I Say Hello

It’s beginning to feel a lot like summer break! Most of IU’s undergraduates have gone home, and the campus is quiet and the lilacs are in full bloom and already the humidity has made my hair untameable. Hello, hairspray. Hello, ponytail. 

Hello, readers. I’m Jen, the new Associate Editor. I am so happy to be here! I’ve spent the past year as an associate genre editor for IR, and I’ve come to know and love this magazine in each of its stages of production: from reading the manuscript submissions and falling in love with the poems and stories you send us, to meeting each week with the IR staff and other associate genre editors to discuss the poems and stories we want to see in IR, to helping review the proofs, to holding the finished product in my hands and smelling the pages and reading the issue cover to cover and falling in love with the poems and stories and essays all over again. 

This past year’s amazingly intelligent and articulate (and fun!) staff  have set the bar super high, and I’m excited for the opportunity to follow in their footsteps. Lucky for me, I get to work under the fearless leadership and expertise of Editor Deborah Kim, and alongside three uber-talented genre editors: Rachel Lyon (fiction), Catie Lycurgus (poetry), and Sarah Suksiri (nonfiction).   

While I don’t love anything more than I love a good poem or story, a good song comes awfully close, and one thing I should probably say going into this job is that I have a small obsession with boy bands. So, what better way to start off the summer than with a song by what is, arguably, the most iconic “boy band” of all time?

Hello, IR. Hello, Summer!