The Georgia Review is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Gerald Maa as its next editor. He will succeed longtime editor Dr. Stephen Corey, who will retire in the summer of 2019 after thirty-six years at the Review. Dr. Maa will begin his tenure at the journal August 1.
Maa is currently an editor-in-chief of the Asian American Literary Review (AALR), which he founded with Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis in 2009. AALR is “a literary nonprofit that publishes the only print journal dedicated to writing by and about Asian American communities.” AALR features the work of both emerging and established authors and has collaborated with institutions such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Among his initiatives there, Maa directed a synchronous teaching program that included more than eighty university classrooms in eight nations around the world and focused on AALR’s special issue on mixed race. Maa holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of California–Irvine and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. His poetry and translations have been published in places such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Common Knowledge, and Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). His essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (UGA Press, 2015), Criticism, Studies in Romanticism, and elsewhere.
“I’m very excited to be part of a journal with such a long, illustrious history,” says Maa. “A literary-cultural journal supported by a flagship university is a rare thing, needless to say one that has existed for so long. I will continue the publication’s lifelong commitment to the region, to national relevance, and to writing of the highest order. To do so, we will put together issues that provoke engagement from our readers and then program events and initiatives around the issues in order to cultivate reader-led conversations. A periodical is not only something to read, it is the foremost means for building literary community, superior in its ability to sustain conversations between reader, writer, and publisher over time. There are avid readers out there, we know, and we invite you to be part of our community.”