Christina Thompson, Editor

Christina Thompson is the author of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All (Bloomsbury USA, 2008). Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Vogue, American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History,and in the 1999, 2000, and 2006 editions of Best Australian Essay. She lives near Boston with her husband and three sons.

Editorial Philosophy: Harvard Review publishes short fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction. My own area of expertise is the essay—also called literary, creative, or narrative nonfiction. This includes memoir, travel, history, personal essays, some kinds of literary criticism, narrative journalism, and various other sub-genres. The key, from my point of view, is not either the subject or the style, but rather the quality of the prose. I am interested in "literary" writing, by which I do not mean old-fashioned or elaborate prose, but writing that evinces a high degree of literary awareness and technical control. It can take pretty much any shape or form and I am certainly interested in almost any subject. I also read and select short fiction for the review, and commission and edit the book reviews. I consult on the selection of both visual arts and poetry.

Website: http://www.comeonshore.com/index.php

Major Jackson , Poetry Editor

Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton, 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His third volume of poetry, Holding Company, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. He is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Editorial Philosophy: I am excited most by poems that defamiliarize the well-known, poems that are taut and elegant in their unfolding, yet not overwrought or overtly inventive. A plain style can be as compelling as one that reaches for transcendent utterance, while poems that delve into underexplored areas or risk saying the unsayable also capture my attention. I like poems that exhibit rich moments of figuration, poems that are conscious of rhythm and meaning, and poems that make claims on our lives or enact historical, social, literary, and spiritual awareness, while remaining grounded in the multiple facets of our lives.

Website: http://www.majorjackson.com/

Nam Le, Fiction Editor

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He is author of The Boat (Knopf, 2008) and the recipient of the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the University of East Anglia. His fiction has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Editorial Philosophy: What am I looking for? The threshold for me is pretty basic: does this story make me want to keep reading it? Beyond that it’s really case by case. In general, I’ll go for something raw and strong over something polished and less strong, something strange over something familiar. It’s that Justice Potter Stewart calculus: you can’t put a name to it but you sure know it when you see it.

Website: http://www.namleonline.com/index.html

Judith Larsen, Visual Arts Editor

Judith Larsen has taught painting, drawing, and design at Wellesley College, the Boston Architectural Center, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Mass. College of Art, and Harvard University. She is represented in the DeCordova Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Graham Gund and Stephen D. Paine Collection. She is currently represented by the RHYS/MENDES Gallery in LA and Brazil and by Eli Klein Fine Art in New York.

Editorial Philosophy: The process of gathering art for the Harvard Review begins with a global scavenger hunt for images that might lend themselves to a narrative environment. This unruly collection is then curated into various groups, one of which eventually coalesces into the art for a single issue. In each publication I try to represent a range of known and unknown artists, artists of different ages and genders, and many types of media, while trying to span the bridge from realism to abstraction. I also try to include at least one artist who is dealing directly with the written word.

Website: http://www.judithlarsen.com/