New Issue of Illuminations Released

The new issue of Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing is now available.  This issue marks a change of editorship for the magazine, which has been edited by Professor Simon Lewis since 1985 and supported by the College of Charleston since Lewis’s arrival at the College in 1996.  The new editor will be Dr. Meg Scott-Copses, a Senior Instructor in the English Department, who brings her own expertise as a poet to the task. To mark the publication of this new issue, the editors held a launch-party at Blue Bicycle Books at 420 King Street on Thursday July 28th where founding editor Dr Peter McMillan, currently a professor of English at Kyorin University in Tokyo in Japan, spoke.

Since its first appearance in 1982 with a poem by Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney, Illuminations has published the work of two more Literature Nobelists (Joseph Brodsky and Nadine Gordimer) and two Peace Prize-winners (Desmond Tutu and climate-scientist Chris Magadza).  The magazine has run special issues on writing from South Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Zimbabwe, and has featured prominent photographers and artists, such as Simon Norfolk and David Hockney, as well as poets and writers such as Athol Fugard and Tim O’Brien.

The current issue continues the magazine’s long-standing policy of publishing new and up-and-coming writers alongside already established ones, and includes writers from America, Ecuador, England, Hungary, Lithuania, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, and Zimbabwe.  The writing is enhanced by the inclusion of cover and interior art-work by acclaimed New York painter David Stern. Individual copies of the magazine are available for $8:50 from editor Meg Scott-Copses, Department of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424-0001 (phone 843-953-4972).