The story of Blue Mesa Review is an interesting one. I’m sure that is true for any literary magazine, any arts publication, or really any venue or outlet for the arts out there. So I won’t talk about that history here. Rather, I’ll talk about who we are now. Blue Mesa Review is a labor of love, and we, the editors and staff, spend a lot of time talking about why we love doing this and about what exactly BMR—a magazine whose staff rotates annually—actually is. It seems to me that answer is different for every editor of Blue Mesa Review, past, present, and future.
So I’ll talk about these editors now, my colleagues, friends, and some of the hardest-working people I know. These are editors who have spent the past year working on an issue to celebrate the 25 years that BMR has been in existence by publishing an anthology that will be our first print run since 2012; editors who have volunteered hours of their time to promote, organize, and coordinate a summer contest, the fruits of which you can read here; editors who have spent countless hours reading, commenting on, and debating the merits of the hundreds of poems, stories, and essays submitted to our magazine in order to determine the few that we love enough to publish here in Issue No. 30.
This rotating group of hardworking people, however, is precisely what makes determining who and what BMR actually is a little complicated. As we compiled the best stories, essays, and poems of the past 25 years’ worth of issues, a few of Blue Mesa Review’s hallmarks as a magazine came to light. For example, BMR is a publication that is committed to featuring an array of diverse voices. We are a magazine that is intentional about publishing work that is both representative of this place we come from—the Southwest—and also involved in a national and international literary conversation. Perhaps most ubiquitously, Blue Mesa Review has and always will be a home for good writing. And you will see all of these characteristics represented again, here, in Issue No. 30. We are all really proud of this issue, not only because we believe in each of the pieces published here, but also because we see this issue as continuing the tradition that BMR has established over the past 25 years. But don’t take my word for it. Go ahead and see for yourself.
