From the Editors
In the January 2026 issue, two essays explore James Agee and Walker Evans’s notable book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The book presents an ironic reversal of the Biblical line, which starts, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Agee’s text and Evan’s photographs instead describe and document poor, unknown sharecroppers, those farthest from being “famous,” who were worthy of praise for their quiet...Read more
FORUMS
Cluster
The essays gathered in this cluster discover new ways to address intractable, interconnected problems at the heart of elegy studies. We approach this field of study now with several hopes, across different horizons: with the hope of better understanding how this writing about death mobilized agency during past waves of political violence, and how it might continue to do so in the present; with the desire to further amplify conversations about...
May 13, 2026


