Current Volume: Volume 26 (2025)

Editor's Note

Literature has always felt like home to me. I can remember my early days as a reader, stockpiling books from the public library and the Scholastic book fair, neatly arranging them, making the difficult choice of which to read first, and then diving in. I’d spend countless quiet hours away from whatever drama was happening, whether it was within the walls of my home or on the sixth-grade playground. In reading, I found solace; I met people who were simultaneously vastly different from me, and very much the same. CS Lewis once said, “We read to know we are not alone.” Indeed. I was never alone. To see ourselves in the experiences of others is a blessing, a privilege, and a basic human need.

Reading inspires empathy.

Ah, there’s that word we throw around so often: Empathy. And here we are in 2025, fighting to survive a world so divided by conflict we can hardly breathe. There is no middle ground, no respectful disagreement, no taking a walk in another person’s shoes. We are often caught between worlds of doom scrolling or digital detox; there seems at times to be no in between.

Sometimes, it seems, the empathy well has run dry.

But literature is still here. Writers are still here.

I am enormously proud of the writers who have graced us with their words in this issue of the Bryant Literary Review. Within the pages, you will find the absolute best of over 250 prose and poetry submissions. Our authors dig deep into themes like grief, spirituality, war, identity, friendship, and love. Their experiences with these themes are very personal; however, readers will see themselves in the most unlikely places. And for a while the world will feel a little less divided.

See? It’s still there: empathy.

Writers, I celebrate your courage and your talent for putting a piece of yourself onto the page. Thank you for allowing us inside.

Readers, welcome home.

Kristen Falso-Capaldi, Interim fiction editor

TEDx BryantU Speaker, 2023