
Listen to me reading my recently published poem, "Blueshift," here:
There is something special about a journal that takes as much care with its physical production as with the literature and art within it. It's an honor and thrill to be in this issue of Northwest Review, the last under the editorship of Natalie Staples and S. Tremaine Nelson. Steve Nelson's kind notes on rejections from the Paris Review years ago were massively important to my confidence as a writer, and when I heard he had left that journal to revive Northwest Review I got a submission together posthaste. I'm so happy this poem—a dear one to me, which marks the moment in my book To Leave for Our Own Country that my wife's pregnancy is revealed—has found such a wonderful second home in these pages.
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