In her Colorado Review Fall/Winter 2023 essay, “Reconsidering the Sunflowers,” Stephanie Harrison recalls her father’s habit of painting just one side of their family’s house a different color each year and the moment she saw this through fresh eyes: “Something in me had blinked and refocused. It was like the optical illusion I’d marveled over in fifth grade: beautiful woman or hag? Definitely hag. Once I’d seen it, I couldn’t stop seeing it.” A stand-in for her father’s sense of self, the house reflects the elusiveness of his identity — ever-shifting throughout their relationship — and ultimately his struggles with mental health. Questions of identity and self are at the heart of this issue, as characters — and writers — examine themselves closely in pivotal moments and ask some hard questions. This issue also features work by Jonathan W. Chu, Christopher Citro, Timothy Donnelly, Lindsey Drager, K. S. Dyal, Suzie Eckl, John Gallaher, Adam Giannelli, Jacob M. Hall, Chengru He, Karan Kapoor, John Kinsella, Arah Ko, Brandon Krieg, Jami Macarty, Caleb A. P. Parker, Susan Rich, Petra Salazar, Liane Strauss, Amy Stuber, Jaz Sufi, Eugene Stein, Cole Swensen, Sher Ting, Marc Vincenz, Hannah V. Warren, Tana Jean Welch & Brad Wetherell.

In the Summer 2023 issue of Colorado Review, readers encounter people watching and waiting, anticipating and missing signs of one kind or another, move uneasily through this issue. As when the narrator of Kelly Luce’s “The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion” says, “I liked scanning the sky, looking for signals. Even when nothing happened, there was still that heartbeat. It was a space—it was space—where I could process what was happening in my life.” And in Adam O’Fallon Price’s “The Famous Actress,” a man tries to recapture a time of possibility, of potential, as he flounders in a dream gig he’s unqualified for, the nearby ocean calling to “some deep, uneasy place in himself,” confirming his anxiety. After her baby is stillborn, a young woman in Dyanne Stempel’s “Crashing Shiva” attempts to process her grief by attending the shivas of strangers, looking for cues, hoping “to try on all the random pain of the room.” And in Analía Villagra’s “Need Her Badly,” two next-door neighbors communicate in a passive-aggressive code—thumps on the apartment wall, knocks, taps—to reach out in a strangely antagonistic friendship. “Wunderkammer,” Lesley Jenike’s lyric essay, contemplates our relationship with museums, the ways they speak to us, tell us who we are. Absent much information about her grandfather, Jo-Anne Berelowitz engages in the practice of midrash to create the narratives that give him a life in her essay “Looking for Joseph.” And in “Mirage,” Susanna Sonnenberg recounts the missed, and crossed, signals in her first marriage, the result of having “unconsciously agreed to Not Know things.”

In the Spring 2023 issue of Colorado Review comes this ominous bit of advice, “Whatever plans you think you got, you better get some others.” Given in Brendan McKennedy’s “Deep River” to a young woman struggling to make a meaningful life as a millhand in 1920s North Carolina. In Joanna Pearson’s “The Favor,” a couple become the hosts to an unexpected houseguest at a time when they are questioning the boundaries of what makes a family. The narrator of Deepa Varadarajan’s “How to Give a Best Man Toast” wrestles with the shifting of attachments as his beloved older brother gets married. And in Naihobe Gonzalez’s “Southern Cemetery,” a young woman spontaneously spends an evening with a new friend, exploring the risky space between safety and uncertainty, confronting her relationship to fear. The essays are concerned with the spaces we inhabit—and how they shape us. “First you live in a house, and then it lives in you,” writes Emily Winakur in “Who Lives in That House,” an essay that explores the relationship of place to memory. Jonathan Gleason’s braided essay “Proxemics” is a meditation on architecture, spatial relationships, family, penitence, and forgiveness. In “The Other Erica,” Erica Goss contemplates the multigenerational impact of her grandmother’s death, leading her to search for the house in Germany where her mother and grandmother endured WWII, seeking clues about her mother’s, grandmother’s, and her own identity.

The newest issue of Colorado Review features the winner of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, Mike Murray’s “Night Owls.” Final Judge Ramona Ausubel commented, “‘Night Owls’ takes place in the darkness – characters are hiding, sneaking, and seeking. I found myself squinting as I read, trying to see through the murk to decipher which things were pure and which were depraved, which were evidence of love, which destruction.” Joining this winning entry are works by Angela Sue Winsor, Da-Lin, Joy Guo, Alyson Mosquera Dutemple, Geoff Wyss, Carolyn Kuebler, Georgia Cloepfil, Mirri Glasson-Darling, Chris Ketchum, Laura Donnelly, Martha Silano, Molly Sutton Kiefer, Mary Helen Callier, Emily Koehn, Nicole Callihan, Jennifer Peterson, Emily Adams-Aucoin, Virginia Ottley Craighill, Jodie Hollander, Sage Ravenwood, Meghan Sterling, John Sibley Williams, Luisa Muradyan, Ashley Colley, Landa Wo, Jeffrey Bean, Tyler Kline, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, C. Henry Smith, Jessica Hincapie, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, and Andrew Hemmert.

Editor Stephanie G’Schwind welcomes readers to the Summer 2022 issue of Colorado Review with a tribute to summer, “Whether your summer is spent in the company of others or in solitude, sorting your things or tending your garden, in the cloud or on the ground, I hope you discover in these pages something to hang on to, something to keep.” As Poetry Editor Camille T. Dungy expresses what she found, “Something drew me to these poems. . . Something in them called out and slowed me, in the way recognized language perks the ear and makes me stop. What did she say? . . .These poems are points of connection in a divided world. It’s so nice to hear someone else thinks this way too.” Contributors to the collection include Fiction by Angela Sue Winsor, Da-Lin, Joy Guo, Alyson Mosquera Dutemple; Nonfiction by Geoff Wyss, Carolyn Kuebler, Georgia Cloepfil; Poetry by Mirri Glasson-Darling, Chris Ketchum, Laura Donnelly, Martha Silano, Molly Sutton Kiefer, Mary Helen Callier, Emily Koehn, Nicole Callihan, Jennifer Peterson, Emily Adams-Aucoin, Virginia Ottley Craighill, Jodie Hollander, Sage Ravenwood, Meghan Sterling, John Sibley Williams, Luisa Muradyan, Ashley Colley, Landa Wo, Jeffrey Bean, Tyler Kline, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, C. Henry Smith, Jessica Hincapie, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, Andrew Hemmert.